Building from the scratch: a perspective for the Product Strategy & Ops career
Product Management, Product Design, Engineering and Data are the disciplines that make up QuintoAndar’s Product & Technology team. If the scope of this team were a spectrum, it would be possible to visualize two well-defined regions: one focused on the construction of the products themselves (or ‘what’); another focused on organizational development initiatives (or ‘how’). Here at QuintoAndar, the responsibility for the ‘how’ belongs to the Product Strategy & Ops team, of which I am part. In the last months we had the opportunity to discuss and develop a way of looking at this career and the professionals who work in it. I want to use this text to present the way we have been working here.
What does organizational development mean to us?
When talking about organizational development, it is possible to have different approaches: processes, culture, among others. Our preferred view is one that has three major goals: 1) happier people, 2) better people and 3) more efficient teams. From this context, the question arises: who is the professional who works in organizational development as described above? What education, what training and skill set are needed for the role?
What does it take to do what we do?
Our team was formed in early 2022 and since then we have been involved in different initiatives, from supporting the Product & Technology team in the planning processes, to creating programs focused on education, development and customer centricity. Ability to lead, systemic vision, change management, planning and collaboration are essential skills to do our job well. This is where our diversity of repertoires makes a difference. I am proud to say that our team has, in addition to the skills I mentioned above, some ‘superpowers’: to connect the dots, to work at different levels, to communicate well and to organize chaos.
But not everything is resolved.
How to design the Strategy & Ops career?
As I said, the Product & Technology team is made up of consolidated disciplines. However, at times, these seemed to be the only possible growth options for the people on our team. And we don’t agree with that. This role is unique and demands a lot of attention. This career cannot be just a step to other careers. How to reinforce these characteristics and superpowers? How to create a specific career for this scope? How to show the possible paths between the different trails? We are trying to answer these questions with three actions:
1. Competency mapping, working both with regard to the individual, and in formalizing the competencies needed to perform the role
2. Career structure, defining levels, scopes, knowledge and responsibilities for acting in Strategy & Ops
3. Career planning, using a framework that includes individual competencies and goals so that each person can develop
Part 1: Competency mapping
The first part of the work consists of mapping the team’s competencies. But not just those directly related to the scope of work. We want to look at this more broadly. Adapting this model presented by Jason Mesut, we intend to look at 3 layers of competences:
- Primary skills: practices expected to perform a role (for example, Strategy & Ops)
- Secondary skills: practices that are related to background and experience (linked to technical training)
- Foundation skills: fundamentals, useful throughout the entire career (e.g. writing well or public speaking)
With a well-defined competency map and understanding how each of the people on the team is in relation to this, we will be able to move forward.
Part 2: Career structure
QuintoAndar already has a robust career matrix, which served as a starting point for designing the Strategy & Ops career. Our job here is to understand what each of the levels that will exist includes. For this step, we used the levels framework presented by Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner. The attributes that we will consider for this are:
- Scope: what kind of context the work covers
- Skills: the mix of required competencies
- Knowledge and Complexity: technical or tacit knowledge
- Autonomy and Decision Making: degree of autonomy required
- Interaction and Influence: breadth of influence and interaction network
With this, we will have a description of each of the existing positions and levels in the Strategy & Ops career.
A bonus is the possibility to contribute to building the Program Manager career at QuintoAndar (but that’s a topic for another text).
Part 3: Career Planning
The last part of the work does not directly impact the construction of the career itself, but it is extremely important as a tool for people management and individual development. Our intention here is, based on the skills and career that we have designed, to support the development of the people on our team, building a career plan that will consider the individual goals and career moves that each one intends to make.
This is an ongoing initiative that will certainly evolve as we implement our ideas.
I hope to be able to tell you soon what we've learned on this journey.
