Product Delivery Team
Summary
For SaaS companies, the Product Delivery Team is all individuals involved in building and operating the product. This includes:
Product Management - Builds and prioritizes product requirements
User Experience - Designs the product user experience
Application Engineering - Frontend and backend developers building features
DevOps - Developer productivity team building SaaS Tooling
SRE - Production and infrastructure operations team
Support - Technical support team helping customers
Documentation - Docs team proactively supporting customers
Marketing - Team advertising new and highlighted features
All these sub-teams share a common goal: continuously deliver customer value.
Description
The product is only successful if these sub-teams work well together. Breakdowns in communication and quality during the Product Delivery pipeline lead to a sub-par user experience for the following reasons. Try determining which departments had a communication breakdown or drop in quality in these scenarios.
Building the wrong features
Features customers can’t figure out
Building buggy features
Building features that don’t solve the customer’s pain point
Building features that are difficult to use
Production outages (unable to use existing features)
Features customers don’t know about
Long cycle times (delay in feature delivery)
To ensure these teams work well together (both intra- and inter-team collaboration), the company must incentivize this behavior. Setting Good OKRs that involve every team ensures teams are incentivized to help each other instead of maximizing their intra-team productivity.
For example, a shared goal of Quality with an objective of more, happier customers involves all teams:
Creating quality requirements
Building quality features with built-in tests
Building and operating resilient production infrastructure
Building docs reflective of common support questions
In contrast, per-team goals can create perverse incentives. For example, setting a throughput goal for application engineering may lead to:
Drop in test coverage (features delivered without tests still count towards the goal)
Buggy features
Fewer bug fixes or architecture investments (neither contribute towards the goal)
Lack of coordination between application engineering and other teams (no discussion on feature requirements or help with support, operations, or documentation)
Start describing your Product Delivery Team as a single team, not a set of independent teams.
