Creating A Product Vision
MasterCardCreating a Tangible Product Vision
How MasterCard improved its product development process by adopting a tangible product vision.
Cross-functional teams improve time to market
Functional separation is the most efficient way to do repeated tasks. But in creative work, you need more flexibility and back-and-forth discussions. Stage gate handoffs and the corresponding documentation limit the ability of teams to develop new and creative solutions, as well as slow down delivery.
But creating and scaling cross-functional teams is easy to say and hard to do. ZeroBlockers provides five different team structures to help you build and scale cross-functional teams.
Better ROI
Quicker time to money
More innovation
Addressing the challenges
Scaling cross-functional teams is easier to say than do
ZeroBlockers scales cross-functional teams by defining five different types of teams that either build the product, provide the business context and direction or enable the teams to do their best work.
Stream Teams
The teams that identify customer needs, evaluate solutions and build the product.
- Business SME's.
- Business specialists such as Marketing, Operations, Legal or Customer Success depending on the focus of the value stream.
- Researcher.
- Interviews customers to uncover their unmet needs and pain points.
- Designer.
- Designs experiments and prototype solutions to evaluate assumptions.
- Developer.
- Designs the architecture and iteratively builds the solution.
- Technical SME's.
- Technical specialists such as Frontend, Backend, Data Engineers or Database specialists depending on the focus of the value stream.
Product Teams
The team that defines the product and strategy and converts business objectives into product outcomes for stream teams.
- Product Manager
- Research Lead
- Design Lead
- Development Lead
- Business SME's Leads
- Technical SME's Leads
Internal Product Teams
Teams that deliver platforms or services to support and streamline the work being done by the Stream Teams. The intent is to encourage traditional service providers to think like product teams and innovate on their solutions to deliver value without blocking the Stream Teams.
- Platform
- Design System
- Finance
- Legal
- HR
Enabling Teams
Functionally aligned teams responsible for improving the performance of the individuals in Stream Teams through training, best practice templates, knowledge sharing and tools.
- ProductOps
- ResearchOps
- DesignOps
- DevEx
- DataOps
- FinOps
Ecosystem Team
The C-suite or divisional leaders that define the business vision and strategy and set objectives for product teams, internal product teams and enabling teams.
Case studies
Cross-functional teams in practice
ZeroBlockers is the result of a decade of research into how real companies are building better products in the real world.
Building
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)Empowering Continuous Delivery Culture at HMH
How Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) transformed its engineering practices by adopting continuous delivery and a DevOps culture.
Product
King GamesMaking Work Visible and Allocating Time for Tech Debt Reduction at King
How King makes work visible and allocates dedicated time to teams for paying down technical debt, ensuring sustainable development practices.
We've always worked this way!
Why change now?
Time to market is critical
Customer preferences are changing faster than ever. Getting to market quickly creates a compounding advantage.
- Better ROI.
- Most features fail to deliver the expected value. Removing the stage gate handovers avoids locking in scope and lets teams iterate until they get the solution right.
- Quicker time to money.
- Removing the handoffs and approvals that slow down teams lets them move faster and get products to market quicker.
- More innovation.
- Tapping into the diverse viewpoints of the different functional experts results in more diverse solution options and better outcomes.