How to Scale Product Teams the Right Way: Get Ready to Grow!

Wanna know how to meet the ever-increasing market demands and outpace the growing competition even with constrained resources and minimal investment? This guide on how to scale product teams is meant exactly for you!

Here, you’ll learn how to take your workforce from its current size to new heights. The guide covers everything from setting the groundwork to effectively managing the expansion and optimization process, as well as key tips and tricks along the way – providing an invaluable skill set that any business manager, team manager, or product manager should possess.

So get ready, because it’s time to start scaling – success awaits!

What Is Team Scaling?

Team scaling is the process of optimizing your workforce in order to grow your business and boost revenues. And while it may require you to actually expand the size of your product team, it’s very much possible to scale up without hiring any additional staff.

How?

The key here is to enhance and standardize your work processes, making them as efficient as possible.

With a bit of smart thinking and some reorganization, you will be able to meet the set growth hacking goals and take on larger, more complex projects with the same old trusty employees to back you up without investing a wealth of time and money in the team development.

When Do You Need to Scale Your Product Team?

• Your product has matured or evolved: As your product becomes more complex and new functionality gets released, team scaling turns out inevitable. You may see that one product manager can’t effectively handle a diversity of problems and concerns associated with a bunch of different features. Thus, you need additional resources and expertise to tackle them effectively and keep your product relevant and competitive at all times.
• Your user base has expanded: As your product gains traction, it’s also natural for the user base to expand. In fact, it’s an exciting sign that your product is solving a problem and satisfying customer needs. However, a larger user base means increased demand for support, feedback, and feature requests. These demands can quickly become overwhelming for a small or inefficient product team. So, in case you are struggling to keep up with essential user needs, it may be time to consider scaling up.
• Customer / market requirements have changed: If you stay in business long enough, you unavoidably notice that customer and market requirements constantly change. These shifting demands may prompt you to develop new product features, adopt new work processes or optimize the existing ones, which may ultimately require some degree of team scaling as a means to propel your business forward.

How to Scale Product Teams Effectively

1.    Make an actionable plan

Scaling a product team is an exciting time for your business – you’re growing, changing, and expanding, which means you’re doing something right! However, rapid growth does come with its own set of challenges. That’s why making a thorough plan before doing any scaling is crucial to your success.

A thorough plan ensures that you focus on the right things, implement changes without any waste of resources, and get the right skills to help you grow. It also allows you to anticipate any issues that may arise on the way, and think of effective solutions to these issues in advance.

How to create a good team scaling plan:

• Set clear scaling goals: A well-defined goal is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Besides, it aligns with the overall strategy and vision of your business. By having a clear understanding of what you want to achieve, you can develop a robust plan of action that addresses all the necessary areas of your business requiring scaling.
• Assess the current state of the team: Take a look at the team’s structure, processes, and workflow, and identify areas for improvement. Evaluate the communication channels, available skills, roles, and responsibilities of each team member. Such analysis will give you a clear picture of what needs to be modified, enhanced, or added to the existing structure.
• Make an action plan: Once you have a clear understanding of your company’s objectives and the areas that require additional support, think of specific tasks and activities that will help you scale your team. For example, if you consider expanding your current workforce, make sure to define the roles you want to fill in and the necessary qualifications for each position. Then, figure out when, where, and how you will run the recruitment process. This will help you attract the right candidates and speed things up.
• Estimate resources: What do you need to scale your team successfully? How much knowledge, time, finances, technology, or any other things are required to fill the identified performance and process gaps that prevent you from achieving the set growth objectives?
• Create a roadmap with key milestones and deadlines: This roadmap should include timelines for optimizing the obsolete work processes, hiring new team members, training employees for new roles, implementing new systems, etc. Remember to keep the timeline realistic and adaptable to any external and internal factors that may affect the planned course of action.

Pro tip:

When estimating time for your team scaling project, you can benefit greatly by using such time tracking software as actiTIME. It provides valuable insights into the use of time and costs across different projects and tasks and helps to estimate resources and create timelines with greater accuracy.

By accurately recording time spent on work, you can identify areas that require more resources or attention, and adjust your plans accordingly. With precise time tracking data at your fingertips, you can make informed decisions about resource allocation and deadlines, ensuring that any kind of project is completed on time and within budget.

2.    Build a strong team

While many novice entrepreneurs believe that they can do it all themselves, the truth is – it’s impossible to succeed without delegating some portion of your responsibilities to others.

When you’re running a scaling business or a growing product, building a strong team is not just a nice-to-have thing – it’s vital. Such a team can help you overcome obstacles, work more efficiently, and create better outcomes for your customers.

