A quick guide to building a product team

Stefan Radisavljević
6 min readMay 12, 2021

As some of you may know I am a nerd who talks a lot of stupid shit, am also a Head of Product at the company called SuperAnnotate (In case you want to know what SuperAnnotate is about please check this article). Before you run to conclusions, I don’t want to cover what the company does or how super we are, or what type of amazing things we do. Today I want to cover the product team, a team which does amazing and magical things every single motherfreaking day.

The product team is my product

Starting from day one, we knew that I have the challenge to form a product team in the company with very high growth potential and with a very strong smell of a unicorn (I mean, have you ever been close to the unicorn? As gracious those creatures are, they also shit a lot). Having said that we started as 2 product managers and, spoiler alert, now we are a team of 8, having product managers, product designers, a tech writer, and still hiring (Note: If you have a referral or want to apply don’t hesitate to DM me through Linkedin).
During the formation of our product team I always kept and still do keep the following phrase:

“The product team is my product”

(I recently heard this in a presentation from one German SVP of product but was always saying the same thing a bit differently. Anyway, this wraps it up perfectly.)

What does this mean?

Well, this means not only leading the team and helping them on a daily basis do their work, but also helping them grow as professionals. Helping someone to grow is that you need to share your knowledge about certain books and articles, share your thoughts of what you think regarding certain use cases, set up product sessions where you can discuss different stuff about product management, product strategy, vision, roadmap, analytics, and many more, which this whole article is not enough to cover.

Now you probably say something like:

  • “This sounds good on paper, but what does it look like in the everyday harsh and miserable world?”

or

  • “You probably wanted to write an article, I can bet you don’t do half of those things”

Well, let me try to be more specific here.

Step 1: Setup hiring process

Of course, we didn’t start by having the product sessions, strategy, vision, and many other fancy things in the first place. The only thing we had, in the beginning, was the product or the platform, which we knew needs to become very competitive in order for our company to grow and get to the product-market fit.

As you may understand the first crucial step is hiring. Also it may happen that you are alone in the team and need to hire your first product manager, designer, or just someone who is good at making Long Island cocktails, so you can work 25 hours a day.

So what is the best approach?

Of course, there is no best approach, but the way we do at SuperAnnotate for hiring the product team members is the following:

  1. Culture fit interview
    This interview is done by our people and culture specialist or managers to understand whether the candidate fits our core values.
  2. Product assignment
    The assignment is usually a multiple-choice test, where we check analytical and product mindset skills
  3. Product team interview
    In this interview, we deep dive with the candidate regarding specific product topics, use cases and try to unleash the inner product monster inside the candidate
  4. Related teams interview
    At this stage engineering and all the related teams talk to the candidate to understand whether the one is actually the one they would work with

If the candidate passes through all these steps successfully, then the one is going to join the cool and awesome startup in a very challenging industry, where everything the company does can be summed up with one word- MAGIC!

Step 2: Setup a right product environment

Before setting up an environment, what you, as a product leader, can do during this pandemic and when you are new to everything, meaning to the product, company, people, and instead of investigating stuff on day one, you start preparing the requirements for features you are not aware of, is… Pray!!!

I am just kidding as bad as it sounds, in parallel to preparing the requirements what you, as a product leader, should do is set up an environment where you and your team can work together. Meaning, set up story templates, research/investigation tools, processes/workflows, and apart from all of this set up a creative and transparent culture, where you and your future coworkers can start working. I am going to repeat.
Set up a creative and TRANSPARENT culture.

What does this mean?

This means that you and any member of your team should be free to tell each other anything they think about a certain topic and should expect you to do the same because otherwise at some point it may become toxic communication or you may not understand each other correctly or the deadly virus may spread and you won’t be able to tell each other what you actually think about the product so that the feature you are developing will make all the purple pandas disappear just because all of you were not honest and transparent.

Step 3: Define product vision and strategy

This may seem like a very quick transition from step 2 to 3, but that’s exactly what one, a product leader, should always keep in mind. Based on my experience it may take one from 6 to 12 months to define the product vision and strategy and still not be 100% sure what one did (Of course, before even thinking about the vision and the strategy, one should set up a proper analytics tool, but let’s assume you did all of that). However, once you got to the point of submitting the vision and the strategy with the leadership team is the moment your product team should start shining.

Why?

Because you finally defined the direction of there the company and the product should be headed to and not satisfying every single customer's feature requests. As a result not ending up like a hamster running on a wheel.

Step 4: Define product roadmap

Once the direction of the company is defined, one should start thinking about the product roadmap. What is the product roadmap? It is the list of items, which covers customers' pain points, and the direction of the company. I would like to have your attention one more time.

Customers’ pain points and the direction of the company. This is the main difference between the roadmap and the backlog of features. If the backlog can have the detailed solution described in the requirement documentation with the deadlines and effort estimations, the product roadmap should reflect more problems and pain points, than solutions.

Note: Your first product roadmap may fail in terms of providing the correct direction, but it is important for the product leader and the product team to learn based on the mistakes made previously and adjust accordingly till the team get to the holy grail of product roadmaps.

Step 5: Facilitate the ownership

In product management, one of the most important things is ownership. This means, that the one should be the key decision-maker in the corresponding area. Product managers and product designers should be responsible for their product areas and be the second closest person to the customer after customer success representatives.

Now you say: “This sounds cool, but how you do that?”

This is where our product sessions, book clubs, experience sharing, and many more product-related trainings come in. The product people are the key decision-makers and one should prepare those individuals to be ready to say YES or NO to anyone even to the product leaders. I, personally, am always happy when the product designers and/or the product managers prove me wrong.

Sum up

To sum up, I know those are not the easy steps and may take some time to implement, but there is no such thing as easy and the result is a monster machine called the product team, which can help your company achieve a 100 billion market cap.

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Stefan Radisavljević

Head of Product | Love product management, my girlfriend, and talking about stupid and crazy shit.