Build a strong team to build a successful product

Building a successful product is a team sport requiring people with a wide range of skills and backgrounds. When you bring a team like that together, the way you structure it can often be the difference between the surprise underdog that wins a championship, or the favorite that flames out because of infighting. We’ll let you insert your own team names for each example.?

This week in product news, we look at how AI can spawn millions of chatbots and at the same time provide a single answer to your burning questions. We also look at Apple loosening its tight grip on in app payments and the fall of an online retailer.

4 Effective product team structures. Before a product team introduces a new feature or launches the next version of their product, they have to figure out how to work together. Yet, so many product leaders overlook the most important part of enabling the product team to work towards their goals - their team structure. Ravi Mehta explains that a well-built product team structure helps everyone know precisely what they are accountable for in the product development process. (via Reforge )?

4 Ways to Build Your Product Team Structure Scaling your product team can be a massive challenge in today’s fast-paced business world. As your organization grows, you need to ensure that your product team structure can keep up with the demands of your ever-expanding customer base. An effective, scalable structure is at the heart of any successful product team. Vy Le explains how to structure a software product development team for delivering high-quality products and services to your customers. (via Orient Software Development Corp. )?

Building High-Performing Product Teams As a product person, you can’t achieve product success on your own — you rely on the support of others, including stakeholders and development teams. Roman Pichler explains how to foster collaboration and form an effective product team.

How to structure your product development team. Behind every great product is a great product development team. Product development teams understand customer needs, create something new, and bring it to market. Besides choosing what to build, they communicate the benefits and measure the performance of the product — crucial duties within any company. The folks at Aha! Explain that there’s more to the product team than just engineering.

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This week’s Video

0-1 Product teams- hire & scale your first product team. Founders and heads of product at early-stage companies are often trying to do two impossible things at once: take a product from 0-1 and take a PM team from 0 to 1. In this talk from INDUSTRY: The Product Conference in 2018, Merci Victoria Grace explains how to avoid common hiring & process mistakes in those crucial early days so you can find the right PMs (or hire your first PM), build trust, and grow while maintaining momentum.

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Product Management News: Week of January 15, 2024

There’s a chatbot for that. OpenAI launched an app store that already contains nearly three million chatbots. The GPT store is a platform where paying users of ChatGPT can share their own custom bots, known as GPTs, or download others’ for free. The store categorizes GPTs by function (writing, productivity, etc.), and the company eventually plans to feature a leaderboard for the top-performing ones.

Tired of looking through a bunch of links? A new AI powered tool called Perplexity acts as an “answer engine” and strives to be a direct competitor to Google. The tool uses generative AI capabilities to provide you a single direct answer pulled from multiple sources, which it also shares. You can try out Perplexity for free or subscribe to upload images and take advantage of a “smarter” AI. Since the tool’s main revenue source is subscription, you don’t have to wade through ads to use it.

App developers don’t have to give Apple quite as much money. Apple has updated its App Store policies to spell out how developers can link to outside payment platforms. Developers will still owe Apple a cut if they use an outside payment platform. Apple will take a 27 percent cut (as opposed to the 30 percent in many cases) or 12 percent if a developer is part of the App Store Small Business Program. This definitely will impact how app developers approach in app payments and subscriptions going forward.

How Zulily soared, sank, and shut down. Zulily’s downfall is a story of a high-flying online retailer that lost its identity and struggled to maintain a competitive moat, years after the company attracted millions of customers with an innovative e-commerce model aimed at moms. It also raises questions about Regent, the private equity firm that acquired Zulily in May and said it planned to grow the retailer in new markets until it put the company in liquidation last month.

Resources and news curated by Kent J. McDonald .