Talented and experienced colleagues can bring diverse perspectives and skill sets to the table, and help you stay ahead of the competition. On the other hand, a weak or disunited team can hold you back, slow you down, and even damage your reputation. Therefore, if you’re serious about scaling your business or product, investing in your team should be a top priority.

How to build a strong team in a scaling business:

• Define your hiring needs and goals: Before hiring new candidates, think of any specific competencies, personality traits, or work experience you want to see in your perfect employees. By having a clear understanding of your needs and goals, you can evaluate potential candidates more effectively.
• Create a thorough hiring process: Selecting the right professional for the job requires a thorough evaluation. The entire routine could include pre-screening questions, skills assessments, multiple rounds of interviews, and reference checks. By having a structured process, you can objectively evaluate candidates and ensure that the best ones are hired.
• Provide onboarding: Proper onboarding helps new hires to feel like a part of the team more quickly and boosts their performance efficiency in the long run by addressing all the questions they may have about the workplace and work processes pertinent to their jobs.
• Enhance your corporate culture: To attract top talent, it’s crucial to define the company’s values, mission, and vision, and communicate them effectively to potential candidates. Apart from the necessary technical skills, a candidate’s cultural fit and willingness to grow with the company are significant factors to consider.
• Create a positive work environment: A culture of transparency, inclusion, and open communication is crucial to keeping employees motivated and productive. Plus, it can go a long way in building strong team morale.
• Focus on alignment: By emphasizing the connection between an employee’s contributions and the company’s overall achievements and growth objectives, businesses can create a more engaged and motivated workforce. One key practice in this regard is setting clear performance expectations and regularly communicating them to employees. Providing frequent feedback and coaching sessions also gives employees the opportunity to understand their progress and address any areas for improvement.

3.    Choose an effective team structure

In order to achieve a common goal, a team must work together efficiently. And an effective team structure can play an instrumental role in that.

Simply put, a team structure is a framework that defines how individual members of a team work together, communicate, and share responsibilities. It establishes a hierarchy, clarifies job roles, and sets the tone for how decisions are made.

One approach that works well for scaling businesses is to break your team down into smaller pods, each with its own specific function or area of expertise. This allows for more focused collaboration between team members, resulting in greater efficiency and productivity.

How to structure your product team for maximum productivity:

• Decentralize: Empower team members with more autonomy and decision-making authority, allowing them to take on more responsibility and feel more invested in the project. It is also important to encourage open collaboration among team members, both within their own sub-teams and across different departments. By breaking down silos and sharing ideas more freely, your employees can gain a better understanding of each other’s perspectives and work together more effectively to solve problems.
• Assign one product manager per product / feature: This way you will ensure that each product or feature has a dedicated expert who can help streamline the development process and provide insights into the unique needs of each offering. Start by identifying the key products or features and determine the individual skill sets required. From there, you can allocate the products or features to the most suitable manager. It’s important to ensure clear and frequent communication between managers to prevent any bottlenecks in the development process or responsibility and task overlaps.
• Delegate to trustworthy employees: Entrusting the right team members with specific job functions can increase efficiency, productivity, and overall job satisfaction. Having such helpers guarantees less stress on your part and an overall better outcome for the business. Thus, it’s undoubtedly worth taking the time to review your team and identify those you trust, empowering them to make decisions and manage tasks independently. You’ll be surprised how much can be accomplished when you have trustworthy employees taking on a considerable chunk of your workload.

4.    Standardize essential processes

When a product management team grows, so does the complexity of its workflows. And in order to avoid chaos and costly mistakes when collaborating on projects, you need to standardize and optimize work processes.

Standardization ensures that everyone in the team knows what is expected of them, how to do it, and when to deliver. It also helps to eliminate variations in output quality, thereby reducing errors and increasing performance efficiency.

Standardization also supports the creation of a sustainable and adaptable team culture, where everyone is on the same page. It not only reduces confusion and misunderstandings but also increases your product team’s productivity and impact, letting you achieve more in less time and with fewer resources.

Here are some of the key processes to standardize in a scaling team:

• Product development (from ideation to deployment)
• Knowledge sharing
• Communication
• Progress tracking

How to standardize essential work processes:

• Define and document processes: Start by identifying the key steps and tasks involved in each process, as well as the tools, resources, and team members required. Then, document these processes in a centralized location, such as a wiki log or a knowledge management system that ensures everyone can access the information they need to work efficiently and effectively.
• Establish standard operating procedures (SOPs): Clearly define your SOPs and share them with the team so that they are executed consistently across the organization. SOPs should include step-by-step instructions, detailed guidelines for each task, and best practices to ensure the quality of work. Regularly reviewing and updating SOPs will also help to keep them relevant and effective.
• Train and mentor employees: When onboarding new team members, make sure they receive thorough training on the SOPs and processes in place. This will help you keep everyone in the loop on the established standards and rest assured knowing that your new hires quickly acclimate to the team’s way of working.
• Monitor and optimize processes: After implementing standardized processes, it’s important to monitor them regularly to identify any bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or areas for improvement. This can be done by collecting data, analyzing it, and using it to optimize your processes over time. Gathering feedback from team members and customers is also valuable, as it can provide insight into areas that may need improvement.

