Toward a new org design for UX and PM
30 to 50, but it’s not feral hogs
On the latest Finding Our Way, Jesse and I talk to product development interrogator John Cutler, in what proved to be perhaps the widest ranging discussion we’ve ever had on the podcast.
(Listen to it on Apple Podcasts, any podcatcher, or read the full transcript.)
Among the many topics, what I’m most eager to pursue is John’s contention that software development will move away from piles of ~8-person squads, each featuring a product manager or product owner, towards 30-to-50-person pods with one product manager, one UX/Design lead, one Engineering lead, an Operations lead, and everyone else an active practitioner.
Nearly 10 years ago, in Org Design for Design Orgs, we advocated that UX/Designers no longer be embedded in small product squads, instead operating as a coherent team across a set of squads, looking something like:
What excites me about John’s postulate is that if you do the ratio math on 5-7 designers (what I consider to be the optimal size of a design team), assuming 6 to 8 engineers per designer, you get a range of 30-56 engineers, and total product pod size of 36-64. So, through totally separate lines of thinking, John and I arrived at a very similar organizational place. Which suggests to me that we’re on to something.
The probable decline of PM/PO ranks
An implication of John’s postulate is that there will be far fewer PMs/POs (a group of 40 would go from around five down to one). I don’t think this is particularly radical. Product Management thought leader Melissa Perri said something similar on Finding Our Way 4 years ago, when she identified “agile transformations” as the culprit leading to far too many product managers.
And, from my anecdotal perspective, this makes sense, because I hear from literally every UX/Design team I support that among their frustrations is how much “product management” work they need to do, because the PMs don’t understand the role. If UX/Designers and Engineers are already doing much of what is considered product management (at least at the team/squad level), it calls into question the value of that role.
Inspiration from elsewhere
Two items bubbled up as worth your time:
The Design Observer interview with Ovetta Sampson on Activism and AI. One of the highest signal-to-noise discussions I’ve heard on the subject of AI.
The Value of Design is Design by Jay Harlow. A brief, yet deeply insightful piece on the distinct value design brings in a software-as-a-service world.
And the best thing I ate this week…
2 years ago, my family visited Naples, Italy, and my daughter fell in love with pizza fritta (imagine a calzone… that’s been deep fried). A couple nights ago, Stacy made it for dinner, and it was exquisite. She used this recipe from the original source, Gino Sorbillo. You don’t need a deep fryer—she used a wok. And the bonus is, for dessert, fry any leftover dough, and dust with powdered sugar, or cinammon sugar, or maybe a glop of honey or chocolate syrup.