Product Leadership Responsibilities

As many tech organizations grow, their productivity slows at an exponential rate. Some decline is the natural implication of scale, but I believe there is more to it. Deeper strategic and structural problems in an organization ultimately manifest through dysfunction in product teams. As a result, product leaders often mistakenly treat the symptoms (try to “fix” the product teams), ignoring the deeper causes. And nothing gets better.

In fact, things get worse. The way most product leaders react to productivity pressure (increasing transparency and control) creates a vicious cycle that erodes their organization’s ability to create uniquely valuable products. I call this the Product Death Cycle. But product leaders do not react in self-defeating ways because they want to but because they don’t know how else to respond.

Too much of today’s “product leadership wisdom” is little more than surface deep cliches that don’t address the immense practical challenges that prevent leaders from implementing them. Collectively, we have overinvested in the development of product teams and underinvested in the development of product leadership teams.

The Role of Product Leadership

The primary responsibility of the Product Team is to discover and deliver uniquely valuable products that win customers. To do that, these teams must stay deeply connected with customers, discover unique insights about their unmet needs, and discover uniquely valuable solutions to those needs through an iterative process of experimentation and learning. Now that’s a full-time job!

However, in most technology organizations, product teams have little time to do that job. Instead, they become consumed with the impossible task of aligning dependencies and satiating gatekeepers to get anything done, sacrificing customer connection and solution innovation.

Scaled product organizations require product leadership. Product leaders empower product teams to do their jobs, even as an organization grows. But how do you do that?

Product Leadership Responsibilities

As a product leadership team, your goal is to build an organization that discovers and delivers products that achieve the most valuable outcomes possible for the company.

And to do that, Product Leaders (not just Product Management Leaders) have the following 4 responsibilities:

• Vision & Strategy: Communicate your company’s unique beliefs about the future, how you’ll get there, and why you’ll win.
• Focus & Alignment: Focus and align the necessary resources on the most valuable outcomes your organization can achieve.
• Support & Development: Support and develop product teams in pursuit of those outcomes.
• Accountability & Change: Hold the organization accountable for its investments and shepherd change.

I will dive into these responsibilities in future posts. Specifically, I’ll focus on why leaders agree with the shallow cliches that constitute product leadership wisdom but fail to behave consistently with that wisdom. And I’ll talk about how I’ve seen effective leaders approach each responsibility in ways that empower their teams.

But at a glance, it’s clear why most product leaders overfocus on Support & Development. Without knowledge or training, product leaders stick to what they know, which is how to do the jobs of the people below them.

Supporting your teams with training and development is a powerful leadership tool in certain circumstances. But, frequently, the root cause of your productivity problem is not your team’s capabilities, but rather a failing in other aspects of product leadership.

Your teams may be over focused on their individual areas and missing bigger collective opportunities. They may be doing too much to do anything well. They may be misaligned and mired in dependencies. They may not have the time to connect with customers or feel the freedom to test and learn. They may not be leveraging the superpowers that enable your organization to build uniquely valuable products. They may be pursuing outcomes that have already been demonstrated to be less valuable or less achievable than initially believed and not worth pursuing…

These aren’t problems with how they are doing their job. These are problems with how you are doing your job. These are (a few of many) product leadership problems. And fixing them requires product leaders to master new skills beyond the “Support & Development” of their teams. It can be useful to view the product leadership responsibilities as a skill development continuum.

The Product Leadership Growth Continuum

No Tool Product Leaders: In the worst case, Product Leaders combat productivity challenges with little more than increased Transparency & Control. These leaders mistakenly believe that the way to get better results faster from their organization is to help product teams make better decisions faster. Specifically, they try to “increase the efficiency” of product teams by eliminating the space for discovery/learning and replacing it with their judgement.

In reacting this way, leaders turn product organizations into feature factories. But the discovery and learning they shortcut is critical to creating uniquely valuable products, so the optimized feature factories they create fail to achieve the outcomes they desire, no matter how much they ship.

One Tool Product Leaders: More effective “one-tool” leaders leverage their expertise in lower-level jobs to empower their teams through Support & Development. “I was promoted because I was good at your job. I’ll teach you what I was good at doing.” The training these leaders provide their teams is tremendously valuable.

However, these leaders tend to see teaching, upleveling or doing for their teams as the only solution to problems that manifests within those teams. They have a hammer, and everything looks like a nail.

