post

Footer About

Footer Get Involved

Footer Links

Mind the Product

General

Product Unplugged Episode 3 with Pierce Healy

Product Unplugged Episode 2 with Lorilyn McCue

Product Strategy

Building Product Teams

Diversity and Inclusion

Digital Transformation

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Product Leadership

Product Management Career

Product Ethics

Minimum Viable Product

Enterprise Product Management

OKRs

Customer Research

Hypothesis and Testing

Business Strategy

User Research

👩‍🚀🚀   Live now for MTP members: <a href="https://mtp2017stg.wpengine.com/membership/#events" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">Driving Innovation AMA with Tendayi Viki</a>

Roadmaps: Break the rules without breaking the principles

Got questions about your product career?

Product roadmaps vs data – Jeremy Levy on The Product Experience

From engineering to product management at Google

Mind the Product joins Pendo

As a certified Product Manager and freelance writer, Jon likes to bring clarity of communication to his work at BibliU - making digital learning more effective. Jon loves how fast the world of product management is evolving and is always interested in opportunities to be part of the conversation.

Product Manager

Jon Horvath

<p>Whether you’re going from 0 to 1, 2 to 10, or 50 to 100 it can be disorienting when your team size multiplies and product lines scale. In this <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://mtp2017stg.wpengine.com/mtpcon/digital/americas/">#mtpcon Digital Americas</a></span> keynote, <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/">Claire Vo </a></span>CPO at Color, former CPO at Optimizely covers the skills, processes, and non-negotiables to rely on as your product org grows significantly.</p>
<p>Watch the talk in full or read on for the overview. Mind the Product members can also watch the recordings of all our #mtpcon Digital Americas talks <a href="https://mtp2017stg.wpengine.com/mtpcon-digital-americas-videos/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">here.</a></p>
<p>In tech, Claire starts, we often portray scaling-up as a hockey stick curve, looking aspirationally at how to &#8220;achieve that rate of compounding growth that sets up a startup to lead and win in a winner-takes-most market”, focussing on revenue and user base growth, while ignoring the challenges of organisation transformation. It’s “like climbing a mountain, it can feel super exhilarating and really fun and exhausting all at once”.</p>
<h2>Leading super-scaling</h2>
<p>Drawing on her experience as CPO a Color, Claire describes how in her first week she completed an organisational design, mapping out sustainable growth “basically this organisation design was another way of communicating the strategy to the company and the strategy of the product”.</p>
<p>Claire highlights 3 points for building an effective structure and supporting frameworks to support scale:</p>
<h3>1. Scaffold the design of your team</h3>
<p>As a manager, avoid instantly filling holes with hires and instead define the ultimate product organisation structure, forecasting for the next 6, 12 or 36 months. “Design organisations that can support future growth [&#8230;] design structure first and overlay people next.&#8221;</p>
<h3>2. Build an effective org chart</h3>
<p>Empower teams by giving them clearly defined roles and insist on tight alignment between product and engineering, “it helps reinforce the organisation structure and helps you grow in tandem with the partners that matter most to a product team&#8217;s success”.</p>
<h3>3. Minimise the hierarchy</h3>
<p>Allowing grouping within your product structure is necessary early on, for example how many managers, to directors, to VPS are needed to be successful, but be open to change and prepared for restructuring as you scale.</p>
<h2>Super scale your career</h2>
<p>Being part of a company that super scales can dramatically shape your career journey, but it requires a proactive approach.</p>
<p>Here Claire collates advice for ensuring product leaders and product managers can best serve their companies, colleagues and personal careers:</p>
<h3>Define your role (before someone defines it for you)</h3>
<p>Product Managers may find their remit narrowed as the strategic scope changes at scale. “Raise your hand and chart your own path &#8211; aligned to the company&#8217;s growth”, Claire says, make sure everyone knows how your role and direction will benefit the wider organisation.</p>
<h3>Map your career</h3>
<p>Product people often struggle to articulate their career ambitions, leading to inefficient personal growth at a time when the company around them is growing fast. “Treat your career like a product”, Claire says: outline your goals, gather user feedback from your peers, and plan your roadmap. Add success metrics, whether that’s your title, impact or money targets. Your MVP is what you can do today and your V1 is your next formal step.</p>
<h3>Give away your Legos</h3>
<p>Citing an article by Molly Graham, Claire describes how important it is to avoid becoming possessive over the products, features or processes you acquire as you work, as they’ll prevent you from thinking to the future. “This is a huge growing rocketship and there&#8217;s a giant pile of Lego, so just give away your Legos and go work on the next big thing”.</p>
<h3>Lean on product ops</h3>
<p>“Maybe I&#8217;m showing my bias, but I just feel like good operation speeds up everything” Claire says, imploring leaders to ”get good at ops yourself or [&#8230;] hire someone who is”. It “helps in scale”, streamlines teams, tracks strategic success correctly, supports onboarding product people efficiently and critically oversees that everything is written down.</p>
<h3>Leave things better than when you found them</h3>
<p>Whether it&#8217;s a system, a process, or a document, try to improve on something as you work on it and then share that learning. Creating a demonstrable portfolio of improvements can help as you look for career advancement opportunities and is a great path to leadership.</p>
<h3>Let teams adapt</h3>
<p>As a leader that’s provided structure and organisation it’s important to empower teams to optimise elements of the workflow for themselves, whether that’s “continuously improving things are killing process” or introducing new ways of working.</p>
<h3>Articulate the future</h3>
<p>Product leaders should disseminate the company vision, setting a goal for everybody in the product organisation can not only work towards, but can understand and even describe with shocking consistency, “it’s an absolute must have if you want teams thinking more broadly about the future when things are moving really fast”.</p>
<h3>Take risks</h3>
<p>While scaling, product people can be rewarded for safe, low impact useful projects, however, risk-taking can be easy with relatively separate teams and a “great way to keep that like small team ambition and a big team system”.</p>
<p>Claire ends her keynote with a final non-negotiable: keep your eyes on the horizon and have a little fun. “At the end of the day, we&#8217;re all here just like making some internet [..] scaling should feel fun, it should feel exciting, and you should be able to laugh at the good things and the bad things so everyone on the team leaders pins everyone just make it your responsibility to make the scaling stage fun because it is.”</p>
<p>Explore more <a href="https://mtp2017stg.wpengine.com/tag/mtpcon/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">#mtpcon video content</a> or use our <a href="https://mtp2017stg.wpengine.com/content-a-z/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Content A-Z</a> to find even more product management content.</p>
<div class="g g-21"><div class="g-single a-77"><a class="gofollow" data-track="NzcsMjEsMSw2MA==" href="https://mtp2017stg.wpengine.com/product-management-training/public-workshops/"><img decoding="async" src="https://mtp2017stg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/General-Training-Next-Level-FOOTER-scaled.jpg" /></a></div></div>

