As a leader of a portfolio of products and areas, director or VP, the breath and depth of what you lead and with the team size you lead it is important to have the right structure in place to support the team(s) and the business.
While right team structures are not a guarantee to success getting this part wrong can definitely create obstacles towards success.
Recently adopted this model framework and thought it’s worth sharing.
A 4D model
One way to think about drawing the boxes of areas of ownership is to draw the landscape of all the areas in this portfolio and group the concepts together based on skills required, context needed, dependencies that exist and stakeholders involved.
- Whiteboard the entire landscape of activities, initiatives, and areas.
- Identify the skills required, the context needed, dependencies that exist and stakeholders involved. These can be four dimensions to consider in your ownership model.
Making sure that there is not an explosion along any of these dimensions for a particular ownership area is key. For example: if the skills needed for someone to be successful in a specific domain span everything from being a UX research, customer developer to thinking about platforms and monetization they are going to have a hard time delivering or excelling. Similarly, if their stakeholders range from the compliance teams to marketing teams and designers they’re going to have a harder time.
Narrowing the range / variety along each dimension could go a long way to setup the team well. With a smaller range of skills, context, dependencies and stakeholders factors it is more manageable for the managers and ICs and also for adjacent teams.
Skills, Context, Dependencies, Stakeholders — the 4Ds to keep in mind for org structure and ownership
Other things to keep in mind:
Validate early
Battle test each model with real situations, challenges, business strategies and realities.
Establish Shared goals
It’s probably okay to have shared goals in most cases versus siloing goals as it creates more opportunities for collaboration and reduces the chance of shipping your org chart to the customer. Make sure that sharing goals doesn’t result in duplication of initiatives.
Evaluate later
Be open to revisit at some cadence and be sure to develop a means of qualitative and quantitative measures to see how successful the model is.