Five Under-Appreciated Aspects of Product Leadership
An unconventional view of what it takes to be a Product Leader
*Note: this is a revised and updated version of a guest blog I did for Department of Product, titled: ‘Unconventional advice for transitioning to Head of Product’ — check it out!
As someone who’s been fortunate enough to have coached dozens of Product Leaders and have walked in their shoes, I have found that there are several under-appreciated ways things change when you move into a product leader role.
Often we talk more about the technical skills, like, portfolio management, being more strategic, etc but being good at those things mean nothing if you can’t build a culture conducive to good product management practices.
Setting an awesome strategy without building the enablers to executing on it is just a pipe-dream. And too often I’ve seen poor leaders resort to micro-management, HIPPO, and dictatorship in order to fulfil their strategies.
As a result, I’ve come to value 5 different aspects of product leadership. Aspects which are more on the human skills end of the spectrum and vastly different from being a Product Manager.
Shift #1: A leader of leaders
The two top things I’ve head people reply to the question “how do I move into Product Leadership?” is to either be more strategic or to develop more as a leader. And although both true, as a Product Manager you are already in a leadership position (at least in my opinion) which puts you miles ahead in this department already.
However, this presents two new challenges for Product Leaders:
- How do you lead a group of leaders? and,
- How do you impart your experience and toolkit onto your team?
This is often a paradigm shift for people who move into the role. The role moves away from the hands-on craft, and you start to have new challenges like, how do I coach my Product Managers? How do I build alignment? How do I cultivate the right product culture for the product teams to succeed?
The plus side is often you don’t need to worry about the finite details as leading a group of leaders means that your team has high agency and takes initiative.
But there are downsides too. The most obvious is ending up with ‘too many chefs in the kitchen’ — too many people taking initiative and proactively looking to lead the team forward.
Now as the leader of these leaders, you have the challenge of creating alignment and helping them learn when they should take the lead vs when they should be a team player. One of the most important skills as a leader is the humility and self-awareness — knowing when to step-up, but more importantly, when to take a step back and be a team player.
Which is why as a Product Leader, it is often these more human skills — interpersonal, emotional intelligence, etc — that set those who excel in the role apart from others.
It’s seldom their ability to do the job technically — to portfolio manage, set strategic intent, make big bets, etc — although important at least for the Product Leaders I work with it’s seldom where I see them struggle or where I spend the majority of my time coaching them.
Shift #2: A coach
One of the big ways the role shifts when you move into a product leadership role is that you now have direct reports. Meaning that you now have a people management responsibility to mentor, coach, guide, and grow them to be the best Product Managers they can be — and ultimately one day succeed you.
“Directors / heads of product should be judged by their weakest product manager. Their #1 responsibility is to coach them, and the rest of their team, to be more effective in their role.” — Marty Cagan
Coaching is a skill that most good Product Managers should already be honing. Even though you don’t have any direct reports you should still be coaching your product team, peers, and stakeholders on what good product practice looks like.
If you are a Senior Product Manager you’ve likely taken this on formally via mentoring junior or aspiring Product Managers in your organization — you may even have an Associate Product Manager program that you participate in for example.
However, coaching tends to consume a smaller percentage of your time as a Product Manager than it does as a Product Leader.
Moving into product leadership moves you away from the day-to-day hands-on tools and into a primarily coaching role.
Your responsibility is no longer on the product itself, but rather your team becomes the product you manage.
Guiding, supporting, and growing them becomes one of your primary responsibilities.
“Probably the single most important, yet most often overlooked element to capable management is coaching.” — Marty Cagan
Now don't fear, I know coaching is a profession in itself but you don’t need to become a full trained coach to be a good Product Leader. You however need to understand enough to employ the right coaching techniques to effectively grow your people.
I usually recommend checking out Coactive’s coaching toolkit. There are lots of great resources in there as a starting point.
Product Coach and Founder of The Product Refinery, Robin Zaragoza posted a great article on Linkedin about why coaching matters and laid out some actionable steps to get started.
Marty Cagan, the founder of SVPG, has also been releasing a series of coaching Product Managers articles on his companies blog — much of which is featured in his latest book, aimed at Product Leaders, Empowered.
Product coach, Petra Wille new book on coaching and growing great product managers called, Strong.
Shift #3: Breadth and Depth
I often frame strategic thinking into two dimensions — breadth and depth.
Breadth is how wide or narrow are you considering? Is it just your product or are you considering how your product fits within your organization and the companies goals also — are you thinking wider, how your organization fits within the world and what political, social, economical, environmental events are happening and how that may impact on your company and then your product?
Depth on the other hand, can be viewed as how far along the continuum of today into the future are you looking — is it 1 year, 10 years, 1000?
The best Product Leaders (as well as Product Managers) I’ve worked with not only cast a wide net but also balanced depth well — they’re trying to win the war not just the battle they face today.
