What does Great Product Leadership look like?
As a product manager, I want to understand great product leadership, so I can both identify and be a GREAT Product Leader
True leaders in this world are rare.
They’re even more rare in a corporate setting.
One strong belief presented in this newsletter is that personal incentives are the primary driver of all individual actions. People want to make more money, do less work, be treated with respect, and not be caught holding the bag when things go wrong.
Individuals are inherently self-interested. If you ever read through peer reviews with a bonus pool up for grabs, you’ll be shocked at how quickly someone will throw their co-worker under the bus if there is personal gain to be had.
God forbid a big client has a bad experience and leaves. The blame hot potato gets shot around quicker than a Steph Curry jump shot.
When the stakes are high - the knives come out.
Within this mess of cold-blooded capitalism, you’ll occasionally come across someone built different.
They’re confident in their decisions and their confidence becomes contagious.
When you interact with them, no matter how great the challenge discussed, you walk away thinking this is going to work.
When things go wrong, these are the first person you try to call. You do so as they can cooly stare down an impossible situation, then figure a way to wiggle out.
You follow their lead not because you have to, but because you want to.
These are the types of people who shape the winners of the world.
Understanding what great leadership looks like allows you to pick the winners of the future.
Understanding how great leaders operate teaches you winning behaviors to emulate yourself.
Software development is a team sport. To achieve great heights requires people of immense talent to work together. If you can become a Product Leader that others want to follow, you can conquer the world.
What Makes a True Product Leader?
Having a Strong Product Vision
Product leadership starts with a product vision. It’s the answer to the question what the hell are we all trying to build?
Someone has to be the final decision maker on what is and is not the product.
At startups, this individual is typically the CEO. At larger companies, it becomes the CPO. In engineering-led organizations, it can even be the CTO.
Whoever it is, they tend to be the most powerful person in an organization. (Look what happened with Sam Altman and OpenAI)
Vision starts with a simple and digestible north start.
Famously, the iPod was 1000 songs in your pocket, coined by none other than Steve Jobs.
Travis Kalinick at Uber wanted to provide transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere, for everyone.
Kevin Systrom at Instagram created a platform that allowed users to capture and share moments of their lives through photos and videos.
Each of these massively successful products was set forth by a singular visionary - leading a youthful bad of misfits wanting to shape the future.
Tech companies are founded by individuals with powerful visions of the future. As the company evolves, so does the product. One product becomes many. Functionality expands. New verticals are included in the core offering.
The most effective organizations have someone with their finger on the pulse who decides the product’s next steps. As a company grows more sprawling with greater product offerings, this becomes a multitude of product leaders each owning a part of the product suite. (IE. Facebook vs. Instagram vs. Whats App at Meta).
A leader rallies everyone around a singular vision of the product. Without a single coherent, everyone starts building in different directions. The result is a plethora of disjointed siloed products with an embarrassing lack of integration among them.
This opens the door up for competition to swoop with a more holistic experience
A Great Product Leader is Someone to Learn From
Where Product Leaders also stand to transform an organization by that they raise the bar for everyone else in the product org.
They write the best specs. They know the client's persona like the back of their hand. They innately know the capabilities of the platform and can speak to it to any random stakeholder in any context.
These individuals can deliver the output of 4-5 Product Managers. They move quickly and know which corners can be cut, and which can’t. They hone in on the exact core of the issue after just one call discussing it.
The first true product leader I got to work with was my first product management boss. Watching them work has remained my greatest product education to date. They’d take any issue or pain point and immediately ask the most critical questions necessary to understand what was going on.
They could, on the fly, define all the component elements of development required to get a solution. (This PM was an ex developer themselves, and intimately familiar with the data architecture.)
They’re user stories we’re used company-wide as an example of what quality product work looked like.
They led by example. I still to this day, ask myself “What would my old boss do?”
Our weekly one-on-one became the foundational education for me as a PM. I would keep a running document on any issues/confusion I faced a given week.
Our meeting would begin, and I would run through each of my questions one by one.
It was an exercise of downloading my boss’s brain into mine.
I’ve long moved on from that role, but that brain download is something I found all Great Product Leaders are willing to do. If you bring a product-related issue to them, they’ll listen intently, more than willing to recommend how they would approach the issue.
If you get this opportunity, take their advice, and execute. Show you listen, and they will be even more eager to help you out the next time around. These types of individuals love to help in instances where their words make a difference.
Prove you have follow-through, and you will develop an ally and mentor who will take your career to new heights.
A Product Leader Rally’s the Troops
In software development, it’s not only about The Work or The Code.
Until robots replace us all, people will remain a critical factor in delivering the future of software technology.
The problem with people is, well, they are people.
Programming Break:
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