Once the organization has matured, three other teams are recommended to keep the FI/FO-Teams and the Product Owner Team productive. These teams are called the Product Portfolio Team (PPT), the Workflow Team (WFT) and the Product Service Team (PST). Let me explain these teams briefly.
The Product Portfolio Team (PPT) consolidates the individual product visions to an overall company and product portfolio vision. The team consists of the product managers of related POTs and the leads of all other teams working for this portfolio. The PPTs responsibility is to decide when to create a new team for the portfolio and which POT this team reports to. Another responsibility of the PPT is to consolidate features across different products of the same portfolio and to decide which product to end or which new product to launch.
The objective of the Workflow Team (WFT) is to build and refine the infrastructure used by the teams. They should be able to work seamlessly and as fast as possible. The Workflow Team regularly aligns with teams to find and solve difficulties they might have. The Workflow Team can negotiate specific supplier agreements in order to provide parts quickly to the teams, if physical parts are needed during the development. The Workflow Team also takes care of tools and equipment used for the development (e.g. CAD tools, Software Development Environments, Test racks, Test equipment, etc.) as well as design guidelines. Team members of the WFT are again from different disciplines and build a cross-functional unit.
I am aware that creating a Workflow Team is considered luxury in a startup condition, but it is essential for bigger companies. It is difficult to define a measure of when to establish WFTs. It depends on the business success and the maturity of the company but also on availability of resources.
The Product Service Team (PST) is needed as soon as the quantity of products in the market increases and the FO-Teams cannot continue to support customer requests directly. If they still did, no optimization on the products would be possible. As with all other teams, a cross-functional membership is needed to make Product Service Team work efficiently. When to setup a PST depends on the business success, the number of products in the market and the amount of customer support needed. Additionally, it makes sense for each PST to support a whole product portfolio instead of only one single product. Again, this depends on the product itself and the real support needed.