PDMA 2008 World Class Web 2.0 Product Org

Building a World Class Web 2.0 Product Organization Adam Nash LinkedIn

Context: LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the world’s largest global professional network, with over 27m members.
Average member is 41, with household income of $110K
Organization has grown over 500% in the past two years. Revenue has grown faster…
We deliver code to production every week

Questions for Today
Does Web 2.0 need product managers?
How does a distributed architecture for product function?
How do you empower user experience?
How do you balance an agile process with organization visibility?
Anything else?

Answers for Today
Yes, Web 2.0 does need product.
The best software is designed & built by small, cross-functional teams.
Including web development in the organization empowers user experience.
Distributed teams must communicate constantly & transparently to scale.
We’re still learning what world-class product means for Web 2.0.

Reflection on Web 2.0
Like all great revolutions, the seeds were planted long ago (1990s) and grew aggressively post-bubble.
A few Web 2.0 realizations:
Social fabrics generate engagement
Viral distribution models generate nearly costless organic traffic
Users can and will generate content

Does Web 2.0 Need Product Managers?
Several years ago, this was the fashionable debate in Silicon Valley.
Why can’t you just connect engineers with customers, iterate, and go?

What makes a great Product Manager?
Combination of skills and temperament
Analytical mind with deep understanding of metrics
A passion for customer-centric design
A natural and tireless evangelist for their product and their team
Business Technology User Experience

Product Managers as a Force Multiplier Product Manager Cross-Functional Team Effort Market Impact

What do you expect from Product?
Prioritization

What do you expect from Product?
Prioritization (!)
Deliverables
Product specification
Product roadmap
Product strategy
Metrics
Translating use cases into data, and data into use cases
Correlation vs. causality
Flexibility
Conditional planning
Leadership & Responsibility
Framing the problem defines the solution
Clarity on what you need to win before you play the game

Building a distributed product organization
The best software is designed & developed by small, cross-functional teams.
At it’s heart, the team is a close partnership between product & engineering.
Organize the teams around the product, while preserving functional reporting.
They sit together, work together, design together, ship together.
The team is responsible for their products & platforms.

Designing space for small teams

The role of central functions
Centralized functions preserve:
Acquisition of great talent
Career development and mentorship
End-to-end consistency, strategy, and architecture
Cross-team pollination of concepts, techniques, and issues
Central functions need to avoid:
Introducing bottlenecks
Stifling vertical innovation on teams
This solution to the matrix optimizes for both scale and innovation.
Highly parallelized function is not dissimilar to the modern distributed systems we build.

Live by the Spider-Man credo
With great power comes great responsibility
Distributed teams are responsible for:
Visibility
Communication
Their Products!

How do you manage in a distributed org?
Carefully 
Management is responsible for:
Providing traffic control & rationalization
Providing perspective & experience
Identifying and defining the culture, vision, goals and priorities for the organization
Setting & enforcing high standards in behavior and execution for the people reporting to them
Regular, but infrequent, resource reallocation
Beware of the delegation trap
People always want decisions pushed down to their level in the organization… and no further.

Empowering User Experience
Great user experience begins with a customer-centric culture.
Small, cross-functional teams with a diversity of backgrounds and expertise are crucial.
Be voracious in your appetite for product & customer data from all sources.
Remember the role of intuition and inspiration in design.
Beware of design by committee (or worse, by executives).

User Experience & Web Development
One of the challenges in Web 1.0 companies has been the interaction between design and web development
Most large companies place web development in engineering.
This often forces web developers to prioritize technical issues over customer issues
This does not, in general, make web developers happy, as the best are passionate user advocates
This also can lead user experience teams to fail to incorporate technical constructs into their design frameworks effectively.
Result: CONFLICT

Empowering user experience
We have taken a different route.
Web development is a part of the user experience team.
Empowers web developers as user experience advocates
Empowers the user experience team to actually control the execution of design.
Self selects for web developers with a passion for user experience
Requires constant vigilance to make sure web development is included in all engineering functions & process.

The key to our product process* A.B.S. * Credit to Ken Norton, former VP Product @ JotSpot for these two slides

Managing a distributed product process
Agile methodologies are great
Cross functional
Adaptive
Innovative
Quality through iteration
But there are issues
Visibility
Long term predictability
Functional excellence

A distributed process: blending concepts
Product definition
Quick, but detailed product & design work up front, on wiki.
Fragment product into cards/tasks
Iteration, including product & design, to final deliverable
Specification is finalized in parallel with development
Integration with other features for testing & weekly release

Leveraging a distributed roadmap
LinkedIn organizes around the wiki
Teams are assigned slots on the roadmap on a round-robin basis
Regular, frequent slots allow teams to be quality driven rather than date driven
Teams are expected to provide 6-8 weeks visibility to the organization for expected deliverables, with documentation
Visibility allows horizontal functions (Operations, Customer Service, etc) to raise issues and plan in advance
Bug fixes go out weekly, if not more often

Our goal: a truly distributed architecture
A true, end-to-end, service-oriented architecture across the board.
Truly independent paths for teams to deliver enhancements to production.
Daily access to release, if not faster.
Preserve the benefits of the small team structure, while scaling to thousands.

A few last thoughts
The pace of innovation is accelerating, not just in terms of technology, but also business process.
New products & new markets require open-minded thinking about new optimum solutions for organizations and product process
The best thing about Web 2.0 is that it is social. Everyone is working to figure out what world-class product means, and is generally willing to share & discuss & debate.

Answers for Today
Yes, Web 2.0 does need product.
The best software is designed & built by small, cross-functional teams.
Including web development in the organization empowers user experience.
Distributed teams must communicate constantly & transparently to scale.
We’re still learning what world-class product means for Web 2.0.

Thank you
Adam Nash
http://www.linkedin.com/in/adamnash

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PDMA 2008 World Class Web 2.0 Product Org

by adamnash on Sep 23, 2008

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PDMA 2008 World Class Web 2.0 Product Org — Presentation Transcript