core/freeform

How to drive product innovation

Product-led company powered by culture by Shaun Smith-Taylor

Leading empowered product teams: AMA with Hope Gurion

A designer, a product manager, and an engineer walk into a bar…by Karishma Irani

Prioritised Fireside Chat: Make better product decisions with JTBD

Gaining confidence quickly, a story of product manager progression by Osaseri Guobadia

How to make remote collaboration work by Ingrid Odegaard

Resilient Management: AMA with Lara Hogan

Scaling product teams for fun and profit by Claire Vo

Achieve success with the Product Leader Map

ProductTank Columbus

ProductTank Tauranga

ProductTank Edinburgh

Prioritised Member AMA - Perfecting product roadmaps

ProductTank San Diego

Navigating difficult relationships panel

ProductTank Philadelphia

ProductTank Bucharest

ProductTank NoVa

Remote Training Workshops

ProductTank London

ProductTank Birmingham

ProductTank Oslo

ProductTank Astana

ProductTank NoVA

ProductTank New York

ProductTank Kansas City

ProductTank Orlando

ProductTank Dallas

ProductTank Tokyo

ProductTank Belgrade

ProductTank Madrid

ProductTank Leeds

ProductTank Zürich

ProductTank Perth

ProductTank Chicago

ProductTank Auckland

ProductTank Richmond

ProductTank Charlotte

ProductTank Reston

ProductTank Washington

ProductTank Sofia

ProductTank Raleigh

ProductTank Ljubljana

ProductTank Kraków

ProductTank Barcelona

ProductTank Dublin

ProductTank Montréal

ProductTank Bogotá

ProductTank Seattle

ProductTank Madison

ProductTank Singapore

ProductTank Portland

ProductTank Budapest

ProductTank Porto

ProductTank Austin

ProductTank Los Angeles

ProductTank Norwich

ProductTank Des Moines

ProductTank San Francisco

ProductTank Helsinki

ProductTank Reading

ProductTank Brighton

ProductTank Valencia

ProductTank Bielefeld

ProductTank Malmö

ProductTank Canberra

ProductTank Paris

ProductTank Manchester

#mtpcon SF+Americas 2022 Conference

#mtpEngage Hamburg 2022 Leadership Forum

#mtpEngage Hamburg 2022 Workshops

#mtpEngage Hamburg 2022 Conference

#mtpcon London+EMEA 2022 Conference