2. Role of a Product Leader - Part 2

The role of a product leader revolves around balancing motivation for the team and achieving business results through the product. This balance becomes the new "product" a leader must manage, acknowledging that the questions and answers aren’t always clear-cut. It requires humility and adaptability, as this equilibrium is inherently challenging to achieve. Leaders must manage team motivation on one side while ensuring that the product drives business outcomes on the other.

Embracing Humility as a Leader

As a product leader, it’s crucial to start from a place of humility, recognizing that you don't have all the questions, let alone all the answers. Cultivating this mindset fosters better decision-making, encouraging an environment where exploration and continuous learning are at the core.

Product leaders must view their teams as their users. Engaging with stakeholders, including team members, other leaders, the CEO, and even investors, is akin to conducting user research. Product leaders should seek to understand what the stakeholders expect, what concerns they have, and where the company's product strategy stands in their view.

Reaching out for conversations with stakeholders provides new insights and energy, while benchmarking and understanding competitors’ approaches can also enrich a leader’s perspective. These proactive engagements help eliminate the solitude that leadership roles can sometimes bring.

Prioritizing Problems and Opportunities

A significant aspect of leading a product team is prioritizing problems and opportunities effectively. Product leaders often work with teams that are full of opinions and ideas—people with strong analytical and critical thinking abilities. Conducting open discussions or retrospective sessions with Product Managers (PMs) and Group Product Managers (GPMs) can reveal many areas that need improvement, but it’s essential to bring pragmatism into these conversations.

A product leader must guide the team to prioritize key systemic problems. This process helps align everyone on the vision, communicate the leader’s goals, and clarify what the team can expect in terms of future improvements. It also allows the team to understand why certain things may take time to address, building patience and shared accountability.

Implementing Incremental Changes

One of the best practices for leading a product team is to make incremental changes rather than pivoting abruptly. Sudden changes in processes, planning methodologies, or leadership approaches can confuse the team and reduce the effectiveness of ongoing efforts. Instead, product leaders should aim for gradual evolution. For example, if a planning approach didn’t yield expected results, adapt it in a small way rather than replacing it entirely.

Adopting incremental changes helps educate and align stakeholders over time. It’s often beneficial to test different solutions within different squads—an A/B test approach to leadership. This experimentation ensures that changes are data-driven and allow for smoother transitions.

Generating Visibility on Leadership Efforts

Product leaders must ensure they generate visibility for their leadership efforts, including successes, challenges, and ongoing initiatives. It’s important not to let leadership activities remain obscure. Sharing updates on product vision iterations or presenting findings from internal ceremonies can keep both the team and stakeholders aware of progress.

Sharing a leadership roadmap is another effective practice. By doing this, the team knows what initiatives are coming next, what will take priority, and what can be expected in the future. This transparency fosters patience, helps set realistic expectations, and makes the team feel involved in the broader leadership journey.

Building Alliances

Creating alliances across the company is vital for product leaders. The role exposes them not only to interactions within the Product, Design, and Engineering triad but also to stakeholders from Sales, Marketing, Finance, and the C-level suite. Whenever there’s friction or misalignment, it’s the leader’s responsibility to turn these challenges into opportunities for collaboration.

The best leaders proactively seek to understand differing perspectives, fostering alignment and reducing friction. This ability to transform friction into alliances can have long-term benefits, establishing a culture of collaboration and mutual respect throughout the company.

Differences Between Leadership Roles

The transition from being a specialist Product Manager (PM) to a leadership role such as a GPM, Head of Product, or C-level is significant. As a PM, you focus on discovering, prioritizing, and delivering product opportunities, with your influence centered around a specific product or squad.

As you transition into leadership roles, the focus shifts to leading the outcomes and development of a team of specialists or even other leaders. Your work becomes more about connecting the dots across squads, ensuring alignment, fostering collaboration between departments, and overseeing systemic improvements in culture, processes, and product strategy.

At higher leadership levels, like C-level positions, the scope becomes even broader. Leaders must ensure that the entire company’s culture aligns with the product vision and strategy, supporting long-term growth and systemic success.

Revisiting Your Leadership Role

Product leaders should continuously revisit their roles and responsibilities, especially in dynamic environments. Changes in market conditions, team composition, or company goals may necessitate adjustments in a leader’s approach. Regularly assessing whether you are still occupying the most impactful spaces and driving meaningful outcomes ensures that your efforts are aligned with both team and company needs.

Another common pitfall for product leaders is failing to allocate time for important but non-urgent tasks, such as refining governance, improving performance management systems, or updating product vision. It’s essential to maintain a balance between addressing urgent issues and dedicating time to strategic initiatives that have long-term value.

Key Takeaways for Product Leaders

To lead a product team effectively, leaders should:

1. Embrace humility, acknowledging they don’t have all the answers and continuously seek to learn.
2. Engage stakeholders as "users" and understand their perspectives, including those of team members, executives, and investors.
3. Prioritize key problems and opportunities and communicate these priorities transparently to the team.
4. Implement incremental changes rather than abrupt pivots to create a smooth, adaptive transition.
5. Generate visibility around leadership efforts and share leadership roadmaps to foster team involvement and patience.
6. Turn friction points into alliances, building strong cross-functional relationships.
7. Regularly revisit their role, adapting to changes in the company’s environment and ensuring they address both urgent and strategic needs.