How to Scale Your Product/Tech Organization Without Sacrificing Your Agility

Help me think through how this episode applies to my situation. Start by asking what I am trying to change. Separate the episode's claims from your suggestions, and say when the notes do not support a claim. Use the transcript to find passages, then check the audio before quoting. Transcript: https://yuvalyeret.com/podcast/episodes/how-to-scale-your-producttech-organization-without-sacrificing-your-agility/transcript.md ## Published episode notes Now that we’ve established our goal - creating empowered product teams- let’s discuss how to scale a product organization using these empowered product teams as a building block and connecting them without sacrificing agility and product orientation. In this episode: * Challenges of maintaining agility as organizations grow * Introduction to the “flipped pyramid” concept * Types of teams needed for effective scaling * Strategies for “descaling” to push work back to empowered teams About the Navigating the Product Operating Model Landscape Audio Series What You’ll Learn: * Why Agile Feature Factories Fail, and What to Do About It * Assessing Your Current Operating Model, Are You Stuck in Projects? * Principles of Effective Product Operating Models * When does a Product Operating Model make sense? * Making It Real: Mapping Your Trail Toward Transformation Subscribe to the free audio mini course here: https://yuvalyeret.com/from-buzzwords-to-clarity-product-operating-model-audio-mini-course/ This is for you if you’re: * A Head of Product, Technology, Engineering, or Product Ops trying to apply or scale product-led practices * Tired of theory or comprehensive perspective frameworks and hungry for real-world strategies that work * Too busy to sit down for training or even watch a video “masterclass” (Webinar in disguise…) and prefer to consume audio podcasts. * Not a fan of 6-figure, inspiring slide decks left behind by expensive consulting firms and product experts. Need help navigating the product transformation landscape? https://yuvalyeret.com/work-with-me/figure-out-your-product-operating-model-strategy/ Interested in more of my insights on the Product world? https://yuvalyeret.com/category/blog/product/ To hear more, visit yuvalyeret.substack.com ## Transcript Automatic transcript of the published podcast audio. Recognition errors are possible. Speakers are unlabeled; do not attribute a passage to Yuval or a guest without checking the audio. Episode: https://yuvalyeret.com/scaling-ai-podcast/how-to-scale-your-producttech-organization-without-sacrificing-your-agility/ Source RSS GUID: substack:post:176412102 Source: published Riverside RSS audio enclosure Transcription: faster-whisper base.en, English ## Transcript [00:00:00] This becomes harder and harder as the organization grows and has even more [00:00:06] dependencies across even more groups where it seems like meaningful things [00:00:14] require everybody to be involved and everything is a project as they scale, [00:00:19] as they add more and more teams, as they add more and more product lines, [00:00:23] as they start to do more and more complex things. [00:00:26] A lot of the times they hit this class seal in which they're wondering where [00:00:31] if we lost our ability to be a product lab, we've become a future factory, [00:00:36] we've become a project driven organization and they hit this wall where [00:00:41] it's either we bring in strong program management capabilities, we give up on [00:00:49] being a product organization, having the startup nature that we benefited from in [00:00:54] the beginning, everything gets stuck. The product operating model essentially [00:01:00] tries to provide an alternative to this approach. If we look at what we're seeing [00:01:06] here, this sort of stalled product organization where there's very little [00:01:12] work that happens in those empowered product teams and more and more of the [00:01:17] work is happening in the future factory and even across multiple future factories [00:01:22] into organization. What we want, if you think about it like a flipped pyramid, [00:01:28] where most of the work is in that feature factory, very little, is at the base which [00:01:34] should be where most of the work is in empowered product teams, we want to essentially [00:01:39] flip that pyramid. In a healthy product organization, we want the percentage of [00:01:45] work that happens in empowered product teams to be much higher. We want to see [00:01:52] most of the work happening in empowered teams that are aligned around outcomes, [00:01:58] are able to deliver these valuable outcomes with minimal dependencies and [00:02:03] steer with evidence. These teams can own the script but the key point is they're [00:02:09] empowered to take ownership of that area and deliver product outcomes that drive [00:02:16] business impact in that area. In order to create as many of those themes as [00:02:21] possible, we often need different types of teams. We often need platforms, enabling [00:02:29] teams, internal products that reduce the cognitive overload, that reduce the [00:02:34] amount of stuff that each one of those empowered product teams needs to know, [00:02:39] teams that own our mobile platform, our key, even those internal products should act [00:02:47] as empowered product teams. They're empowered to build the platform or the know-how [00:02:54] that ideally reduces the dependency on them and empowers those product teams to [00:03:00] run on their own as much of the time as possible. The goal of these platform teams [00:03:06] is to create a healthy pyramid where we're able to push as much of the work as [00:03:12] possible into the strong base of the pyramid which is those empowered product [00:03:17] teams. There would always be some work that requires dependencies. It's unrealistic to [00:03:24] expect that everything will happen in those teams. Know how to work with the work [00:03:28] that cuts across multiple teams using a product approach. So even when we have a [00:03:34] product group, we need to figure out ways to enable this team of teams to act as an [00:03:44] empowered product group. They should be discovering and delivering value. They as [00:03:48] well should be oriented around outcomes, around a metric that matters that we want [00:03:53] to move the needle on. And yet again, as we're managing these empowered product [00:03:59] groups, we want to discover ways and explore ways to descale, to take some of the [00:04:06] work. Maybe there's a repeating theme of dependencies, a repeating style of [00:04:12] dependencies that continuously appears and is a headache. How could we do [00:04:19] something by reorganizing our teams, our product apology, or creating a platform, [00:04:26] so that we can move some of these work further into the base of the pyramid back [00:04:32] to being an empowered teams. ## Source boundary These are the published show notes from the podcast feed. They are a starting point for discussion, not a verbatim record of the conversation. The transcript is machine-generated and may contain errors or unlabeled speakers. Check the audio before quoting anyone.