1. Lack Quick Feedback

The product development efforts are easily derailed without quick feedback from the customers. When teams build their products in a silo without feedback, deep knowledge of customer needs and outcomes, it can lead to ordinary products.

A good product team doesn’t only rely on its research and development, but realworld customer feedback to build the right product. Even the top technology companies in the world have failed to deliver compelling when they’ve missed the customer pulse. Google wave, Google One, Apple Maps, Amazon’s firebase are just examples that show that customers make the products successful.

A good product team is aligned around the problem it is solving for the customer. The product team asks:
Is the problem really important for the customer?
What is missing for the customer that our product can address?
Do customers find it easy to use what we are building?
Is there any other way a customer can achieve what we are trying to build?
What outcomes or goals will the customer achieve by using our product?
Why would someone care to use our product?
Would the customer recommend our product to others? Why?

Feedback and getting in touch with your products at the earliest stages of development is highly recommended. A product that fails to capture the essence of what customers want fails to please them. A good product team needs customer representation. They need to validate, improvise and deliver on compelling outcomes pertinent for customer’s success.

2. Misaligned Incentives

Misaligned incentives cause more harm than good. The legendary investor Charlie Munger makes a strong case for aligning the incentives right for the team to deliver the results you’re looking for. The technology industry is a place where employees need to be incentivised for delivering the results, not the time spent on the projects.

In today’s environment, employees need freedom and space to build things. They need to know what the goals and objectives are. Once they know it, they can chart their own way and build amazing things.

The old paradigm of time shifts, mandatory office hours and inflexible routines may not lead to great outcomes. When employees are empowered and held accountable for what they are doing, they take ownership.

A good product team ensures that employees have their skin in the game. They are incentivised for delivering the results. A win win situation aligns employee efforts and performance for maximising results for everyone.

3. Frequent Changes in Goals


The digital world is marked by its speed and new developments. It is all too common for customers, vendors and employees to change their boats. Even the best technology companies face attritions on a regular basis.

Good product teams are able to organise work in a flexible way. When companies plan and prepare for the changes in advance, they can rotate resources and create a methodical way to deliver the products.

Digital technologies make it possible for companies to collaborate, create and structure their products around a common product vision. A solid product team is built on a strong foundation that will not be shaken by ongoing market changes or individuals leaving the group.

4. Expertise Vs Market Need

SaaS product development typically revolves around digitisation of a business service. It involves creating an online product to meet a real world need. But many times, product teams fail to understand the core market needs. They rely on their expertise, development experience and technology roadmap without asking the business use case.

A good product team A/B tests ideas by launching them in the real world to see where the gaps are. A good product reduces friction, makes it easier to accomplish things and does things end to end.

A good product team goes a long way to see every interaction of the users with their products. They use advanced analytics to track user behaviour, usage patterns and understand friction points that their products fail to address.

They use data points from the market to improve the product they are building. Many products fail when they rely on the expertise of high end consultants who don’t know the ground reality. They may be relying on reports and research that may be outdated. But the market needs are never outdated, customer reality and needs leads to the best product outcomes. 

5. Too Many User Stories 

If you look around the most successful SaaS products, they typically nail something very simple but in the most comprehensive way. But doing too many things at once is a sure recipe for product failure.

A product team needs to plan stories inline with the most important features. When managers try to cram everything into a sprint, it can lead to poor product outcomes. Always remember the 80/20 principle, when you are planning user story development. Focus on the 20% functionality that is likely to have an 80% impact on your customers.

A strong product team prioritises development ruthlessly. It ensures that the most important user stories are covered using something like an INVEST framework. Doing fewer things better is the key, no one should build unwanted features in a product.

When teams are clear on the user stories and why they are doing them, they can focus on delivering the results. But when there is too much on their plate, they often fail to research, take inputs or brainstorm the most effective ways to solve the problems for the users. 

6. Technology Curve

Product teams are often led by technology enthusiasts and evangelists who might not have the required business expertise. The new technologies and developments that are unproven and not yet market tested can lead to problems. The technology may not be ready for prime time. For e.g. building products on an unproven technology can lead to scaling or quality issues.

On the other hand, using outdated technologies renders a product useless too. When a product doesn’t evolve with the changing technological developments, it could lead to customer churn. For e.g. AI driven accounting software that automates accounting render older desktop and web versions obsolete. 

A product team ensures that they have the right technology to address the critical need of their customers. Technology is not the goal, but a tool for helping the users achieve what they want. Good product team ensures a solid technical foundation for meeting the objectives of their clients.

Kreyon Systems develops SaaS products tapping into new revenue streams and innovative business models for enterprise customers. If you need any assistance for SaaS product development, please get in touch.

The post The Common Dysfunctions of a Product Team & How to Avoid them appeared first on Kreyon Systems | Blog | Software Company | Software Development | Software Design.

