8 common traits of uncommon product leaders
People who do well at guiding or encouraging great products don’t necessarily share the same advantages. But I’ve found the following traits to be common (and not easily taught) in people whose product skills I admire. They tend to be…
8. Happily dissatisfied.
How do you react when your computer freezes or locks up? Most people would prefer to throw it against a wall or live with it. Bad product makers are like this, they seize up emotionally, yell through their pain, avoid imperfect advancements, eschew any innovation that surfaces a problem, alienate teams/partners and often transfer their unhappiness to users by implicating them as sources. e.g. “People shouldn’t want the feature to work like this.”
I find they’re often protected by a staff which mitigates these behavioral challenges.
Great product people are actually excited by this kind of failure in the products they’re working for. The roadblock engages them, they laugh, have their curiosity tweaked, and use that energy to solve problems.
7. Personally engaged in feedback.
A product maker who sits in the corner office far from users may be making valuable contributions, but if they also aren’t emotionally invested in turning a user’s disappointment to delight, you can bet they won’t prioritize delightful work. Seeing dissatisfaction is believing in dissatisfaction.
Great product makers like the people who use their products. They’re excited to reach out to them since they want to please them and they’re confident they’re going to show them something great.
6. Actively collaborating with knowledgeable peers.
It takes a village. Obviously, there’s products other than yours that have smart people making them. So talk with them. Great product makers are involved in discussions about their craft. And it’s even better when they’re addressing these issues in the wider context of common and public goals.
5. Protective of a team.
(Even from themselves.)
There’s a million downward influences on progress. One of the best things a product leader can do for their product and users is identify every block to progress and then convince, coerce, and deflect each one. I especially like when product leaders know when they themselves are the block.
4. Incredible designers.
From Dyson vacuums to mid-century Levi’s, to the 1926 Chevrolet Series V Coupe, to the iPhone, to early MTV indents, to HBO program introductions, to Penguin Classics covers…
Products with a strong focus on great design often have the highest perceived value. But what kind of design? Audio, visual, tactile, experience, environmental design? Yes. All of it. I think product makers with good design skills have a tremendous advantage over everyone else.
3. Guided by an articulate philosophy.
Products can find some success when simply deciding to decide. It looks like progress — actions are taken, schedules are met, and good work is delivered. But action without good aim has a cost, and this cost can be crippling. It can lead to the wrong kind of feature growth, to bloat, to market confusion, to irresiliency.
A product that doesn’t understand why it’s successful can be marched off with smartly snapping arms and crisp uniforms into dark swamps. Someone needs to be deeply involved in developing first principles for all that energy and activity. Ideally this involves everyone, including users.
2. Experts in the technology involved.
Some questions from recent tech history: Would the iPhone be as successful without a thin case? Multi-touch UI? An SDK which allows access to core animation libraries? Would Gmail or Google Maps be as successful without excellent Javascript development?
Great products make the best use of their technologies and a great product maker benefits from understanding that technology as well as they can. Furthermore, I’d argue that it’s rare to be able to improve a complex commercial product without knowing how it works in detail.
(Wetherell’s Law: As a software or industrial product grows in complexity the probability that an engineer moves into a product-defining role approaches 1.0.)
(Wetherell’s Corollary to Wetherell’s Law: It’s more likely that the apparent absence of a product-defining engineer in complex technical products is owed to the difficulty of uncovering due credit.)
1. Iterating in steps, thinking in leaps.
The history of LEGO provides examples of many of these characteristics but particularly demonstrates a focus on careful and critical execution after a set of leaps. Ole Kirk Christiansen’s family and team began their company in home and furniture construction, then followed with a leap into toys, and then a leap into a toy system, and then another into plastic. With each leap came high quality execution. A system of production emerged from innovation literally brick by brick.
Visionaries often run into trouble conceiving of the steps that get something launched. I’ve seen many people who love to think “big picture” but prevent/delay shipping things because the interim steps aren’t exciting or because they require compromises. But the careful completion of each step requires more focus and dedication than the lightning phase of ideation. I strongly believe that for the best product makers, the ability to switch from grand plans to details moves mountains.
