How to Nail Your Product Team Structure

Properly structuring your product team is one of the most common challenges for a Product Manager. The way you compose your product team structure can be make or break. A team structure that suits you creates efficient, highly collaborative teams, whereas a poorly designed team structure can result in clashes and low output. 

Now, there are many ways you can structure your team. This will depend on the size of your company, the number of products you manage, and your budget. There’s no one single team structure that’s going to work for everyone – but some are going to work better for you than others.  

We’re going to help you find them 🫡.

Why is Product Team Structure important?

The structure of your product team is the spine that supports how you do things. It dictates how ideas flow between teammates, how decisions are made, and ultimately, how successful your product becomes. Without the right structure, even the best ideas can get lost in the chaos, and your team might end up feeling like they’re constantly on the back foot.

A well-thought-out team structure ensures that everyone knows their role, who they report to, and how their work contributes to the bigger picture. It’s the difference between a symphony and a garage band—both can make music, but one is a lot more likely to hit the right notes consistently. It helps with task prioritization, making the whole team more efficient, innovative, and, let’s be honest, a lot more fun to work with.

What are the benefits of a solid Product Team Structure?

Putting together a great product team structure comes with many benefits. Would you like to hear them? Of course, you do. Nailing your product team structure can: 

• Improve communication: A well-structured team knows who to talk to and when, cutting down on mixed messaging and “I thought you were doing that” moments.
• Enhance collaboration: By building a team structure that better connects departments and roles, you’ll be better equipped to work on the same goals. 
• Boost efficiency: When everyone knows their responsibilities and what everyone else is working on, there’s less time wasted on duplication of effort or stepping on each other’s toes. Just smooth sailing ahead.
• Accelerate value delivery: A strong structure allows your team to move faster from ideation to execution, bringing valuable features to your users before they even knew they needed them. 
• Increase product quality: With a balanced team, every detail gets the attention it deserves, leading to a polished product that your users will love—and that you’ll be proud to ship.
• Strengthen accountability: By knowing what everyone is responsible for, a solid product team structure makes it easier to track progress, celebrate wins, and address any hiccups before they become full-blown issues.

Roles on a product team

To build the best product team structure for you, you need to first understand the various roles that can fit into a team. These roles are your building blocks, the Lego pieces you need to fit together to create an effective team. 

Some of these roles are essential – you won’t get away with not having them in your product team – while others can supplement your team depending on factors like your industry, type of products, and finances. It’s best practice to have defined roles with specific responsibilities, but we all know that best practices can often end up as a pipe dream. 

Many team members within a product team structure will wear multiple hats depending on what your company needs. A Product Designer can also fulfill the responsibilities of a UX researcher. A Product Manager may also be doing jobs that may fall under the job spec of a Product Marketer.

The number and types of roles in any product organization will vary. Because of that, we’ll cover the core and supplementary roles that are possible. 

First, let’s look at the key roles that you’ll see in 99% of product team structures:

1. Product Manager

The role of a Product Manager is multifaceted, and the scope of responsibilities and tasks will look different for every team. In a nutshell, the PM is focused on the entire product strategy, owning the product vision, collecting user feedback, leading product discovery, and bringing vetted solutions into reality. Sounds like a lot right? Well, that’s because it is. 

In bigger teams, some of the responsibilities can be delegated to other roles to support the Product Manager, but for many, they’ll be working around the clock to complete these tasks.

2. Product Owner

The Product Owner is like a Product Manager for your agile sprint cycle. One of their main priorities is to review the backlog and act as a representative for your customers by understanding their needs and writing user stories.  

There are a few other key responsibilities of a Product Owner. You can check out the full list below to help you better spec out the role 👇. 

Now here’s when things get complicated. In small teams, the Product Manager can also be the Product Owner. That’s because it’s best to think of the Product Owner as a responsibility instead of a defined role. It’s one of the many hats that your team members can wear. 

Regardless of whether it’s a separate role or a responsibility, you need someone to complete the tasks attributed to the Product Owner, so it’s still a crucial role you can’t ignore, even if it is fulfilled by a pre-existing team member.

3. Product Designer

The Product Designer is responsible for making your products look good and feel intuitive to use. You need this role in your product team structure if you’re hoping to build an effective product that works. Concepts like UI (user interface) and UX (user experience) rule the designer’s world. 

Again, depending on the size of your team, a Product Manager will often be dipping into a Product Designer’s responsibilities. However, if you’re looking to restructure your team and define the specific responsibilities for each role, read on about the difference between a product manager and a product designer.

4. Engineer

The engineer’s role is pretty self-explanatory. They’re the people putting the product together, often coding the software and bringing the ideas from the Product Manager to life. It’s important to see the engineer as a core role of the product team, and not exclusively belonging to “engineering” or “development.” 

The product team needs an engineer’s perspective on the feasibility and viability of any product solution. Your team may have an amazing, outlandish idea, but an engineer will help keep your feet on the ground and ensure you only focus on what’s possible to make. 

