How to build better teams
Build product teams that own, align, and deliver
Finding an autonomous and aligned team is not as common as it seems. Should teams make decisions on their own? Or is it the leader who must set the direction? While the answer may sound simple, in practice, it’s not because autonomy without direction can easily turn into dispersion. So, how can you lead large teams with both autonomy and alignment?
To answer this question, today we won’t talk about mission, vision, or roadmaps. We’ll talk about two practical principles that can transform the way we structure our teams:
Good product decisions can only be made when user needs are deeply understood.
A product is the sum of its functional areas, and each one solves a specific user need.
See the connection?
Imagine a digital product. Its functional areas might include: account creation and profile setup, checkout, subscription and payment management, customer support... Each serves a clear purpose. Each contains multiple screens, flows, and components that must work together seamlessly. Account creation wouldn’t work without a registration flow, right?
If each functional area is autonomous and serves a purpose, what would happen if we made different teams responsible for each of those areas? Something interesting would happen: each team would start thinking in terms of real user problems, not just scattered tasks or isolated features. Because they would have:
Context, by understanding how their area impacts the entire product.
Autonomy, by knowing the ins and outs of their domain and being able to act decisively.
Alignment, because the user problem is clearly defined and shared across the organization.
This way, each team knows why it exists, what impact it must create, and how far it can go when making decisions. That’s autonomy. And it’s also alignment. And when both things happen at once, the quality of decisions, speed of development, and coherence of the final product all improve dramatically.