Autonomous, collaborative, self-managing squads
TL;DR:
Product Lead ~= Product Owner
Delivery Lead ~= Scrum Master
(To be clear, this doesn’t mean you have to be a “Scrum” shop, but for those who are familiar with that methodology, the above gets you maybe halfway there. It’s directionally accurate. The vectorised version, however, is a lot more than this… read on!)
I’ve been using this graphic, or a version of it for over 10 years now. No matter the organisation or mission, these are the three different perspectives that are typically in tension within a Product Squad setup. Yes they overlap, so it’s not a tidy roles and responsibilities, and don’t even attempt to do a RACI with it. That’s now how Product Development works.
Who does what?
Whilst the tendency is to want to draw nice clean lines between areas of responsibility, the reality of an autonomous, collaborative, cross-functional and self-managing squad is that there are areas of overlap, similar to the Venn diagram above. Whilst they do overlap somewhat, and need to work closely together, the Product Lead and Delivery Lead roles each have a different focus.
Delivery Lead
Delivery Lead is focused on straight-line speed. In our complex world, that means smoothing the flow end-to-end and shortening the cycle time. They’re looking for opportunities to go (sustainably) faster.
That means managing the flow of work, identifying gaps, removing impediments, attacking unhealthy queues and waiting time, bottlenecks, and general “waste” in a lean sense.
The “tools” of a Delivery Lead are things like the Kanban Board, CFD, Cycletime charts, WIP limits and a bunch of facilitation techniques.
The Delivery Lead really cares about healthy team practices that encourage collaboration and learning, like the Daily Sync, Planning, Demos, Retrospectives – the rituals and events that help keep us moving forward. They’ll help with setting and tweaking WIP limits with the team. With developing a Definition of Ready and a Definition of Done. They know that poor quality leads to slow flow, so that’s a key area of concern too. Ultimately, it’s all about the team, facilitation and coaching the team to be the best they can be, together.
Mission: Developing products that customers love and teams love building.
Product Lead
Product Lead is primarily focused on helping the team to convert pure straight-line speed into “velocity made good”. There’s no point doing all the good flow stuff, and having amazingly fast feedback loops with the best technical and functional quality if there’s no VALUE being delivered.
Globally, trillions of dollars are wasted (and countless years of people’s lives) delivering software that nobody uses. We don’t want to contribute to that.
The “tools” of a Product Lead are prioritisation frameworks, Roadmaps, Forecast, and an ability to manage expectations, sharing the complexity and helping others to understand tradeoffs, especially when trying to decide what goes first and what has to wait.
In this way, the Product Lead’s role is to gently steer the ship toward the next mark. That’s typically done via meaningful metrics, Goals, Experiments, Measures, OKRs (or whatever you want to call them). How are we going to make a real difference. The PL needs to be able to articulate for the team and for stakeholders where the value and urgency is, what the steps towards that are. They’re going to work closely with the DL and the team to put together Roadmaps that we can believe in, and they’ll help to slice the big huge missions down into small bite-size “stories” for the team to deliver VALUE early and often.
Mission: Developing products that customers love and teams love building.
See how the Product Lead and Delivery Lead roles are complementary?
Platform Lead
Platform Leads are quite similar to Product Lead. The main difference is that the primary consumers/users of our Platforms are other technology teams (either internal or external/clients). As a result, they’re going to be a LOT more focused on Developer Experience, and maintaining quality and scalability of our platforms. Without that, the platform is probably dying.
They’re also likely to be more technical than a Product Lead, because of who the “customer” is. They also need to be able to make some of the hardest trade off decisions – not about which client or user or feature goes first or waits, but how to find win-wins managing technical debt and growing the platform in a way that doesn’t dig a hole.
Who reports to whom?
Neither the Delivery Lead nor the Product or Platform Lead are the line manager of the squad. They do have an important leadership role though. Line management tends to mess things up, diluting the focus. As Henrik Kniberg nicely shared in how things (used to) work at Spotify, line management is more about career development, guidance and coaching via “Chapters” or Practices.
And then there are Communities of Interest. But those are topics for another day!
