Accountable: The one ultimately answerable for the correct and thorough completion of the deliverable or task, the one who ensures the prerequisites of the task are met, and who delegates the work to those responsible.
Responsible: Those who do the work to complete the task
Expectations: A description of how we think this should work in practice.
Roles and Responsibilities
Product Strategy
Performing research to inform strategy
Accountable: PM
Responsible: PM
Expectations: The PM conducts market, customer, and quantitative research and synthesizes this into insights that the team can understand.
Setting team Objectives
Accountable: PM
Responsible: PM / Team
Expectations: The PM defines the Objective which is the aspirational, qualitative goal for the quarter. It’s expected that the team contributes by providing potential outcomes and providing feedback on existing objectives. Ultimately the PM gets buy-in from the team and decides which is the most important outcome for the quarter.
Defining Key Results
Accountable: PM
Responsible: PM / Team
Expectations: The PM defines the quantitative measures (KRs) that indicate if we’ve hit our Objective. It’s expected that the team contributes by helping provide relevant KRs, helping collect data on these, and providing feedback on any potential KRs. Ultimately the PM decides on which KRs are the most relevant and what is a realistic goal.
Drafting roadmap items that will contribute to team OKRs
Accountable: PM
Responsible: PM / Team
Expectations: The PM defines the roadmap items that are the best candidates for the team to hit the KRs. It’s expected that the team contributes by helping provide relevant problems, ideas, and solutions. Ultimately the PM decides on which roadmap items we commit to the quarter and in which order.
Progress reporting/tracking on OKRs
Accountable: PM / Team
Responsible: Team
Expectations: The PM ensures that we are reporting on updates to our roadmap items and the impact on our OKRs on time. The updates for each roadmap item are compiled and completed by each lead of that project.
Backlog
Prioritization: Are we working on the right things? Is this the correct order in which we should be working on these things?
Accountable: PM
Responsible: Team
Expectations: The PM ensures that we have a prioritized backlog ranked by what issues are most important for the business.
Creating issues based on feedback (internal/external) (Documentation)
Accountable: EM
Responsible: Team
Expectations: The team can and should create issues based on the feedback coming in through any channel if it is not yet documented. The EM ensures that feedback is being captured in Github.
Problem discovery
Categorizing feedback
Accountable: PM
Responsible: PM / Team
Expectations: The PM is accountable for ensuring that feedback is acquired, shared, stored, and categorized in a way that can be used to inform future decisions. This includes storing it in ProductBoard, adding any associated labels, features, and ensuring everyone knows how to do this. The team should feel empowered to add any feedback they encounter from any sources they see.
Identifying areas needing research
Accountable: PM
Responsible: Team
Expectations: The PM is accountable for identifying areas where we have gaps, risks, or assumptions on customer use of our products that need to be validated. This covers both new and existing features. The team is also encouraged to identify any customer problem or features that need validation and work with the PM / PD to make this happen.
Identifying users to talk to
Accountable: PM
Responsible: PM
Expectations: The PM is accountable for finding users that fit the criteria for our research purposes. This includes using qualitative and quantitative data to ensure we have the right users, informing internal stakeholders, scheduling interviews, and providing the right incentives to make sure they happen.
Performing user interviews
Accountable: PD
Responsible: PD
Expectations: The PD is accountable for identifying when a feature or user problem would benefit from user research during Discovery. The PD is accountable for driving and planning user research to better understand the problem space and user needs before starting on solution design.
Quantitative research
Accountable: PM
Responsible: PM / PD
Expectations: The PM is accountable for ensuring we have dashboards in place that let us proactively monitor the performance of our features against their objectives. They are also responsible for identifying when data indicates we are not hitting our objectives and taking corrective actions. The PM is also responsible for undertaking any quantitative research to find users who fit certain criteria or have performed certain actions for further research.
Synthesizing research
Accountable: PD
Responsible: PD
Expectations: The PD is accountable for aggregating all user research on a topic and summarizing this into key actionable insights.
Solution design
Creation of mockups
Accountable: PD
Responsible: PD / Team
Expectations: The PD is accountable for the creation of mockups ranging from low to high fidelity. The team is encouraged to provide feedback and suggestions to mockups when the PD has opened up mockups for review. For features where we have agreed as a team that the PD just needs to provide a final review, individuals in the team may be in charge of creating and proposing a design.