These leaders might view product vision as little more than a “an inspiring video” or product strategy as “a long-term roadmap” that won’t help me make urgent decisions today. So, they deprioritize them. They might think that affecting cross-org focus & alignment is impossible or even not their job. So, they deprioritize them. In the end, one tool leaders stick to what they know and can control: their teams.

Multi-tool Product Leaders: The most capable “multi-tool” leaders learn to diagnose problems that stem from a lack of vision, strategy, focus, alignment, capability and accountability…. even when the symptoms of these higher-level problems manifest as disfunction within their product teams. And they develop a broader set of tools to address those varied root causes. And in doing so, they more fully empower their teams to be productive at scale.

Put simply, multi-tool Product Leaders use Vision & Strategy, Focus & Alignment, Support & Development, and Accountability & Change to empower their teams. I’ll explain how I’ve seen it done in future posts.

No Your Product Leader Doesn’t Suck

To be clear, not having developed these tools is not an implicit indictment of your product leaders. Like everyone else promoted into a job with new responsibilities, even the best leaders need time to learn and adjust. LeBron James was not very good his first year in the NBA. (Seriously, look it up.) The best product leaders need time to grow into their jobs and situation.

Also remember, unlike the wealth of tools and best practices available to Product Teams, there are almost no tools or best practices to guide product leaders. (How, for example, do you focus and align an organization?!?) So that growth may require extra patience and support. What matters for product leaders, like anyone else, is the extent to which they are self-aware, and growth minded. Organizations, for their part, must create an environment that supports that supports a growth mindset from leadership which is a serious commitment in and of itself.

Put simply: Your product leader doesn’t suck if they lack these tools. They suck if they aren’t open to developing them. You don’t suck for wanting them to develop more leadership tools. You suck if you don’t give them the support to try, fail and learn.

And remember, failure is not an implicit sign of incompetence. Over the past decade, there has developed a broad recognition that Product Teams are on discovery journey that requires them to repeatedly test, fail and learn from informed hypotheses to find success. The situation is no different for Product Leaders.

No Product Leader “knows” the right answer to build a more effective organization. At best, they develop and test informed hypotheses. Most will fail, some will work. You hope to learn from what works to increase your success rate over time.

The worst product leaders assume they are right, and they don’t seek to learn. Developing product leaders may recognize the need to test and learn but may not feel safe to do so. If your culture requires someone to be SURE that [idea] is a HUGE WINNER just to get an idea built, your culture is undermining its own success. (I’ve seen this repeatedly.)

When a leader has staked their reputation on an idea succeeding, they are highly motivated to show success regardless of whether the idea succeeds. They will find reasons not to test the idea at all. Or they will “test to validate”, not to learn, implicitly pressuring teams to structure tests in a way that shows success through the unnatural definition or interpretation of success metrics.

The best product leaders develop informed hypotheses by listening to their teams, managers and partners. They synthesize that information and develop informed hypotheses. They communicate what they want to do and why, and seek alignment (not consensus). They measure the impact of what they do, learn from their experiences, and evolve their perspectives. They share what they learned with the team and adjust as needed.

Great product leaders test, fail and learn, just like their teams.

What It Means to Empower Product Teams

Repeatedly, I’ve seen organizations assume that “empowering teams” means “leaving them alone”. Product teams use this belief to justify pushing management away. Leaders use it to vilify empowerment and justify excessive control. Teams are right to push back against excessive transparency and control. And leaders are right to push back against teams that want to operate without oversight or support. But they all misunderstand empowerment.

Empowering teams is giving them the maximum chance of discovering and delivering uniquely valuable products that achieve your company’s most valuable outcomes. That won’t happen by leaving them alone or telling them exactly what to do.

Communicating your company’s unique beliefs about the future and why you will win is empowering your teams. Focusing and aligning them on most valuable opportunities is empowering your teams. Holding the leadership accountable for its investments and changing course when needed is empowering your teams. The way to build a fully empowered product organization is to embrace all four product leadership responsibilities.

My Focus is Focus

In the following posts, I’ll touch on all 4 Product Leadership Responsibilities, but my deepest attention will be on Focus & Alignment, because I believe it the least appreciated aspect of product leadership. Too often, I believe, problems of focus and alignment are misdiagnosed and treated as problems with product teams — where the symptoms of these problems manifest.

To the extent that I touch on other responsibilities, it will be through lens of how to better empower your organization to achieve the most valuable outcomes possible for your company. For example, most textbooks would describe vision as “where you are going… your North Star” and strategy as “how you get there”. But I find these definitions utterly insufficient, and as a result, the visions and strategies of most companies are near worthless slogans that don’t help guide everyday decision making.