| Hi Shaper ✌️
Welcome to this week's issue of INFUZED on Structure.
In every company's development, there comes a point when you need to split up into teams to focus on various aspects of the business. Most do this based on "proven" practice, namely function-based teams. Teams organized around their function. One for Product, one for Marketing & Sales, another one for HR, Finance, etc. The problem with this approach: it's proven to work well for physical products. In today's agile and digitalized world, it creates a bunch of challenges.
The metric-based team, however, is organized around a specific metric that is important to the business. For digital products, such metrics could be user retention, conversion, daily active users, etc.
Here are
"3 Benefits of Metric-based Teams"
1. Ownership of Results
The job is no longer to "build a great product" and push around accountability for metrics to other teams. The mission of each team is unambiguous. They own a specific metric and it's their only job to take good care of this metric.
2. Organizational Alignment
By structuring the organization by metrics, not only has each team a clear and explicit goal everyone knows about (no more hidden agendas), it also allows and encourages all teams to work together for their shared interests. Additionally, those interests are no longer derived from opinion, but supported by data.
3. Marketplace of Ideas
This is by far my personal favorite. The competition is no longer between functions on who knows what's the right thing to do or what the user really wants. The competition is now between the best ideas and solutions. What features will advance our metrics the most?
Now the biggest challenge for leadership is no longer to play politics or keep restructuring, but to decide which are the metrics that actually matter and move the needle for the business. |