Supplemental roles on a product team

If your team is big enough and has enough resources, you might invest in additional roles that support the core product management team.

These roles could be:

• Product operations. These folks are devoted to optimizing the way the product team works, through tools, data analysis, and other facilitation. Learn more about how your team could harness the power of product operations.
• Data analyst. When SaaS analytics tools just don’t cut it anymore for a complex product, a product team might bring on their own dedicated data analyst to support product discovery and retrospectives with key performance metrics being tracked.
• UX researcher. Since understanding and improving the user experience is central to great product management, a full-time UX researcher might come on board to support the team.
• Growth marketer. Some of the most effective product feature changes can actually be a matter of product marketing, rather than hard code. Working hand-in-hand with a growth marketer brings a wider range of ideas and solutions to the table.
• Legal expert, business analyst, or domain expert. These specialists especially come in handy if you’re in a highly regulated field, such as finance or medicine, or when launching in a new market.
• Customer Success Manager, or Account Manager. Most of the time, the most valuable insights don’t come from the Product Leaders themselves but from the external customers. Having the customer experiences brought into the product development process via your customer-facing team brings that deep understanding of the customer base to the product team.

How to approach your Product Team Structure?

So, how do you piece all these product roles together? Well, there are many different formulations and constellations you can try to build a high-performing product team structure. Here are just five of some of the most successful ones that work well across multiple types of companies. 

The Product Trio

The product trio is a model that revolves around a Product Manager, an Engineer, and a Product Designer. Think of these as the three musketeers of product, combining to work together on Product Management as a whole or on a specific problem within a product.

Product trios are small by design, to facilitate collaborative decision-making while still being balanced. What makes this structure so effective is the tight-knit collaboration it fosters. Instead of working in silos, each member of the trio is involved from the very beginning, which means fewer surprises down the road and a more cohesive final product. Decisions are made faster, roadblocks are cleared more efficiently, and everyone stays on the same page. It’s a recipe for not just building great products, but building them with a lot less friction and a lot more fun.

A product trio is a flexible concept, and you can include other roles in this team if it works for you. It’s just that these there are the most common. For example,  if you’re a user-focused team, you can add a user researcher to your trio to make it a quad, or a squad.

Product squads

Product squads are similar to product trios, with the main difference being that they’re not limited to three people. A product squad is modeled after the product trio, with you then adding roles that might be key for your Product Development, based on your industry or goals. 

For example, if your company is expanding into a new market or region like Germany, you may want to create a ‘Germany Squad’ for that region that includes the core three roles as well as a legal expert who knows that domain.

The benefit of product squads is that they’re flexible and can be molded around your aims and goals. It gives you the ability to build your squads in a way that makes the most sense for your product. 

With squads, you’re empowered to tailor your teams to what’s needed, and failing to do so is a common sign of a poorly constructed team structure.

Cross-functional teams

The cross-functional team is an evolution of the traditional team structure, where different departments are grouped into their own siloed teams. In this traditional structure, product teams, engineering teams, and design teams are separate from each other, focusing on their specific work. This approach leads to each team operating as a faux agency for the other, handing over what’s required to other teams while waiting for their own requests. 

As you can imagine, this traditional approach fostered less collaboration, resulting in siloed thinking and mismatched product planning. The cross-functional team structure is designed to fix this. 

In a cross-functional team, a team is made up of folks with diverse skill sets, pinched from each department, working towards the same goal. With this team, silos are broken down to foster deeper collaboration between the company. You get a diverse range of perspectives and a shared sense of goals and responsibilities. The team members in these cross-functional teams are able to report back to their departments to ensure that the right hand knows what the left hand is doing.

User persona structure

One popular way to structure your product teams is to divide teams by user segments, or user personas. This is a good option for companies that serve different types of users, as this allows you to focus on and cater to the needs of different customers. 

In this model, you can divide your teams to focus on a certain type of user, with one team working to make the product better for one segment, while another focuses on a different one. This approach helps you position good customer experience as one of your core objectives, as each team works on addressing specific pain points and needs. 

For this structure to succeed, each team needs to fully understand the needs of the customers they’re building for. You’ll need to use data-backed insights, behavior analytics, and also consider running a Customer Advisory Board.

A negative of this approach is that it can harm coordination between different teams, making it important that the Product Manager implements ways to ensure good communication between these customer-focused teams.

Performance metrics structure

As long as you’ve clearly identified your target KPIs and metrics and have aligned them with business goals, you can decide to structure your teams by working to improve specific metrics. 

In this structure, each team – which can be a trio or a squad – performs tasks and creates features that help them achieve or enhance their North Star metric values. For example, one team can focus its effort on improving user activation, while another works on boosting customer lifetime value. This makes it easier to measure product success and gives each team a clear focus.

Be mindful that this approach to team structure isn’t for everyone. You’ll need a fixed set of KPIs that won’t change often, and you’ll also need highly coordinated cross-team functionality. If you need a hand picking the best KPIs and metrics to track, we’ve got a definitive list of PM KPIs you can download.

