How I brought a product mindset to a roles and responsibilities restructuring
An acquisition brings about big change
An EdTech company had just completed its acquisition of a smaller competitor. My client had already been seeing rapid growth in demand for its products. With the acquisition their ambitions were growing too – they planned to launch twice as many courses this year as compared to last.
For the product organization, it meant a lot of change. Previously all learning content had been delivered via third-party platforms. This acquisition reduced their reliance on those platforms. It set them up to provide higher-quality learning experiences by bringing on a proprietary learning management system (LMS) and a platform to enable hands-on training. The company would have more control over their content delivery instead of relying on the feature sets available on the market.
Product management responsibilities were scattered
Their organizational structure wasn’t set up to absorb the other team. The acquisition grew the product and engineering team by 120%, to about 100 employees. The larger organization brought new communication difficulties. They became concerned about their ability to deliver on their goals.
As their CPO phrased it: “We had product management in three different areas. We had some people just focused on exams. Some people just focused on learning. Some people just focused on solutions. So we had different ways of doing product management and no group focused on operations. We’d outgrown our ad-hoc organizational design.” As they began working on their 2024 launches, the CPO realized that they were going to struggle to hit their goals with their current structure.
It was time to move to an organizational design that could support their larger size and greater ambitions. They brought me in to define a new path forward for the product development organization.
Creating a collaborative organizational redesign
I started by conducting a product operations assessment. I talked to 22 different employees across the company and ran a survey with 64 people. This provided data about the biggest stressors in their current workflows.
The next step was to document the current situation and open the door to solutions – I put together a process map and ran 3 workshops with the team to jointly ideate on how to solve their key challenges. We focused on handoffs between product, design, and development; the confusion marketing and sales had about when products were coming to market; and the confusion around how new ideas got into the development pipeline.
The CPO reflected on how he felt at that point:
“I wasn’t sure how all that grassroots team feedback was going to work. But you were able to synthesize that and bring it up. It helped make the case for change and it helped solidify people’s trust in the process and their acceptance of a new way of doing things because they participated in the change.”
Through the assessment and workshop we understood the challenges and where there was appetite for change. I proposed different options to the leadership team that had a high likelihood of success.
We came to the realization that some roles overlapped, while other important functions weren’t part of any role. Given those gaps and redundancies, the best solution was going to be consolidating roles. I proposed a new organizational structure for the leadership team to refine. Meanwhile, I planned and coordinated the rollout.
I made sure there was sufficient infrastructure in place by building out a wide range of materials. This was a large change, which meant putting in additional layers of infrastructure to help it succeed.
| Infrastructure | Type |
| Consolidated and redesigned product management role | People |
| Updated reporting structure to streamline communication | People |
| Playbook for all new roles | Documentation |
| Designed how the new roles would work together | Workflows |
| Process map of the new workflows | Documentation |
| Weekly group coaching sessions for people being moved into new roles | Training |
| Communications strategy and plan for the launch | Documentation |
| New documentation templates for product launches | Templates |
To sell the change to the team, I pulled in quotes from the discovery workshops I had led earlier. We wanted to solidify the feeling that this was a collaborative change with ample input from across the organization.
Building a greater sense of ownership
The CPO enthused about the change: “The team feels less overwhelmed, more enthusiastic for their work. They also feel more empowered to take ownership and make changes to make things happen. They’re not waiting for someone on another team to tell them what to do.”
He now feels very good about doubling the number of product launches this year: “With the improvement of our processes, it’s going to also lead to better products and smoother, faster development cycles.”
We were able to create positive organizational change by applying a product development process: identifying the problems to solve, running in-depth user research with employees, deep understanding of the problems, creating buy-in and collecting ideas from the whole organization, and a thoughtful implementation of infrastructure.
The solution we implemented was adaptable, created greater role clarity, and improved cross-functional collaboration. By backing it up with training, documentation, and other support structures the changes were more durable over the long-term.
Just as products need care and support after launch, I’ve been helping the leadership team to refine and iterate on our solution. More important, the team has continued to deliver quality learning experiences to students around the world.
