2020 Australia & New Zealand
Product Teams Report
With insights from Cogent, tech leaders, and 73 respondents representing 53 organisations, it’s designed to be a valuable, no-BS tool to help you navigate product team delivery, and guide improvements for your team.
A guide by teams, for teams.
Let’s dive in.
WHAT'S INSIDE
The 2020 Australia and New Zealand Product Teams Report includes:
Insights
Insights from CEOs, Founders, developers, designers and product managers representing 53 organisations.
Recommendations
Actionable advice to help navigate product team delivery and improvements.
Benchmarking
Take an inside look at ‘how other people do it‘, and get a sense of how your team stacks up.
Download the full report to read the detailed breakdown.
How do other people do it?
That’s the question we get asked most at Cogent.
We’ve worked on over 100 different digital products loved by millions of users, ranging from small mental health apps to multinational unicorns. This gives us a unique view into how different teams organise themselves to deliver products to market.
We see commonalities of high-performing tech teams, but we haven’t been able to find objective data showing why some teams thrive, while others face challenge after challenge. So, to help us answer this question with real data rather than purely our own qualitative experience, we asked product managers, developers, designers, founders, and tech CEOs to give their input via a survey.
The findings, alongside insights from Cogent and Australian tech leaders, have been collated into this report.
RESPONDENT OVERVIEW
For questions, comments or to participate in next year’s survey, please email info@cogent.co
“High performing product & tech teams are the core of all successful digital businesses, but at Cogent we see wildly varying approaches, so we decided to draw a line in the sand and get some hard data on what ‘great’ looks like.“
Mark Wells
Key Takeaways
1. Teams who can connect their work to meaningful improvements for their users are more effective.
Those who reported that their team is working well were more likely to focus on increasing user satisfaction and engagement, whereas those who answered that their team isn’t working well were more likely to focus on increasing revenue or delivering more features.
2. The most effective teams work towards common goals, recognise wins and celebrate success.
Only 20% of respondents said their product team celebrated success frequently, while 73% said they did, but only sometimes.
Those who rated their team as effective or highly effective tended to celebrate success more frequently. Conversely, not knowing when their team delivered value was a commonality of teams rated as less effective.
“We listen to our community, passionately. We combine this with our strong mission to empower the world to design. These are our north stars.“
Andrew Green
3. Teams without focus are less likely to know if they've delivered value and don't collaborate as well.
When asked what they’re primarily focused on, 30% of respondents felt that their priorities were thinly spread across all the answer options.
The majority of these teams didn’t know when they’d created value (64%) and had management or internal shout outs (45%) as their principal measure of value achieved.
This contrasts with highly effective teams, who were likely to be working towards a common goal (93%) and measure success quantitatively. They were also more likely to believe their work was contributing to achieving their organisation’s strategy (100%).
4. Remote working isn’t as bad as you might think.
Almost half (49%) of all respondents found remote working more productive than working in-person, and only 18% found it less productive.
Similarly, 70% of respondents indicated that working from home has had no impact on the delivery frequency of feature improvements, and 20% even said that feature releases happen more frequently as a result of working from home.
“We’re very passionate about making sure that everyone can do everything. There’s no single point of failure, we don’t have job titles and we don’t have specific roles.’’
Dom Pym
Download the full 40-page report
