Product Management
What Does it Mean to Be a Product Leader?
How I learned to transform the role and responsibilities of product management into leadership skills
The tagline on all of my social media accounts includes the same introduction: “Product Leader at Walmart eCommerce.” Once upon a time, and not terribly long ago, I introduced myself only with my official work titles. As I have reflected upon my journey, I realized that the skills that I developed as a product manager are highly extensible to people management. However, my tagline says leader rather than manager. My transformation from a product manager into a product leader actually had very little to do with people management. Instead, I have been able to master skills that enable me to influence others, manager a broader portfolio of work, and drive key results. So how do you translate product management into product leadership?
The first step is to truly understand leadership. The dictionary would have us believe that leadership is merely “the action of leading a group of people or an organization.” To many, leadership is therefore a title or a role that one is appointed to; it represents power and authority. True, many leaders are in positions of management, in which part of their job requires them to lead others. But…
