Product Leadership Quotes

“Shipping work must also solve a problem and result in customers truly receiving value from whatever was shipped.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“A product leader is ultimately responsible for the success or failure of a product and, by extension, the company itself. The impact of that cannot be underestimated.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“Steve told me that there were two important things I needed to communicate to this person in the first week. Firstly, the new team member must understand that it is their job to know more than anyone in the company about their product area and its customers. Importantly, this person needed to know more about these things than I did, and Steve knew that I knew a lot. Secondly, the new team member should have a publicly visible ‘win’ sometime in the first 90 days from their start date.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“In order to set your team up for success as it scales, it’s important to consider what the core product and design principles for your organization are — and articulate them clearly so everyone in the team understands them and can apply them in their work.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“What is common in high-performance teams is that they are cross-functional, collocated, and autonomous.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“The best product managers, therefore, focus on defining and prioritizing problems, not solutions.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“Free yourself from the mental constraints of just giving options to people, and focus on the problem statement. Once you’ve got clarity on that, you can pass the responsibility of solving the problem onto your team.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all. Peter Drucker”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“Applying design-thinking principles to one’s own life is both fun and satisfying.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“There is a wealth of research that underlies the value of diverse teams and shows that being around people who are different from us makes us more creative, more diligent, and harder-working,6 and has also been proven to make companies more innovative and successful.7”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“The product leader’s job is not to constantly manage or direct, but to lead their team by clearly articulating the common goal.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“A great vision should paint a picture of a brighter future for your customers. It’s not about you. It’s about them.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“Product management might not be the right career path for a person that is averse to change.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“Ultimately, where the vision comes from is less important than ensuring that it is the correct one. As product management guru Rich Mironov says, “It’s not important to me who has the good idea, but it is my job to make sure it’s the best one, that it’s still validated, and that we have people who are going to pay for it. The process has to continually validate the vision. If we do that, I don’t care whose vision it is.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“Be stubborn on vision, flexible on details.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“Management is about doing things right;
leadership is about doing the right things. Peter Drucker”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“product leaders are “the implementers of the company vision,” always pushing the company forward by “focusing on what is most important to the company — what do we want to accomplish as a business and what do we need to do to get there?”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“However, in most tech organizations, marketing has evolved to be more about owning the brand and customer acquisition, while product owns the value proposition and development.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“The success of a product manager — and subsequently that of their product — relies on every team member, from sales to development, understanding the vision and becoming at least a little bit passionate about it.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“Driving the vision forward is the first area where management and leadership overlap. It is a leadership job in the sense of ownership and guidance and a management job in the sense that it requires a system to communicate and reinforce the path on a daily basis.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“One of the really fantastic things about product management, but also one of the real stresses of it, is that it is a very broad role. You have to be able to be really good at strategy, be inspirational, and understand the long-term picture. At the same time, you have to be really good at the operational side and making things happen.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“Efficient communication and decision making are key to great teams. Poor communication between team members defeats the purpose of having great people.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“No leader operates in a vacuum, and aligning their activities with the greater organization is essential for success.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“leadership often comes with a lot of executive responsibility, but not always the authority afforded to executives.”
― Richard Banfield, Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams