I’ve posted many times about what it takes to turn technology into product. I’ve written about how product requires standardization, polish, self-serve and 15 other things that make it useful, scalable, and delightful.

However, it’s also important to know what it takes to build a *team* that can build products.

Many inexperienced founders think it just takes a few engineers.

This is generally incorrect.

A complete, fully funded product team typically includes...

1 x product manager
1 x engineering manager
N x engineers (ideally no fewer than 2 and no more than 5 or 7)
1 x Product designer
1 x Data scientist
1 x Product Marketing Manager

Each product team should have a durable long-term mission whereby they can develop their own roadmap and momentum.

For example, they might own “Billing and Payments” or “Discovery and Search”. These missions should not be about technical architecture like “Backend” or “Mobile”.

Further, you need 1 team per product. In this case, it’s hard to define the boundaries between individual products.

As your product gets more sophisticated, each team may own more and more granular parts of the product.

For example, at the beginning a team might own the “Admin Dashboard”, but eventually that team might be broken up into many subteams (subteams are still complete teams as described above) that own individual parts of the admin dashboard.

Finally, in the beginning, and as you're building the team and business, some resources can be shared.

For example, you could have 1 PM, 1 Product Designer and/or 1 Data scientist per 2 or 3 teams. This is a way to scale the team iteratively but it is unsustainable in the long term.

If you don’t have enough people for all the products you want to build, you must cut things and focus until the team grows. Otherwise, you’ll just tread water and/or ship crappy things.