Scaling Your Product Team? Don’t Leave People Behind.

Two Colorado product experts broke down their methods for successfully scaling teams through rapid company growth.
Written by Tyler Holmes
February 15, 2022Updated: February 15, 2022

Growth isn’t an isolated incident.

As a product’s user base scales, so too must its internal capabilities. That means bigger coding projects, more responsibilities delegated to the teams behind the scenes and, inevitably, expansion. But what happens to the individuals navigating between all those moving parts as their previous roles transform?

For Michael Pfister, vice president of product at Nylas, giving product managers established specialties is essential for improving quality. “Initially, product managers were individual contributors that owned large portions of our product portfolio,” he said. “As our PM team has grown, we’ve begun to specialize within specific communication channels.”

However, not just any company can scale as it pleases. Expanding organizations must take into account market demand, user feedback and, most importantly, timing. According to a report by Startup Genome, 74 percent of successful young businesses fail by attempting to scale too early. That’s why home medical care company DispatchHealth first chose to analyze the biggest problems each customer segment faced before scaling, determined the solutions and built a game plan around how each team could be structured most effectively.

Built In Colorado caught up with Pfister and DispatchHealth Product Leader Charles Soll to learn the details about how each company’s internal structures have shifted as their product offerings grow — and what possibilities are on the horizon.

 

DispatchHealth Office
DispatchHealth

 

Charles Soll
Product Leadership • DispatchHealth

 

How big is your product management team, and how is it structured?

We have eight product managers and four product designers at Dispatch. The team is split into two groups: The first is focused on core experiences like patient, provider, onboarding and virtual care. The second is focused on optimization and integrations like logistics, partner experience, risk stratification and care orchestration.

We determined this structure based on looking at our customer segments and the biggest problems each customer segment faces. Within each team, product managers partner with their engineering, design and data science counterparts to prioritize, set and execute against the roadmap.

 

How has that structure changed during the life of the company, or if more applicable, during your time there?

As Dispatch continues to scale, both by geography and complexity of offerings, we’ve continued to evolve our product org. We center everything we do around the patient and provider experiences, and regularly evaluate how we’re organized to effectively iterate on these experiences. Most recently we broke out the patient experience from onboarding to allow for teams to focus on the specific problems patients face when onboarding versus problems they face pre- and post-visit.

Additionally, we’ve made it a strategic priority to leverage our internal data to improve our ability to evaluate risk and dispatch the correct level of care. This includes creating a risk stratification team that uses internal data to train predictive models to assess risk. This team will work alongside our logistics team that focuses on dispatching the right provider to the right patient, taking into account supply and demand levels by market.

We center everything we do around the patient and provider experiences.”

 

Looking forward, at what point does the current structure break down at scale? And what comes next?

We’re committed to continuously improving how our teams are organized to best support the business. We believe that the best way to do that is to continue evolving the vision we have for the patient and provider journeys, and identify where gaps exist based on our team structure. One area we anticipate needing to revisit as we scale is whether or not we form service line product teams like chronic care management, in-home hospitalization and more. Today we have teams focusing on the end-to-end experiences, but as products scale we will likely want to build unique experiences for these providers and patients.

 

 

Michael Pfister
Vice President, Product • Nylas

 

How big is your product management team, and how is it structured?

The product team at Nylas includes eight product managers (PMs), three designers and three technical writers. Nylas is a developer platform with products spanning the entire tech stack, and we’ve structured our team to reflect that.

Our connectivity team is responsible for our core communication APIs and integrations. Our developer experience team builds products that shorten developers’ time to market, like Scheduler, Components, SDKs and Docs. Our neural team owns the insight layer, building ML models to extract insight from all the data flowing throughout the platform.

This helps ensure that each PM has depth within their product area so that we build the best product possible for our customers.

 

How has that structure changed during the life of the company, or if more applicable, during your time there?

As customer usage of our Connectivity, Developer Experience and Neural products has grown rapidly in the last two years, the problem space has also expanded significantly. As our PM team has grown, we’ve begun to specialize within specific communication channels like email and business chat, and customer verticals like eCommerce and financial services. This helps our end-to-end product experiences align closely with customer use cases and outcomes.

 

MORE ON NYLASNylas Raises $120M Series C Following ‘Remarkable Growth,’ Plans Denver Hiring

 

Looking forward, at what point does the current structure break down at scale? And what comes next?

In order to keep our product velocity as fast as possible while remaining frugal, new product initiative teams will be extremely lean until they find product-market fit. When these products become successful and drive revenue, we will graduate them to enduring core teams with more cross-functional ownership, resourcing and a strong product leader.

We may also establish a product operations team to help manage product data, tools, experimentation, internal comms and strategy. Aside from that, much of the product leadership structure is in place and I expect it to scale through 500 employees.

 

 

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