A good product team is known for the quality of the products it builds. When customers fall in love with a product, a good team is born not necessarily the other way around. Teams that build software products experiment, innovate and keep evolving until they perfect what they’re creating.And then they do it again. Such is the nature of software products, the disruptive nature of technology ensures that no product is guaranteed to last unless it evolves with time, none whatsoever.

1. Own Product Vision 

The product vision is the reason why a team is building what it is building. When a team understands and owns the product vision, it signifies their deep involvement in building the product.

The product vision connects the team to their work. Everything follows from that. When teams reason, question, and build things from the depth of knowledge, it leads to remarkable products.

The ownership of the product and accountability for the results makes a world of difference. Teams that take ownership of what they are doing care about the products they are building. They hold themselves accountable for the product, work with increased focus and vizualise the big picture.  

2. Focus on the Problem First

Great products are built where teams fall in love with their customers not their solutions. This is a simple metaphor for building an understanding of what is needed by your customers and the market.

Good teams understand the importance of involving customers early into the development process and test features in the customer environment. The customer interviews lead to the determination of what needs to be built for the customers. It is the problem and careful analysis of what customers are looking for that drives the development processes. The product features are prioritized according to customer needs.

3. Product Feature Adoption
Teams that deliver successful products know what customers want. They build a core product usage and prioritization matrix to assess product interactions with the end-users. 

One of the biggest hurdles in building the right product is adding the wrong features to the product. The development resources need to be utilised in delivering the features that add the most value for the users. 

Using the product feature adoption matrix, features can be categorized as: 

Q I —   High no. of users & high-frequency usage

Q II —  Low no. of users & high-frequency usage

Q III — Low no. of users & low-frequency usage

Q IV — High no. of users & low-frequency usage

Clearly, a company that understands where users are spending time and deriving value can prioritize its efforts with clarity. When customer outcomes are mapped with product

feature adoption matrix, teams can deliver better products. The idea is to improve the usability aspects of the product for the features that add the highest value and have a high frequency of usage. 

4. Useful Technology Trends 

A good product team understands technology trends. It reinvents the product according to the needs of consumers and relevance. The top teams are not afraid of cannibalizing what they have built in the past, but often disrupt things proactively. They are always on the lookout for cutting-edge technology to develop superior solutions, even at the cost of making their old products obsolete.

When teams are looking at breakthrough product improvements, they can optimize for costs, customer efforts, time, risk, and sustainability. Good product teams use meaningful technology trends that improve the product tangibly for the customers. They leverage new technical capabilities to innovate and solve customer problems in more effective ways.

5. Right Team Structure 

A good product team has the right balance and team structure. It has the right mix of developers, designers, product owner, manager, marketing, accounting & finance, customer representatives and sales personnel. Many times, when engineering teams dominate the product development phase, it can be counterintuitive for growth.

A collaborative and interactive relationship between different product functions is integral to achieving product success. A team that is too large or doesnt represent all business functions is likely to miss important aspects of building the right product. A good team knows how to build, market, sell, support and scale a product.  

6. Market Assessment

Customer value proposition ranks very highly for making a product successful. Good product teams have ways to identify and survey the gaps in the existing market. These teams are able to identify the value proposition that customers are willing to pay for and the value it brings them.

A team with the right skills, experience, and market understanding knows how to deliver great value to their customers. They evangelize products based on the outcomes customers are looking for. These teams translate the business needs to viable products that results in value creation for everyone. Whether it is design sprints, resource allocation, prioritisation of features or delivering great value at affordable price points, a good product team delivers the results with consistency.

7. Growth & Scale
Technology businesses are easier to scale when the basic building blocks are sound. A good product that introduces a breakthrough technology solution can rapidly scale to serve a large customer base.

Take the e.g. of VMotion developed at VMware. It was conceived by an engineer and the company found a way to monetize it, paving the way for a billion dollar business. VMotion is the technology that enables live migration of running virtual machines from one physical server to another with zero downtime, uninterrupted service availability and complete transaction integrity.

Software products give the scale and flexibility that allows a company to grow. Product teams that have the right mix of talent, skills, experience and knowledge of customer environment are likely to build scalable products. 

8. Execution Bias

A great team knows what it takes to build and execute things. They deliver the right products for the right customers. Execution bias ensures they are consistently trying out new experiments and failing forward, until they nail the right product. 

Strong leadership improves team’s focus and engagement. Studies have shown that teams that work very closely with executives and enjoy their unwavering support perform exceedingly well.

When teams are aligned with the product strategy, trust their leadership and focus on their core tasks, they are likely to produce extra ordinary results. Focus is the ability to zone into the most important value drivers for the customers, and leaving everything else. The best teams know where they have to draw the boundaries and say no to deliver outstanding products.

Execution bias also helps companies deal with ever changing priorities and product roadmaps. As technological disruptions are commonplace, companies often need to change their strategies overnight and adapt quickly. Teams that experiment, iterate and deliver with pace are more likely to develop winning products.

Kreyon Systems is a SaaS product company with expertise in enterprise SaaS. If you have any queries for us or need assistance in building software products, please reach out to us.

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