71: John Cutler - How to structure a product organization
PRODUCTEA with Leah, Growth & Senior Leadership
Enabling Constraints in Product Development
💬 "I'm obsessed with these enabling constraints. So I collect them all from different companies."
- Throwing more people at a problem often makes things slower, not faster, creating more tech debt.
- One company's constraint is to limit teams to three people: a designer, a product manager, and an engineer.
- Another constraint: set a maximum number of open stories per engineer to manage work in progress.
- Six weeks is a common and effective time box for projects, providing enough time for meaningful progress without being too long like a quarter.
- Many software projects don't need more than six weeks for significant advancement.
Key takeaway: Counterintuitively, constraints, like limiting team size or time, can enhance product development speed and focus.
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