3. Best Practices for Product Leadership
In this module, we will discuss the best practices that help define the offering of a product delivered to the market. This involves establishing effective leadership methods that balance providing context with ensuring control, ultimately leading to better decision-making within the product team.
Leading with Context, Not Control
A key concept in effective product leadership is "leading with context." This approach emphasizes providing information and context to the team so they can make informed decisions on their own. This is different from the control-based leadership style, where leaders make all decisions and directly manage every aspect. The goal here is to maximize context while minimizing control, enabling team members to innovate and solve user problems effectively.
There may be times, such as during a significant shift in company strategy or a crisis (e.g., a pandemic), when more control is needed. However, as a leader, the aim should be to shift the balance towards context as much as possible, empowering product managers and product leaders to find solutions and make crucial decisions.
Challenges in Product Leadership
When reviewing industry reports, product managers often cite challenges such as stakeholder management, securing buy-in, and aligning product direction. This alignment must extend beyond the product team to include other squads, stakeholders, and even the company leadership.
It's important to balance the needs of various stakeholders, such as users, company leadership, and technical feasibility. Product leaders need to ensure that product decisions are viable not only for the user but also for the business. This means constantly questioning whether adding a new feature makes sense or if improving an existing one is a better investment.
Bridging Strategic and Tactical Contexts
Product leadership requires a balance between strategic objectives and day-to-day operations. Leaders must connect high-level business strategy—including mission statements, SWOT analysis, and growth levers—with the practical actions of product squads.
Leaders must take the strategic context, such as company mission and growth opportunities, and translate it into actionable tasks for product squads. This means ensuring that all product managers have a deep understanding of company strategy and that every decision taken by the team is aligned with broader business objectives.
An example of failure in this area could be when stakeholders, during a product demo, do not understand the purpose or expected outcomes of a new feature. This indicates a lack of context sharing between the product team and other company areas, which underscores the importance of bridging the gap between strategic objectives and product operations.
Sharing Context and Creating Accountability
Product leaders must effectively share strategic context with their teams to enable informed decision-making. For instance, it’s important to explain the company's unit economics, financial goals, OKRs from other departments, and competition analysis to the team. Understanding these factors ensures that product squads can make decisions that are fully aligned with the company's objectives.
On the other hand, product leaders must also communicate what the product team is discovering to the rest of the organization. This can include sharing roadmaps, discoveries from user research, and competitive analyses. It’s crucial to make sure that other departments understand the product’s vision, principles, and why certain decisions are made.
Effective communication works both ways—sharing business context with product teams and sharing product discoveries with the wider company. This helps ensure everyone is aligned and working towards the same goals.
Enabling Bottom-Up Influence
Once the flow of information from leadership to product teams is well-established, it’s important to cultivate a strong bottom-up flow of information. Product teams should regularly share insights, research findings, and data-driven conclusions with company leadership. When product teams generate valuable information, their influence within the company grows, and they become strategic contributors to company direction.
A well-established bottom-up flow helps the product team gain a seat at the table during strategic discussions. This allows product managers to not only receive strategic directives but also contribute to shaping those strategies.
To evaluate whether this bottom-up flow is working effectively, product leaders should assess how often their teams are invited to provide input into strategic company decisions. The aim should be to create an environment where the insights generated by product teams are valued at the highest levels of the company.
Promoting Autonomy with Responsibility
True autonomy for product teams comes with responsibility and transparency. Teams need to demonstrate that they have the capability to make well-informed decisions based on data, user insights, and strategic context. When a product team consistently shows this ability, it fosters trust and earns the autonomy to lead product direction.
Autonomy without accountability is chaos. The role of the product leader is to establish a culture where autonomy is granted based on responsibility, results, and strategic alignment. This balance ensures that product teams have the freedom to innovate while staying aligned with company goals.