In case you don’t yet get our monthly Inside Cogent emails, or missed our social posts about it, we recently launched the 2021 Australia & New Zealand Product Teams Report.
This is the second year we’ve published the report, which pulls together findings from an industry-wide survey, insights from senior tech leaders, and recommendations based on our people’s own experience.
Over the past year, Cogent has worked on over 40 different product teams across Australia, New Zealand and the US, so we’ve seen… a lot.
When we ran the survey this year, our aim was to answer three key questions:
- How does leadership and strategy influence how well teams work?
- How do teams work together and with other teams to deliver business outcomes?
- How has working in a distributed way impacted those things, and will it continue to do so?
Like last year, the survey was open for three weeks and in that time, 133 people representing 100 different organisations across Australia and New Zealand contributed. We know that surveys can sometimes be a drainer – especially long ones – so we were truly blown away by the response. What was most interesting was how many open-ended responses people gave. In many open-ended questions, we had upwards of 60+ responses sharing how their team works.
One of the key takeaways of the report was the value Product Managers can bring to a product team. In this image Eadaoin, a Lead Product Manager at Cogent is workshopping client app screen designs.
We then analysed the data to pull together the findings that now sit in the report. There are four key takeaways that I won’t go into detail about in this post, but we’ve also included the findings from the majority of the questions. Every organisation and team is different, so we want you to have access to as much of the data as possible to choose what insights are most relevant to you.
Because insights without action are kinda pointless, you’ll also find recommendations from our senior developers, product managers and designers, as well as a few words of wisdom from industry leaders on what to do with this data.
As you’ll see when you read the report, two major themes are a) how working in a distributed context will continue to change how teams get stuff done, and b) the importance of communication in building connection, trust and collaboration.
The full report is designed to be a valuable, go-to resource to help you more easily navigate product team delivery, and guide improvements for your team. So whether you’re a CEO or a senior developer, a fast-growing startup or a global tech leader, these will be relevant to you.
