How to Structure a Marketplace Team for Success

A market team is composed of four main pillars: marketing, operations, product, and engineering. Each of these departments performs tasks that are essential for market success. Marketing creates the value proposition, brand, definition of the market, list of keywords, content, and manages social media. This type of team management is similar to product-based management, but instead of creating departments based on products, the organization creates departments based on the company's audience. For example, individuals, other small businesses, and governments can be audiences and potential customers of a web design company. Different marketing methods will work better for each audience, so the company will create divisions.

Once you have something minimal but adorable, you can start focusing on the other side of the market. Unlike online stores that sell goods from a warehouse, marketplace services aggregate offers from suppliers of goods or services in one place. It is key to define and communicate a clear vision and objectives so that all team members know the importance of their contribution to market success. When you expand to omnichannel e-commerce, you'll need to monitor hundreds of similar ads per market to keep track of your own sales. A talented virtual assistant can carry many roles from keeping the entire team on the right track to being the first member of the customer service or marketing team you bring on board.

When your engineering team is small enough to be managed by you (8 to 12, depending on how masochistic you are), you need to focus on supply. You never completely ignore either party; you just end up drastically changing the priority structure based on the resources of your team and the market economy that are present in your product. Instead, put your application on the supply side into maintenance mode and start over with the demand side of the market. If your market is new, your supply customers can no longer sell what they are now trying to sell in your market. For medium and large e-commerce companies, the management team will focus less on day-to-day and more on improving sales performance, expanding business, implementing new sales channels, improving strategies and managing the team.

Choosing a different niche with focusing on one type of product or service (for Airbnb it's the apartment rental service) allows startups in the market to work better and be more mobile than the competition. Before joining Share, I was working on product growth & on major teams in the market such as Netflix, Facebook and Uber. At least I have enough experience in how I have seen successful (and not successful) companies scale their engineering organizations for markets.

Well-structured marketplace teams are essential for success in today's competitive markets. It is important to define a clear vision and objectives so that all team members understand their contribution to market success. It is also important to focus on supply when engineering teams are small enough to be managed by one person. Additionally, choosing a different niche with focusing on one type of product or service can help startups in the market work better and be more mobile than their competition.