The purpose of a product team is to drive customer outcomes and business outcomes. They are not a feature factory and do not strictly follow a product roadmap. 

Regardless of the organization reporting structure, an effective product team is cross-functional:  product management, product design, product analytics, product strategy, product engineering, product marketing, and product-adjacent teams. 

A thumb rule for a product-adjacent team is one that has “product” in its job title, for example product documentation, product training, and product support. Product marketing is unique in that sometimes it reports to product and other times to marketing. 

A product team can be thought of as the core product team and product-adjacent teams. Core product teams typically comprise product management, product design, product analytics, and product strategy. 

EPD is a common acronym to refer to Engineering, Product, and Design. A nice acronym is AMPED.

Finally, driving customer outcomes often simplifies to driving active usage of the product, so long as usage is shown to be correlated with the outcomes that users value and outcomes that buyers value. The product team needs to show this correlation, through research-backed case studies as an example, and empower their users to show this value to their buyer/business stakeholders.

Driving business outcomes at startups often simplifies to Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and ARR Growth that is influenced by the product because startups need to grow. Another business outcome metric is the Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost ratio (LTV/CAC). Many other metrics may be relevant for the product depending on the economic environment and the stage or situation of the business: Dollar Retention (gross and net), Margin (gross and free cash flow), Sales Efficiency (magic number, CAC payback), and Business Efficiency (rule of 40, APE ARR per employee, and cash burn).

Last but not the least, “not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts” is an adage to remember. This is especially true for core platform investments, for which clear and convincing reasons are needed to invest and the delivered output may be the desired outcome.

PS: Check out more articles on building products. I write to pay it forward and to clarify my thinking.