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.