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Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the product welcome to the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. It's time for this week's Dear Melissa, Every Friday I answer all of your product management questions right here on the podcast. If you have a question for me, go to dearMelissa.com and let me know what it is. Your dev team is shipping faster than ever, but your tools? They are still stuck in 2012. Monday.com's dev platform changes that. With Monday Dev you get fully customizable workflows, real time visibility across your development lifecycle, and seamless GitHub integration without admin bottlenecks slowing you down. Whether you're working in the platform or straight from your ide, Monday Dev keeps your teams aligned, focused and moving fast with AI powered context built in. Go to Monday.comdev and see how your team can build without limits. Let's dive in Dear Melissa, Product management is always advocated as a trifecta of engineering, design and business. However, what if the company also has an R and D department or research department? How would you set them up for success in this model, if at all? In this specific case, the R&D department works more with academia. They write academic papers, they present at science conferences, but they barely contribute anything to the app itself besides some algorithms here and there. Unfortunately, the leaders of the company think that this is where innovation is coming from for the product, and it's a must have department. In my humble opinion, there is no dedicated r&d department needed if you empower your engineering team the way it's meant to be in a modern product company. Okay, so I've seen R and D in many different organizations, but there's different ways that they show up. One side of R and D is that they're content experts. So in this case they're kind of like experts on the content that's going into the system, but also the market perspective. So they're out there kind of being, you know, forward facing people in academic circles or in places where they're kind of providing the science, let's say, behind what your application does so give you a good example. In healthcare, for example, if you're building a product that has high pharmaceutical components or something like that, you might hire some pharmacists who are really prominent in the industry and they might be advising on how you do your work and how you innovate around it and the trends that are coming out. They're not usually building the software, they're more like advisory roles. So I've definitely seen R and D in those situations. I've seen them in education, for instance, when they're brought in more as educators who have taught those subject matters before. And maybe they're doing content development, so they're kind of creating the way that you teach courses. And the product management team is figuring out how those surfaces up through software. So the R and D team here is more content experts. They also might be a little market facing, so they might be going out and studying as well where the opportunities are in the market. In all those cases, I think R and D is really bad name for them. It's just what I've seen people name R and D people before. They're not necessarily just R and D. They're more like content experts, subject matter experts. And I think it's better to put some kind of label around them that's more about either product marketing or, you know, market expert or content experts, stuff like that. But I have seen them labeled R and D. It's interesting. So you, you kind of want to piece through. What does that actually mean then in other organizations, which I think is what you're getting at, they're highly technical people that are more like data scientists and experts from a technical perspective on building the algorithms, on doing the data science behind it, on building the tech, let's say. And those situations, yeah, they're kind of a little bit more like a platform team. They're not just R and D over here doing some sciency stuff. And when I do see R and D kind of be siloed in these organizations, what happens is that they're not connected back to the customer value piece. They're kind of given free reign to just experiment or do academic type technology work. Typically these companies too are started by somebody who's heavy in the technology space in that kind of R and D, scientific, academic approach. So they give them the room to go research and come up with new things. But there's usually a strategy disconnect between what we actually want to bring to customers and what those teams are prioritizing and doing. So I always advocate for giving teams some space to do some of that work, to do some of that research work and bring those into the algorithms. I think that we should be treating them more like part of the platform team and the platform team does so. So much scientific thinking about how do we build better algorithms. We just need to give people some space for that. So one, it sounds like they're a little bit of an evangelist role and they're trying to promote technology at your company and promote the way that you build technology, which is great. That's a fantastic role to have. But I don't think they're super separate or special compared to other engineers on the team. And I do agree that you want to empower the rest of the engineering in the organization as well. PMs make great investors. If you're a product leader curious about angel investing, check out Angel Squad is where over 2,000 operators from Google, Meta and Apple learn to invest in high growth startups alongside Hustle Fun. I've been a member for years and highly recommend it. They've given me a few 30 day guest passes to share, so head over to Go Angelsquad Co Melissa and make sure to act fast as the passes are limited. So if I'm in your company, what I think you want to make apparent here is that there could be a disconnect between what the R and D team is doing and what we actually have to launch to customers to make money. So we want to make sure that we're prioritizing all of our work around what the customer value is and bringing that back into the work that the R and D team is doing because they might be kind of spinning their wheels or doing a bunch of work that's not going to help you achieve business value. Some of that work might be great down the road, but I think you have to ask yourself or your product leader has to ask themselves, how much time do we actually want to spend on that and how big are we? Right? Like if, if I'm a small company, I might not be able to afford a ton of time on that scientific research stuff. But if I'm a big company like Facebook, you could spend, you could have multiple teams doing that, right? Like you could have tons of people. It's not going to break the bank. What size are you? How do we incorporate R and D? How are they actually connected? The customer value flow? Those are some, some big questions to bring up and that's what I would be asking if I was the leaders in your company. So I hope that helps. And again, if people are listening to this and you say, hey, I got a question I would love Melissa to answer. Go to dear melissa.com let me know what it is. We will be back next Wednesday with another amazing guest on the Product Thinking Podcast. Make sure that you like and subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. We will see you next time.