Organizational Design For Product Companies

A good and effective organizational structure enables an organization to function more effectively and with greater efficiency. Also organizational structure differs from industry to industry and per Edwards Demming, organizational design depends not only on what the organization is doing today but also upon what the organization will be doing tomorrow.
 

For software product organizations, the organization can be divided along 3 major tracks: the marketing track (market research & marketing analysis), the product management and design track (information architecture, interaction design, visual design & usability engineering) and the actual product development track (architecture, engineering, project management, SaaS delivery & even operations).  In product companies, there is also often conflict between the marketing/product managers group and the product development group. While the former typically pushes for early releases, the other focuses on the technical integrity of the product more than anything.  Therefore conflict is built into the design of the organization itself and the absence of conflict may actually give rise to sub-optimal results.
 

Startup organizations are a little different in that they are typically smaller in size and that the personalities and individual skill sets involved actually matter more than the organization structure itself. So therefore roles and responsibilities here are even more important than the right organization structure. In fact, with good intentions aka strong organization culture, any organizational structure is workable and the organization can be designed around the strengths of individual leaders.
 

An organization template I have seen for organizations with focus on innovation and problem solving (as it is with product organizations) is team based. The management style is participative, goals are set mutually and the reward system is in the form of a team bonus. In fact, organizations that go as far as to allow their employees to self-organize and form teams have actually become much more effective and efficient. One company I know of goes as far as to have uniform mobile workstations with state-of-the-art networked computers. People here are always mobile and their office has become an environment that maximizes collaboration and execution.  Remember the ‘skunk works’ concept whose origins lies in at Lockheed Burbank? This concept is now widely used in product organizations and describes an organization that is given a high degree of autonomy and is unhampered by bureaucracy.