Product Team Structure in action

So you’ve seen the structures, but how does this work in real life? Well, we’ve spoken to Trevor Acy, who formerly held the role of PM and Associate Director of a 1000-team-member company with about 30 product teams, about how they approached their team structure.

But what about an example where things haven’t worked out that well? We’ve also chatted to Antonia Landi, a Product Coach & Consultant, who’s got a lot to say about what was learnt after a poor approach to getting an engineering team more aligned with business goals .

Who is responsible for setting the Product Team Structure?

So, who’s the mastermind behind setting the product team structure? Well, in the world of product management, that role usually falls to the Chief Product Officer (CPO) or other product leaders, depending on the size of your company. They’re the ones who have the bird’s-eye view of the product vision, company goals, and team strengths, making them perfectly positioned to assemble the dream team.

But this isn’t a solo gig. Setting the product team structure is often a collaborative effort, with input from key stakeholders like engineering leaders, design heads, and even HR. 

As a product manager, you definitely have a voice in the process. Your insights into how the team operates on the ground are invaluable when it comes to making adjustments or advocating for the right mix of people. You’re certainly one of the key advisors helping to shape the blockbuster team that’s going to build the next big thing.

Factors to consider for your Product Team Structure

When choosing a specific structure that works best for your team, there are a few factors you should definitely consider when evaluating your options. This additional context can help you determine which one is most effective for you. 

Some things you should make sure to do is:

1. Structure your team with experience in mind

The amount of product or professional experience can determine how you structure the team. If there are more senior Product Managers, then these seniors can be carved off into product trios or squads to work more autonomously. However, if the team leans more junior, you might choose a structure that provides more guidance or oversight.

2. Consider your product line

If you have a small product portfolio or specific short-term projects, you might want to structure around project (or “initiative”) teams. This teams-within-a-team, such as a single Product Trio, is focused on a particular goal or problem.

On the other hand, if you have a diverse suite of products, it might not be feasible to create separate mini-teams to manage each one. That takes a ton of resources and organization. Instead, you might choose to stay more integrated and centralized.

3. Consider the size of your company

This one seems obvious, but it’s worth saying. If you have a small company, your product team is likely also small. Structure options are pretty simple. But if you work in a large company, there might be more options and flexibility to try new team formulations. For example, with more designers and engineers in-house, the more likely you can pull one of each to create a cross-functional team.

4. Remember that change happens!

As product people, embracing change is basically our job. So, remember that teams are not fixed! Allow them to grow, flux, change, and evolve. Like your product lifecycle, your product development cycle style will change and evolve. The structure that works for you now doesn’t need to be the structure you use in a year.

Pitfalls to avoid in product team structure

When building a product team structure, there are many things you can get wrong. One major issue is diving into reorganizing your teams without first evaluating your goals and objectives. These play a massive part in how you build an effective team.

The best product team structure is designed, in part, to avoid some of these product management pitfalls.

1. Conflicting priorities. Individual teams that are working in silos, or without great communication, can end up working against each other! Structure wisely and align your teams by writing good objectives and key results.
2. Psychologically unsafe environment. No single ego or voice should dominate the team. Everyone needs to feel they can speak up, challenge decisions, and make bets.
3. Poor meeting management. Even the best team structure can feel ineffective or annoying if meetings are: a) useless, or b) not frequent enough. Learn how to run a great product team meeting.
4. Using the wrong tools. It’s really important to invest in the right tools for product management teams. So important that we’ve dedicated a whole section to it!

Tools to facilitate good product team structure

No structure will work well if people aren’t supported with the right tools! Designers need their design tools; developers need their engineering tools.

But what about all the cross-functional collaboration we just talked about? You need to find the right tools that help the team work together. There are several categories of collaboration tools, which include:

• Video meetings, such as Zoom
• Messaging, such as Slack
• Virtual brainstorming, such as Miro
• Project management, such as Trello
• Product analytics tools, such as Mixpannel

If your team is hybrid or fully distributed, check out these tools for remote teamwork.

Building the Dream Team

When piecing your product team together, there’s a lot to think about to ensure that it works. You need to focus on crafting a team that matches your needs, focuses, and aims, as well as budget. Whether you opt for product trios, squads, cross-functional teams, or something different, you need to do your discovery and research to make sure that it’s best for you. 

A good product team structure is designed to make you a better team and ultimately, create a better product. The way you organize your teams is vital, but you’ll miss the mark if you’re not empowering these teams with the right tools. We’ve already mentioned some of the most effective collaboration tools but purposely foregoed to mention one of the most important: your product management tool. 

As your centralized platform for your roadmaps, planning, idea generation, and more, you need a product management tool that facilitates effective collaboration within your team structure. ProdPad does just that 👋. 

In ProdPad, you’re able to capture feedback, ideas, and strategy all in one place. It also helps you present your product roadmap, manage experiments, and measure outcomes, boosting transparency and accountability within your entire team. If you’re not already in love with ProdPad, why don’t you give it a try?