This week we released our fourth annual Study of Product Team Performance. As always, we gleaned a wide range of valuable insights into what enables some teams to overachieve and others to flounder. This year’s study takes a close look at several focus areas.
High Performance Focus Areas
The first focal area is product team performance. In other words, what product teams say about their own performance. This year we continue to see improvement in the data indicating that product teams are gradually increasing their levels of performance. In fact, since we began examining product team performance in 2012 the number of respondents indicating consistency of execution reached an all time high this year. We attribute this increase to improved hiring conditions and the slow down in mass layoffs that adversely effected product teams during the great recession.
We also take a close look at product development adoption rates and perceptions about each methods impact upon profitability. We have four years of data that illustrates how Agile, Blended, Waterfall and Kanban have each fared over this time period.
In the second section we examine product management performance. There were quite a few surprises in this section. Our market research covers:
– Accountability metrics organizations are using to determine product management’s success or failure
– Time spent in the field talking to customers
– Backlog ownership
– Product management’s role in innovation
– Stand up frequency
In the third section we explore UX’s (user experiences) rise on product teams. Last year UX emerged as a factor in our regression analysis for the very first time. So this year we delve into UX reporting relationships, where UX should report to be most effective, and how user experience professionals are spending their time.
Regression Analysis
Finally, we uncovered four new factors that directly correlate with high performance on product teams.
– Making and sticking with decisions
– Stand up frequency
– Speed at overcoming unforeseen obstacles
– Active user experience engagement with product management
Over the last four years we have identified approximately twenty factors that contribute to high performance. Successful product development is complex and the more factors that product teams have effectively integrated into their activities the higher the likelihood a team will outperform its peers.
Get Your Copy Today
If you would like to download a copy of our latest market research you can do so by clicking here. Additionally, we just released new infographics covering product management and user experience as well as product teams.
Advancing the Profession of Product Management™
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