Pro tip:

Kanban board is one of the best tools for standardizing your progress tracking process by visualizing it in a simple-to-understand way:

Each task is represented by a card on the board, and users can drag and drop these cards as tasks progress through different stages. This makes it easy to see where each task is currently in the project cycle, ensures that all team members are working from the same set of priorities, and helps to prevent confusion or misunderstandings that can lead to delays and mistakes.

5.    Keep it lean

Lean project management is all about maximizing value while minimizing such waste as over-production, waiting periods, over-processing, defects, etc. This framework empowers product teams to move quickly and efficiently toward the set project and business goals. Promoting a focus on continuous improvement and a streamlined process helps to stay on track amidst the chaos of growth and change.

How to implement lean project management:

• Encourage cross-functional communication and collaboration: Lean project management emphasizes working in small teams that can quickly iterate and test ideas. Encouraging productive collaboration between team members can help eliminate bottlenecks and ensure that everyone is aligned on the project goals.
• Embrace continuous improvement: Lean project management involves continuous improvement through iterative cycles of planning, executing, and evaluating. By embracing this mindset, you can quickly adapt to changing market conditions, user needs, and technology advancements.
• Measure progress and success: Lean project management relies on data-driven decision-making. By regularly collecting and analyzing such metrics as task completion rate, on-time product delivery, and performance cost efficiency, you can make informed decisions about the direction of the project.
• Eliminate waste: In lean project management, waste is anything that doesn’t add value to the customer. By eliminating such non-value-adding activities as unnecessary meetings or excessive documentation, your team can focus on what matters most – delivering a high-quality product that meets customer needs.

Pro tip:

One of the key benefits of using a time tracking software like actiTIME is its ability to identify areas of inefficiency within a project. By recording time spent on each task, you can detect bottlenecks in the workflow and take steps to eliminate them, thereby increasing productivity and ensuring faster product delivery.

Besides, actiTIME features a fully automated browser extension that reduces the administrative burden associated with manual time tracking, freeing up time for managers and employees alike to focus on more value-added tasks and enabling them to better manage their time and improve their overall performance.

6.    Adopt a change management strategy

As your team grows or changes in any way, there will inevitably be shifts in processes, priorities, and even team dynamics. This can create confusion and resistance if not properly addressed.

A change management strategy enables you to anticipate and prepare for these changes and ultimately helps to reduce friction and resistance from individual employees and the team as a whole.

How to manage change in a scaling product team:

• Identify the need for change: This involves identifying the specific areas in the organization that require improvement or those that no longer support the business goals and objectives. An in-depth analysis of the current state of the organization is necessary to determine the root cause of the problems (e.g., obsolete processes and practices that don’t support business growth) and the changes required to overcome them.
• Establish a vision for the change: Define the desired future state of the organization and outline the goals and objectives that the change will help the company achieve. The ultimate goal of the change can then be broken down into smaller, achievable milestones.
• Develop a change management plan: This plan outlines the steps needed to achieve the desired future state, including any required resources, timelines, and potential obstacles. The plan should be communicated effectively to stakeholders to ensure alignment and support.
• Implementing the change: Now it’s time to execute the plan while ensuring that it stays on track and meets the predefined objectives. It is crucial to actively engage stakeholders throughout the change management process, as they will be impacted by the change and can provide valuable feedback and insight.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of the change: This involves measuring the results achieved against the predefined objectives and assessing the impact of the change on the wider organization. This stage helps to identify any gaps or areas for improvement and provides insights that can inform future initiatives.

Conclusion

The 6-step process outlined above will provide the framework necessary to ensure success in scaling your product team:

• Start by making a plan
• Build your team with the right mix of skill sets
• Standardize key processes
• Structure team members for maximum productivity
• Implement lean project management
• Reflect on how changes are affecting the company and make adjustments to embrace them

By following these steps, you’ll be able to effectively scale up your team while staying organized and efficient. And don’t forget – use actiTIME to track team progress and measure how efficient the optimized work processes have become.

By leveraging both your own talents as a leader and actiTIME’s robust project management features you can confidently reach infinity while attaining your product growth goals in the most efficient way.

Sign up for a free actiTIME trial today and scale your team with ease!