Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

by Richard Banfield

“One, there’s always an initial set of things for any product. We identified very early on that there were a couple things that absolutely had to exist. Otherwise, nothing else would matter.”

Either it’s a core item or it’s a critical element that other core items need in order to exist.

If everyone knows there’s a place where their idea will be stored, considered, and not discarded, then most of the time these conversations are much, much easier.

To know what to prioritize, a leader must operate at the level of solving problems rather than at the level of functionality.

“People who really want to work with their counterparts. The designers are engineering-focused, the engineers are design-focused, and everybody’s product-focused.”

It is far more important to find someone with deep experience in an area where help is needed, and who brings the right attitude and aptitude to pick up in other areas as required.

Anytime I can sit with a product person who can see all the obvious agendas in the room, I’m happier.”

“What is critical in a product person is to be able to take all the noise and conversation in a room and turn it into something they can execute on.

A mature product leader is committed to the customer-centric way of making product and should always hire for that alignment.

Porter observes that writing in the third person indicates a lack of ego on the part of the candidate.

What makes a team bond isn’t having a big homogeneous blob but rather keeping them aligned to a common goal. Preserving individual differences is possible when the team sees how they can work toward a common objective without having to give up their identities.

Healthy leaders undergo a transition, and learn to be a servant leader — that is, they learn to serve the customer’s needs and not just their own ideas.

A core product or platform provides a lens through which other business and operational decisions can be filtered.

When product leaders are trying to communicate something, they need to think about how people experience them as a leader. It’s not just about what they say, but also about how it will be perceived or understood.

Leaders can often fall into the trap of assuming that whatever they say will be understood exactly as they intended.

If you spend time trying to relate to or seeking to understand their context before you start communicating what you want them to learn, they will feel something different, something more resonant with their interests and ultimately more impactful.

Product leaders need to ask themselves if they understand the vision clearly enough to communicate confidently to their team.

Put another way, the vision is aspirational and the strategy is execution. Senior product leaders, along with individual contributors, need to understand the difference between those two things. Vision and strategy are often lumped into a single bucket. This is a mistake. They are very different things.

In practical terms, this means that practitioners need to be connecting their work to the vision, and leaders need to be willing to adjust the vision to accommodate the incoming insights from practitioners and customers.

The first consideration for the product leadership is to ensure the organization has at least one product that truly sets it apart. Assuming you have multiple products, you’ll want one that stands head and shoulders above the rest.

A secret weapon that the most successful product leaders deploy is discovery and human-centered research principles. Collecting insights and data well before the executive and market pressures start dictating changes is critical at large product organizations.

This is where a product leader’s ability to simply get up and walk around the office, or out of the building, to speak to their teams and their customers really helps.

“Probably the best example of this,” adds O’Reilly, “is Reed Hastings at Netflix. He has a standing 30-minute meeting with all the directors of the company every 12 weeks. Every three months, he has a customer-testing session with everyone who runs or leads a major department in the business to understand what’s happening, what’s working, and what’s not.”

“When you create an org chart, you are creating your product — the seams in the organization get reflected in the product; the depth of feature work gets reflected in resource allocation; the coordination across job functions gets reflected by the leaders you choose; and so on,”

A healthy way to think about communication is this: everyone is a customer. That means that both internal teams and external users are your customers.

Everyone is creative. Make everyone part of the creative process.”

The highest-performing leadership teams, we’ve discovered, operate at a cross-functional level across an entire business.

“To break the silos, we are identifying big problems to solve, and then we are handpicking people from different products to solve that problem together,”

We are also creating practice taskforces. We have people who are passionate about research, people who are passionate about visual design, people who are passionate about information architecture, and they convene and they have their own charters. Their job is to elevate the practice throughout the organization so they can ship better products for the future.”

“The reason we publish a 15-month roadmap is that it recaps what we accomplished during the prior quarter.

Importantly, throughout the five stages, everything they learn is stored in a central database.

“You know the most about the product when you know why it’s being built. This process applies to internal products and projects,”

Outsourced design and development can quickly become a commodity, so the work’s emphasis should always be on either problem solving or strategic innovation.

The product leader just needs to use a little initiative and creativity to get closer to that customer.

We can’t say it enough: get out of the building.

The first is the future value this work has to the organization (comparable to return on investment, or ROI), and the second is the value of the equivalent internal resources required to create the output.

A project’s value can easily be compared to the cost of what full-time employees (FTEs) would be paid to do the same work. Instead of measuring the value of a project by the time it takes to build something, the client team would measure the value based on the equivalent effort of hiring all those people.

“Always be learning.”