You may think that a great product starts with a great idea and a vision. While that’s true, you cannot achieve true greatness without the right people on board. Enter the integrated product team (IPT), a cross-functional group that brings together experts from various fields to collaborate on product development from conception to launch.
An IPT isn’t just another team; it’s a strategic approach that breaks down unnecessary communication blockades in favor of open communication, thus accelerating innovation. By uniting different disciplines under a common goal, IPTs ensure that all aspects of a product are considered, leading to more cohesive and successful products.
This article explains what makes a successful integrated product team, including what they are, how they function, and why they’re essential for modern product managers aiming for excellence.
Key roles within an integrated product team
An effective IPT is a collection of diverse skills and perspectives. The typical roles include the following, starting with you, the PM.
As the product manager, you’re the team’s anchor, ensuring that everyone’s efforts align with the right backlog item. You shape the product by greenlighting and issuing all the work that needs to happen to make the full release.
Responsibilities:
DEs turn ideas into tangible products, bringing technical expertise that makes the product viable. Even in the emerging era of AI coding and low-code platforms, DEs are an integral part of bringing ideas to life.
Responsibilities:
Designers ensure the product is user-friendly and meets customer expectations, enhancing satisfaction and adoption rates. They’re the expert on what works and what doesn’t for certain users and are responsible for keeping the whole product visually and navigation-wise coherent and accessible.
Responsibilities:
Data specialists help find the one source of truth and allow the IPT to make data-driven choices and uncover areas where products could improve and serve better for their users. While this can also be done by you, BDAs have time and tools to dive deeper into research and take into account non-obvious data-impacting circumstances.
Responsibilities:
QA analysts safeguard the product’s quality, enhancing its reliability and user trust. While developers could test or cross-test their work, having a specialist to do this increases overall quality of the released product while allowing devs to focus more on coding.
Responsibilities:
The team leader ensures that the IPT operates smoothly, facilitating collaboration and maintaining momentum toward goals. They’re the actual manager of the whole IPT with the exception of you as the PM, who reports to the head of product type of position.
Responsibilities:
To be honest with you, the concept of an unintegrated product team is so alien to me that writing about an integrated one feels like talking cliches. In all the organizations I have worked, the benefit of integration was so obvious that no one ever discussed having another approach to working together on an initiative. Each time we had a contractor on the team or someone working remotely (unlike all the other team members), it felt like having an outsider on the team. That person wouldn’t be given as many responsibilities and trust as all the other teammates.
The fact is that if you consider the agile scrum framework, which is the basis of most development teams in the world right now, you can see that it strongly promotes the integration of the team. While that isn’t explicitly said in the scrum guide, this is the most common interpretation and application of those concepts.
While working with integrated teams I had the ability to improve the seniority and soft skill set of my fellow team members. Of course, I also learned on the way, becoming a better product manager and a better leader.
I always remember with pride that the first team that I worked on as a junior product manager started as an inefficient set of my opponents. With hard work and open-mindedness, the team became one of the most efficient and well-working in the whole department. That allowed me, later on, to translate those learnings to other integrated product teams. I’m sure that without the dedication and trust of people that I’ve worked with day by day, I wouldn’t be able to achieve half of my product successes.
Now that you see the roles and benefits of IPTs, here are some best practices for implementing them:
In an integrated product team it might sound like the product manager and the team leader are above the team. While this might be true in the company charts, it shouldn’t be true in the room together.
You’re there to get everyone on the same page and achieve the best possible result. The team leader is there to guide, help, and enable the growth of the entire team. When you create an environment where everyone’s opinion matters, great ideas flow, stress and conflict goes down, and the team becomes even more integrated.
In the world of deadlines and pressure from upstairs, the IPT managers can be tempted into overworking and pushing the team to find their limits and against their personal situations. While this might work once, maybe twice, in the long-term it can push team members to develop their careers in different companies. It’s much better to care about the mental health of everyone on the team and make sure that when they need their personal time, due to illness or personal matters, they can have it.
When they’re back they’ll remember the kindness and respect they received and try even harder in the future. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t empathy for the sake of future results. It’s just that being a good person creates a situation where everyone eventually wins.
Using corporate language sounds fake and no one trusts it. If you speak openly with your team, you’ll grow their trust and confidence and they’ll be more likely to accept difficult news.
However, that has its limits. You don’t want to say bad words about your management and company. You need to be diplomatic in such situations and realize that you might not have the full picture and what might appear stupid for you might actually be the only reasonable course of action. It’s better to take this optimistic approach rather than bury yourself in a mountain of complaints and animosities.
You might be more experienced than the other members of your team as a product manager or a team leader. That might push you to tell your team what to do in order to achieve results without allowing them to work for that solution to save more time. Unfortunately, this is short-sighted.
If you don’t allow your team to grow and figure things out for themselves, you’ll have to babysit them all the time and you’ll never have time of your own. Instead, invest time to coach and help your team members grow so that in the future they can be better professionals.
This is something that I struggle a lot with. Not because I fail to see the contributions of the team, but because you have to be very wary of what you say and use “we” rather than “I” at the right time. Remember during every important presentation to give the whole team credit. Neither the product manager nor the team leader would have anything to present if it weren’t for the other members of the IPT.
Remember that the other members of the IPT are also your stakeholders. They might ask you to recode (refactor) parts of the product to make it easier for them to code or to make the product more stable. It’s often hard to quantify the value of those changes and it can feel like a development black hole that takes time that can be dedicated to user-facing development.
While very often those changes do positively impact the development time and product stability, they also benefit the team’s morale. It builds trust that when a team member flags something important the project manager and team leader will listen.
Integrated product teams are standard for the agile scrum world. People are social creatures and we operate better in packs. While you don’t need to transform your colleagues into your best friends, having them as close, honorable allies allows you to enjoy your work and get better results (and who knows, they might even help fast-track your career).
Featured image source: IconScout
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