Product management

Manage data- and cloud-enabled offerings that deliver repeatable value to internal and external customers as products through their lifecycles.

Amazon uses product management as a discipline to drive ownership and impact for just about any concept. Today, Amazon organizes around products and dedicated product teams, each with a product manager who is end-to-end accountable over a set of a features that delivers value to a customer. This section shares specific tenets to build a mature product management capability.

Start

The first group of tenets is foundational and sets the stage for a customer-centric product organization.

• Work backwards from the customer — The key to maximizing value is to deliver products that solve real customer problems.  Start by forming a hypothesis and use data to understand who your customers are and what are their pain points. It is important to remember that customers can be internal or external to the organization. Gather data from various qualitative and quantitative methods such as interviews, shadowing, market research, and surveys to prevent biased opinions and better understand your customers. This data will then either validate or change your initial hypothesis, allowing you to identify potential solutions that meet your customer needs. 

• Focus on solving customer problems — To move to a product-centric model, you first have to align with the product’s definition. Identify who the product is built for and re-imagine what each product would be and what problem they are solving. The focus on customer problems will drive adoption and extend the use of functionality, driving further investment in other features rather than consistently delivering custom builds for small audiences. 

  Products evolve as the company adopts new goals and the market changes. It is essential to maintain a feature backlog constantly prioritized around customer value. Continue to test potential solutions by running minimum lovable product (MLP) based experiments that keep solving specific customer problems and ruthlessly de-prioritize features not supported by data.   

Advance

The second set of tenets focuses on team and organizational structures. These tenets are essential to make your organization product-centric. 

• Organize into product teams — As you establish your product vision and deliver against it, organize products around self-sufficient 2-Pizza Teams (2PT).  2PTs are autonomous, cross-functional teams that work to identify, rationalize, and achieve business and technology objectives in a defined opportunity area. No matter how large the company gets, individual teams should not be larger than what two pizzas can feed (typically no more than 8-10 team members) to minimize dependencies and increase communication. 

  • For 2PTs to be self-sufficient, they need to have all the necessary skills to deliver a product. 2PTs typically include a product manager, designer, operations engineer, engineering manager, application engineers, and any other roles specific to the product. The 2PT approach enables product organizations to move faster. 

  • If a product becomes too large and/or too complex to manage with a single 2PT, you can split the product and create a new team rather than adding more people to the original product team, ultimately slowing it down. 

• Reduce risk through iteration — After establishing 2PTs, the next step is to determine the frequency of your product delivery. Most enterprises typically have “large batch” delivery and funding cycles. Delivery may take place over a year with long phases of analysis, design, development, testing, go-lives, and, finally, handing it over to support.

  • Throughout this long delivery cycle, the organization accrues the potential delivery of a product not aligned with customer needs and hence an increased risk of opportunity cost. The risk of delivering something that no one wants can be mitigated by producing smaller batches and then assessing the feedback collected from the customer to decide whether the product vision and strategy should pivot or persevere. Iterative processes enable you to break up your releases and deliver incremental product value in the form of what Amazon calls, “Minimum Lovable Products” (MLPs). 

  • After each release of a MLP, the organization measures business value to justify the funding needs and future iterations. The funding cycles shift from annual budgets to released MLPs to resemble startup funding practices. 

Excel

Two practices can help you manage products at even higher levels: bring the work to the teams and letting teams own the entire product lifecycle. The former increases productivity while the latter increases quality.

• Bringing the work to the teams — The traditional project-based approach starts with an idea. A business case is created, and once approved, funded, and prioritized, a team is formed to deliver the idea. In most project-based organizations, once the project is executed, it is turned over to operations, and the team is disbanded and moved on to the next assignment.

  This approach works only for one-off initiatives but becomes highly inefficient if more related work is done later. Teams reach high levels of efficiency over time, and breaking them down slows their productivity significantly. In product-based organizations, permanent and empowered teams develop deep contextual knowledge, reach high levels of productivity, throughput, and increased quality.

  Teams feel emotionally connected to their work and customers. If you want to “do more and better with less” keep your teams working together and bring the work to them. Investing in people and building strong teams is the best way to make great products. 

• Own your entire lifecycle — Business, engineering, and operations groups must work in unison to reduce time to value. Quality and speed diminish when responsibility to ideate, develop, and operate products is fragmented.

  Products need to be owned and operated across organizations to increase customer feedback and reduce handoffs for a more responsive product-based organization. Empowerment and investment in enabling teams to own products from ideation to operation is key to promoting a “you built-it, you run it” mentality.

  This approach guides your teams to invest in self-service documentation and tools that allow 2PTs to be accountable for their product’s testing, DevOps, and security.