With this comes a particular way of viewing the world. Take coaching your Product Managers for example: do I a) step in and help a junior Product Manager have a successful first launch, or b) let them fail so they can learn from the experience?
Those focused on today’s battle will be more concerned with making sure their people don’t make mistakes — they’re likely to take option a) and jump in. But this will be at the detriment of a valuable lesson for their people — as we learn via mistakes.
Whereas those focused on winning the war will be more prone to choose option b) as letting them fail may help them avoid such mistakes again in the future.
This is one of the many paradoxes Product Leaders face daily — do I do A at the cost of B? — unfortunately, this is part of the job but widening your breadth and depth will help you make better-informed decisions.
Having coached many Product Managers and leaders in companies of all shapes and sizes, those who struggle here the most are often missing either breadth or depth.
Either they make narrow decisions not considering the wider organizational or market (such as competitors, economical, political, etc).
Or they’re too shallow, too tactical, and aren’t looking far enough into the future to make the appropriate trade-offs.
If you feel that you are lacking breadth, I often advise getting out of your current domain — learn a new skill or get a secondment to a different part of the business. All will help you develop additional competencies and get exposure to new knowledge.
Having more breadth of knowledge and skills has also been widely researched to increase problem-solving and abstract thinking skills.
As for depth, a good trick I coach is to break your thinking into multiple horizons. It might be as simple as, horizon 1 = now, horizon 2 = next year, horizon 3 = next decade.
Or another example and a personal favourite is 1s and 3s from John Cutler. A super simple it follows; 1–3 hours, 1–3 days, 1–3 weeks, 1–3 Months, then 1–3 years, 1–3 decades.
The idea behind using a framework is to facilitate your thinking. You want to keep using a framework like this until further horizons become second nature.
Shift #4: System thinker
One side to considering the bigger picture is the external functions — product strategy, A&M, etc — but another equally important side is looking internally.
As a Product Leader, you play a pivotal role in enabling your product teams to succeed through determining vision, strategy, alignment, structure, diversity, and investment mix.
I was talking with a newly appointed Head of Product the other week and she was really keen to help shift the way her teams work, but she could already sense their resistance. The organization had already undergone several restructures over the past couple of years before she was promoted and although keen to make an impact and change things she was sensing a case of change-fatigue.
Realizing this we explored two options:
- Bet #1: Rip the band-aid off — it is completely within her authority to make the changes she wanted and despite the change-fatigue there is nothing stopping her from just going right ahead and making them. However, the risk here would be adding more change-fatigue and potentially putting people offside — worse losing trust within the first weeks on the job.
- Bet #2: Take it slow — on the other hand she could take the long route, take an iterative and more organic approach. Things will go slowly and realizing the benefits of the changes won't happen anytime soon but there would be a lower risk in regards to putting people offside and therefore a higher chance of long-term success.
The reality is there’s no right or wrong answer here — it’s context-dependent.
In her situation, the level of change-fatigue led her to take option two but in other cases, it might have made more sense to go with option one.
As I mentioned before these kinds of paradoxes are the day-to-day life of a Product Leader — do I take longer to keep morale up and retain people or do I go all-in and risk losing people?
Teams may not always appreciate or fully understand the extent of certain decisions you make as a Product Leader but it's your job to help them see the larger picture, provide clarity and transparency as to why and how you came to that decision.
Shift #5: Culture, culture, culture
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is the famous quote from management guru Peter Drucker.
Many of us have seen this play out on more than one occasion. I’ve watched brilliant Product Leaders, who are great visionaries, have an excellent strategy, failed to build the right culture and rally people behind it.
The reality here is that the job is much more than just the hard skills we often love to talk about.
Truth is it won't matter how good you may be at strategy, synthesising research data, building roadmaps, etc…but product is a team sport.
This makes building and maintaining culture perhaps the most paramount part of your role as a Product Leader — but equally the most difficult.
Part of this equation is to help coach the right mindset and help your Product Managers understand what great product practice is like. But equally, as a Product Leader your role is to also educate your peers, and even the CEO, to better understand what great looks like.
“The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture.” — Edgar H. Schein
So whether your organization needs to understand why we conduct research or whether your organization values output over outcomes, as a Product leader you play a pivotal role in tackling these cultural aspects. If your org values shipping features and not doing discovery then you need to help educate your peers about why that’s a bad idea — you need to help build a more product-friendly culture so that you’re teams are able to perform at their best and deliver amazing products.
Conclusion
Being a Product Leader isn’t always the glory people often think. I often speak with Product Managers who want to be promoted so they can “finally have control over the decisions that are being made”. But the truth is that as a product leader you actually move further away from the decision making, from the day-to-day. You become higher level, focused on organization strategic alignment, capability uplifting, coaching and culture.
Often those Product Managers are in a situation where their culture isn’t product friendly — ironically meaning the person in the product leadership role is likely not doing an important aspect of the job, which is culture.
