Structuring a Product Team

We are building Version 2 of SkilledUp Life using our volunteers (SkilledUp Lifers). Our team includes a full-time lead developer, me and a growing number of SkilledUp Lifers.

Each of the SkilledUp Lifer commits 3 hours per day, Monday to Friday, for 60 Volunteer Days over 3+ months. They cannot earn through SkilledUp Life. Instead, they gain career-defining experience and skills to improve their career prospects.

SkilledUp Life sits between the education and job markets, never venturing into either of them. Experience gained through us has led many past colleagues to land paid jobs, including at prestigious companies such as Lenovo and Deloitte.

Let's take a look at our product team. When designing a team, you can take a top-down (starting with the Head of Product first) or bottom-up strategy (starting from designers and developers first). We chose a mixed strategy.

Current team structure:

• Head of Product: Me

• Deputy Head of Product: Jerry from the UK - he is on his second Volunteer Term with us.

• 2 x Product Managers: One of them being Jerry and Yulia from Russia.

• 3 x UI/UX Designers: Catherine, in her second Term from the Netherlands, leads with Vern from Malaysia (also on her second Term) with Xiaohuan from the UK. Both Vern and Xiaohuan are Chinese. Our Israeli colleague, who just completed a Term career transitioned from product management to design with our help and landed a paid job. Yei was our first awesome UI/UX designer from China, who managed to use the experience to land a job with Lenovo.

• 3 x Back-end Developers: Asinsala is full-time and leads the team. She is my trusted lieutenant. She is supported by 2 from the UK - Yasiru (Sri Lankan) and Oluwatobi (Nigerian)

• 6 x Front-end Developers: Dennis from Kenya, Nathaniel from Ghana, Christian from Indonesia, Lessa from Brazil, Tayyab from the UK and Ademola (Nigerian) from the UK.

• 1 x QA - Pallavi from UK.

We are looking for a lot more skilled volunteers to join our team. If you are interested, do get in touch once you have signed up on SkilledUp Life and have built the profile fully. We are keen to help more people.

Peerlist is full of talented Indie Hackers and Tech Entrepreneurs building early-stage tech startups. You too, can build and maintain a product team once subscribed. Do get in touch if you are interested.