Product Management Team Structure: How To Set It Up

The greatness of your product is proportional to the organizational structure of your product management team.

Your PM team builds your product roadmap, implements strategy, understands customer feedback and needs, defines product features, and leads the evolution of your product journey.

You might think having one product manager is enough, and if you’re scaling up, you can add another to your team and call it a day. But, this will only cause confusion. The more your company and customer base grows, the more complex your product processes get.

If you want to provide an excellent product experience to your audience, you need a solid team structure. This means defined roles, clear-cut responsibilities, and ownership, so every member is on the same page and working towards a collective goal—providing the best product experience to your customers and helping the business grow.

We know how hard it can be to understand how to structure your product team in a fail-proof way, but this guide will help. So let's dig in.

Summary

Consider factors like target customers, product priorities, team functions, existing team readiness, and available resources when structuring your product team. Five common product team structures include structuring by
- Product or individual features of a product
- Customer persona or segment
- Cross-functional collaboration
- Customer journey stage
- Performance metrics
There are typically four core roles within a product team:
- Product development
- Vision development
- Strategy development
- Metrics tracking
Titles who play a key role in product management include product managers, product designers, product owners, growth product managers, and test engineers
The placement of a product management team within an organization doesn’t have any definitive rules. It can be part of the marketing department to foster close collaboration on messaging and positioning, or it can be a stand-alone cross-functional department to facilitate collaboration across the entire organization
Product team structures should evolve as the organization grows and product needs change. Like product development itself, team structure requires iteration and adaptation.

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How to structure a product team in the best way

A product team cannot be structured with a one-size-fits-all strategy. It requires cross-functional collaboration between product management, user experience, data analytics, marketing, and sales teams.

Your team's organizational structure depends on many factors, including present and future business goals and priorities.

Answer these questions to understand the model you should pick for structuring your product team:

Who are your target customers, what needs do they have, and how often do they vary?
How many products do you have to manage? Which one(s) are higher priority based on their demand and development needs?
Based on your goals, what functions should your product team perform?
Are your existing product team members ready for the change in organizational and team structure?
Which resources do you plan to allocate to this team so they can function efficiently? Do you have the budget to accommodate their needs?

Answering these questions gives you an idea of which structuring approach you should take, so you can pick the most suitable product organizational structure for your team.

Here are five different team structures to consider:

1. Structure by product or individual features of a product

If you have a suite of products—or one product with several complex features that need individual attention—assigning one product manager to cover everything can be quite messy.

One of the best ways to tackle this is to assign one product manager per product or individual product feature. These product managers can then be responsible for a host of activities with teams that overlook customer research, data analytics, budgeting, marketing, sales, and product management.

A good practice to ensure product managers work seamlessly with their teams and align with product and business goals is to assign a Chief Product Officer or a VP of Product.

The effectiveness of this structure lies in consistent validation and communication, so product iterations are followed with customer feedback for effective development and goal achievement.

Pros

Specific roles and responsibilities are outlined for each team member with an organized hierarchy of who reports to whom
Because each product/feature is assigned a dedicated project manager with a team, there’s more scope for creativity, innovation, and efficiency in functionality. This directly impacts results and overall product experience.

Cons

Since a great emphasis is placed on prioritizing features, the team might focus solely on delivery, completely overlooking the importance of customer validation and feedback
Individual product teams can end up working competitively instead of collaboratively because of working in isolation. This can affect the delivery of product experiences and cause misalignment in vision and business goals.

2. Structure by customer persona or segment

If your product serves the needs of various customer segments or personas, you can structure your product team to cater to the needs of different customers and come up with relevant solutions and features—specifically for them.

Here, your team needs to be laser-focused on understanding each persona's most triggering pain points and which solution should be proposed, released, and prioritized. This requires a comprehensive understanding of individual personas with data-backed insights and behavior analytics.

Pros

Customer experience stands at the top because your first goal is to understand your customer's needs and develop and improve your product to help them
Rather than focusing on one customer, these product teams focus on and study different personas, thus targeting their research and iteration strategy to serve them—resulting in a much more accurate product experience

Cons

This approach can reduce the rate of product innovation because each team is only focused on the needs of their customers, thus taking away the focus from holistic product enhancement
Cross-functionality and coordination between teams can become complicated when many products are being offered to one customer segment

3. Structure by cross-functional teams

If you've been scaling rapidly, have a huge team, and continuously deliver excellent product experiences, it’s time to take a slightly more flexible (yet organized) approach.

Here, you make small teams of project managers, developers, analysts, and designers whose job is to act on specific features quickly and efficiently. These teams work with a high level of autonomy which offers them the freedom to release features to the market directly, without multiple rounds of approvals from general managers or stakeholders.

