Let’s build a team
My colleague Tatu Kairi came up with an interesting mind game on one Friday afternoon.
The rules are so:
You are a starting a new product idea and you need a team to work on it. You cannot work on the product yourself.
Which employee first: A Product Manager, a software engineeer, a Designer, a QA person, an ops person, a marketeer or a salesperson. Once you have the first hire, you can now repeat the game but you have 2 hires this time, whom do you get then? then 3 and so on.
The game wouldn’t work in reality, since many more parameters come into play but it’s fun to discuss with a few colleagues, to share your understandings on software development.
Personally, it got me to think that all roles add a more focused flavor of risk reduction, which I want to expand on.
It’s all about risks
I wonder what was your first choice? Our group reached a conclusion that the software engineer is probably our first hire, because they are the only ones actually able to produce value for the customer. In the age of AI though, more and more tools allow you to build a “working” software prototype by describing it in a prompt, so there is a case to be made for the PM being first too.
What the game got me to think about though, was that, around the software engineer, all the other roles are there to reduce risks. For this I use the 4 risks of Product by Marty Cagan (Read more at the bottom of the article)
- The product manager? Their role is to take a strong stance in reducing the Value Risk and the Business Value Risk.
- The Designer? Through their UX design and research they look at Value risk, Usability risk
- The QA? Challenging the developers before and during development, testing (or building tools for testing) will help a lot with Usability risk
- The Ops? Making sure that the software built can be run and can handle customer using it sounds like Feasibility risk with a touch of Usability/Value risk too
- The Marketeer? What if your product is never discovered? How do you make sure you have the right qualities highlighted? Value risk, Business Value risk and “Sellability” risk
- The Salesperson? Reaching out, selling and maintaining a healthy relationship with customers goes to “Sellability” risk and Value risk
Even the software engineer plays a frontline role in reducing the feasibility risk.
I’m sure asking someone else to fill these would give variation in the answers but, hopefully, you get the idea and that’s what matters.
An imaginary world
The real world doesn’t work like that. Every employee is far more than a title, their skills, personality and interests covering a lot more that the job description.
The game is still a fun one to think with your team:
- How do they view each role in the team?
- What do they feel each role (and their) contribution to be?
- Find out if a risk coverage is only covered by one person (Imagine if that person gets sick!)
Try it out!
I recommend you to try the game at the lunch table and see how others think about it. Share your findings in the Linked in post comments?
Read more about product risks
If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend to read the Product Management bible “Inspired” by Marty Cagan. Taken from it, and used for this post are the 4 big risks. Here is a link to a blogpost about them: