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.

Related Content