User testing with customers and users
Accountable: PD
Responsible: PD
Expectations: The PD is accountable for ensuring that user testing/interviews are happening for features that would benefit from additional data and/or validation. Anyone on the team can recommend that additional testing/research be done on designs.
Technical feasibility assessment
Accountable: EM
Responsible: Team
Expectations: The team is responsible for providing guidance on the technical feasibility of issues before and while the PD is exploring solutions during the Discovery phase. The EM is ultimately accountable for the PM/PD receiving proper support on technical feasibility during the product development process.
Financial viability (Pricing and packaging)
Accountable: PM
Responsible: PM
Expectations: The PM is accountable for collaborating with sales and other stakeholders in any conversations pertaining to the pricing and packaging of features owned by the team.
Iteration planning
Determining iteration goal
Accountable: PM
Responsible: EM / Team
Expectations: PM is accountable for making sure the teams iterations are aligned with high-level goals
Providing guidance on prioritization
Accountable: PM
Responsible: Team
Expectations: PM is accountable for ensuring we align with high-level company goals. The EM is expected to work closely with PM to ensure we progress towards it and inform on technical details. The team should be proposing issues and priorities for an iteration.
Capacity planning
Accountable: EM
Responsible: Team
Expectations: The EM is accountable for making sure we balance the roadmap items and passive items (backlog/tech debt) with engineering capacity
Ticket refinement (scoping, measures of success)
Accountable: EM
Responsible: PM
Expectations: The EM are accountable for ensuring that GitHub issues have all the required information for engineers to pick up and get started.
Dependency management / logistics
Accountable: PM
Responsible: EM
Expectations: On simple cross-team engineering dependencies, the EM working with other EMs generally work just fine. On larger roadmap impacting items, the PM should lead the coordination efforts as they are accountable for the corresponding teams’ roadmap.
Iteration Execution
Check-in with engineers on capacity
Accountable: EM
Responsible: EM / PM
Expectations: The EM is accountable for ensuring that engineers have enough on their plate. Changes to the iteration/roadmap should be communicated as fast as possible to ensure constant progress towards our goals.
Expectations: The EM is accountable to ensure everyone is delivering on their promises.
Progress reporting
Accountable: EM
Responsible: EM / Engineers
Expectations: The EM is responsible for communicating technical progress reports across the organization to communicate changes made once an iteration has been completed.
Support
Triaging of new support items
Accountable: EM
Responsible: Team
Expectations: The EM is accountable for ensuring new support issues are given the right priority and added to the correct milestone.
Go to market
Sales enablement
Accountable: PM
Responsible: PM
Expectations: The PM is accountable for ensuring that the sales team understands the key value propositions, how it compares to competitors’ features, answers to any FAQ, and any likely objections and associated responses that might come up. They are also accountable for ensuring that sales know any details around pricing and packaging as well as the process for getting a customer live with a feature.
Support enablement
Accountable: PM
Responsible: EM
Expectations: The PM is accountable for ensuring that the support team understands how a feature works, likely issues that might occur, and how to identify and troubleshoot the feature.
User doc ownership/management
Accountable: PM
Responsible: Team
Expectations: The PM is accountable for ensuring that any user-facing documentation is correct and actively maintained.
Marketing enablement
Accountable: PM
Responsible: PM
Expectations: The PM is accountable for ensuring that PMM understands the value proposition of the features we’re building, keeping them up to date with progress, and agreeing on created collateral and launch dates.
Operational Things
Hiring
Accountable: EM
Responsible: EM
Expectations: Defining hiring requirements, creating the job specification, sourcing candidates, making sure we have the best hiring process.
Career development and performance management of engineers
Accountable: EM
Responsible: EM
Expectations: EM is responsible for the career development of all the engineers. The PM proactively sharing feedback regarding areas of growth and observations is highly encouraged.
Team morale
Accountable: EM
Responsible: EM
Expectations: Beyond the team rituals and social events, the triad is expected to bring candid customer/external feedback/data to remind people why we’re doing the things we’re doing and keep us real.
