# How to Scale Your Product/Tech Organization Without Sacrificing Your Agility: transcript

Automatic transcript of the published podcast audio. Recognition errors are possible. Speakers are unlabeled; do not attribute a passage to Yuval or a guest without checking the audio.

Episode: https://yuvalyeret.com/scaling-ai-podcast/how-to-scale-your-producttech-organization-without-sacrificing-your-agility/
Source RSS GUID: substack:post:176412102
Source: published Riverside RSS audio enclosure
Transcription: faster-whisper base.en, English

## Transcript

[00:00:00] This becomes harder and harder as the organization grows and has even more

[00:00:06] dependencies across even more groups where it seems like meaningful things

[00:00:14] require everybody to be involved and everything is a project as they scale,

[00:00:19] as they add more and more teams, as they add more and more product lines,

[00:00:23] as they start to do more and more complex things.

[00:00:26] A lot of the times they hit this class seal in which they're wondering where

[00:00:31] if we lost our ability to be a product lab, we've become a future factory,

[00:00:36] we've become a project driven organization and they hit this wall where

[00:00:41] it's either we bring in strong program management capabilities, we give up on

[00:00:49] being a product organization, having the startup nature that we benefited from in

[00:00:54] the beginning, everything gets stuck. The product operating model essentially

[00:01:00] tries to provide an alternative to this approach. If we look at what we're seeing

[00:01:06] here, this sort of stalled product organization where there's very little

[00:01:12] work that happens in those empowered product teams and more and more of the

[00:01:17] work is happening in the future factory and even across multiple future factories

[00:01:22] into organization. What we want, if you think about it like a flipped pyramid,

[00:01:28] where most of the work is in that feature factory, very little, is at the base which

[00:01:34] should be where most of the work is in empowered product teams, we want to essentially

[00:01:39] flip that pyramid. In a healthy product organization, we want the percentage of

[00:01:45] work that happens in empowered product teams to be much higher. We want to see

[00:01:52] most of the work happening in empowered teams that are aligned around outcomes,

[00:01:58] are able to deliver these valuable outcomes with minimal dependencies and

[00:02:03] steer with evidence. These teams can own the script but the key point is they're

[00:02:09] empowered to take ownership of that area and deliver product outcomes that drive

[00:02:16] business impact in that area. In order to create as many of those themes as

[00:02:21] possible, we often need different types of teams. We often need platforms, enabling

[00:02:29] teams, internal products that reduce the cognitive overload, that reduce the

[00:02:34] amount of stuff that each one of those empowered product teams needs to know,

[00:02:39] teams that own our mobile platform, our key, even those internal products should act

[00:02:47] as empowered product teams. They're empowered to build the platform or the know-how

[00:02:54] that ideally reduces the dependency on them and empowers those product teams to

[00:03:00] run on their own as much of the time as possible. The goal of these platform teams

[00:03:06] is to create a healthy pyramid where we're able to push as much of the work as

[00:03:12] possible into the strong base of the pyramid which is those empowered product

[00:03:17] teams. There would always be some work that requires dependencies. It's unrealistic to

[00:03:24] expect that everything will happen in those teams. Know how to work with the work

[00:03:28] that cuts across multiple teams using a product approach. So even when we have a

[00:03:34] product group, we need to figure out ways to enable this team of teams to act as an

[00:03:44] empowered product group. They should be discovering and delivering value. They as

[00:03:48] well should be oriented around outcomes, around a metric that matters that we want

[00:03:53] to move the needle on. And yet again, as we're managing these empowered product

[00:03:59] groups, we want to discover ways and explore ways to descale, to take some of the

[00:04:06] work. Maybe there's a repeating theme of dependencies, a repeating style of

[00:04:12] dependencies that continuously appears and is a headache. How could we do

[00:04:19] something by reorganizing our teams, our product apology, or creating a platform,

[00:04:26] so that we can move some of these work further into the base of the pyramid back

[00:04:32] to being an empowered teams.