This is especially great for large brands—think Shopify or HubSpot—who want to innovate and act on feedback faster than getting caught up in hierarchy or approvals.

Pros

This approach allows learning from and leveraging various skills because you get a mixture of different people from all departments that contribute to product features
It’s a quick method to achieve goals and shortens the product iteration cycle because of the autonomy and specialization of product team members

Cons

It holds the risk of losing the customer’s voice in the rapid process of implementation, feedback, and iteration
Small teams can sometimes get caught in a conflict of interest—whether to focus on team-assigned roles or larger organizational roles, which can cause misalignment and confusion

4. Structure by customer journey stage

If you have a clearly defined, linear customer journey map, it might work to structure your product team based on the different stages of a customer journey: awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy.

With this structure, assign a different product manager to each phase of the buying experience to focus on specific activities—for example, improving the product trial experience in the consideration phase.

Each team needs to understand the customer journey stages in detail to tailor and iterate features that lead customers further down the funnel.

Pros

The approach allows efficient product scaling—the growth team drives customers to the product while other teams enhance product trial and engagement experiences
Each product manager is assigned clear metrics, such as conversions from free trial to paid—making it easy to track progress and identify gaps

Cons

To ensure a good user experience for each customer journey stage, the team structure and supervision need to be strict. However, such tight supervision can lead to micromanagement and discomfort among members.
If team members don’t understand their assigned customer stage, it could lead to inadequate product features, and thus a poor product experience

5. Structure by performance metrics

If you have clear product key performance indicators (KPIs) that capture business and customer outcomes, you can assign individual teams to work on performance metrics like acquisition or activation.

Each team can have one product manager, developer, designer, analyst, or marketer who directly reports to the Chief of Product or VP.

Each team performs tasks, discovers, and implements features that help them achieve or enhance their target metric values. While the teams work individually, the VP brings it all together for effectiveness.

This independent structuring method was used by Uber to build feedback loops and track their growth based on referrals, and introduce improvements wherever there was a dip in numbers.

Pros

It’s easy to measure product success because each team has specific goals and metrics to work towards
The independent approach enhances adaptability, accountability, and decision-making skills because they work on one goal—aligning product features with customer needs to get good metric values

Cons

You need a fixed set of KPIs that won’t change regularly (because individual teams are working on them), which is difficult to outline, especially in the initial stages
It requires highly coordinated cross-team functionality for achieving overall goals as one metric may flow into another. For example, if customers are acquired but not activated, the flow will break down, and you won’t be able to push customers further down the funnel.

4 core roles within a product team

Before we dive into the people that make up the product team, let’s be clear: there’s a difference between roles and titles.

'Product manager' is a title, but PMs may also perform product ownership or data analysis tasks. Based on current and future product needs, roles can be added or tweaked.

So, before we understand what each member does in the team, let’s look at four roles performed by the product team in a larger sense of the term:

1. Product development

You have a brilliant product idea. Now, can you just gather a bunch of developers and take it live? Not really.

A product team performs customer research, creates a roadmap, and starts bringing your product from concept to market release while collecting and acting on customer feedback.

Many team members contribute to product development: product managers, product owners, developers, designers, analysts, business and sales executives, stakeholders, etc.

This role strikes a balance between what your customers want and what changes you need to bring to your product to bridge those gaps.

Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s Zone-Based Heatmaps to simplify your product development process by visualizing user behavior, and use product experience insights to make prioritization decisions.

This will help you understand significant pain points and areas of improvement, which can be used as guiding factors for introducing relevant product features.

[Visual] File — two-columns-feature-placeholder-1 - Zoning experience and revenue attribution

2. Vision development

Product vision defines which problems your product solves, who it solves them for, and where it’s headed.

To give your product team an image of what they’re working towards, why they're working towards it, and how progress will be measured, you need to develop a vision that helps achieve long-term business goals.

3. Strategy development

A product strategy defines the plan of action and workflow of tasks for each product team member.

This clear, realistic, and time-bound strategy is based on the product vision and outlines steps needed to bridge the gap from where the product is right now and where you want it to be.

4. Metrics tracking

Tracking metrics is essential to understand whether product features and iterations are getting results—track UX metrics like conversion rate, churn rate, monthly recurring revenue, and retention rate.

Once the team has launched their product, they monitor its progress and use customer feedback and behavior insights to plan future iterations to fix bugs and enhance functionality.

While these four roles summarize what a product team does, distinct professionals are responsible for different tasks that contribute to overall goal achievement. Let’s look at them:

5 titles who play a key role in product management

1. Product manager

A product manager is viewed as the leader of a product team and plays many roles which vary with organization, goals, and current and future product state.

They sit at the intersection between business, design, and tech—and understand what the market requires, the needs of the users, and how the product should evolve to articulate what success will look like.