For a tech company, product and engineering are the heart and soul of
the business. When I do a quick mental query of headcount across our
entire portfolio of ~30 companies, I think at least 50% and maybe as
much as 60% of the entire headcount of our portfolio is in either
product or engineering.

Many of the founding teams we back include
a strong coder and a strong product person. A typical configuration is
the founding CEO is also the “VP Product” at the start. This is a great
configuration for a starting team. The two individuals can and should
build a tight-knit relationship with each focusing on their particular
roles in getting the product built. The product person sets the overall
requirements, specs them, focuses on the UI and UX and manages the
process. The engineering person builds the product or manages the team
that builds the product, or both. The yin and yang of product and
engineering are represented in these two founders and their relationship
and combined effort is what gets the product out the door.

As the
company scales the yin and yang of product and engineering often gets
out of whack. What typically happens is that the engineering team scales
and the engineering leader either scales with the team or hands over
the job of managing engineering to a seasoned executive. But the product
side often does not scale in the same way. Many founding CEOs who are
also acting in the VP Product role attempt to do that job for too long.
Or they bring in product managers but don’t build a highly-functioning-product organization. And hiring a really strong VP Product is often an
afterthought.

I have seen many companies go through this phase.
What happens is the company starts having trouble getting product out
the door as rapidly as it had in its early days. Other issues start
cropping up and the engineering team has to focus on them. A typical one
is technical scaling issues. If the service is popular, the entire
engineering team can get pulled into firefights related to scaling
issues. And I have often seen companies spend a year or more rebuilding
the guts of their product to make it scale better. During this time,
product related efforts can languish and feature development takes a
back seat.  This period in a company’s development is brutal on the
product team who gets frustrated with their inability to move the ball
forward.

The prescription for these problems is two fold. First,
the company needs a strong executive in both product and engineering. I
say executive because the key skill set is the ability to manage people
and create organization structures that are highly functional. The VP
Engineering and the VP Product need to have a history of being highly
skilled engineers or product managers, but in the role of leading these
organizations, those skills will not be the ones they use. They will
hire, fire, organize, manage, resolve lingering issues, and make tough
decisions. They will be managers. And these two individuals need to pair
up in the same way that the founding team did. They need to be partners
with each other and reinforce each other. The ability of the VP
Engineering and VP Product to work well together is so key to building a
great tech company.

The second thing that has to happen is that
product and engineering resources need to be divided up into small teams
that actually build stuff. Teams should be between three and seven
people. Anything more than that
should be broken up into two teams. Each team needs to have a product
lead and a tech lead. And just like the two founders and the two VPs,
the two team leads need to partner up and work well together.

So
hopefully you see that this yin and yang of product and engineering must
always be at the center of the company and they need to be in balance.
If you have a super strong engineering team but a weak or understaffed
product team, you will struggle. If you have built a functioning
organization in engineering but not in product, you will struggle. If
you have a team where one of your two team leads is weak, it will
struggle.

If you are stuck between being the scrappy startup you
used to be and the highly functioning big company you want to be, look
at your product and engineering organizations and make sure they are
well balanced and that you have strong leaders in both who work well
together. If you don’t see all of those things, think about making some
changes to get there.

(For more from Fred, visit his blog)
(Image source: Farm4.static.flickr)

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