Head of Product Roles and Responsibilities: A Maturity-Based Perspective
What Is Going On Here
Product Management is evolving every day. Wherever you turn your head, from business blogs to online courses, from books to top academic journals, you can feel product management and its trending situation. So, many corporate and startups regard PM as a core concept in their value creation journey.
One of the crucial organizational roles for corporates and startups that adopt a product mindset is the ‘Head of Product’. Due to the corporate HR and organizational policies, you can see many roles in the top management layer for products. Chief Product Officer, Product Lead, Product Director, Head of Product, etc are all the roles that different corporates design based on their circumstances, needs, and desires. Please allow me to use ‘Head of Product’ to refer to these top management layers in this blog.
In this blog, I want to introduce you what are the roles and responsibilities of the Head of Product and how she/he can empower the product people within the corporate by setting the stage for them. Here the goal is to introduce what are the HoPs roles and responsibilities and how they can improve their act continuously with the maturity-based perspective.
Why This Is Important
Knowing roles and responsibilities helps HoPs to act as professionally as they can and makes them aware of their scope. I know! It is very important to know what is your responsibility but there is one thing that is preferred to that…! HoPs should know ‘What they shouldn’t do’! This is the miracle of the scoping!
What Are The Key Concepts
Before starting to know what are the HoPs roles and responsibilities, let’s get familiar with product thought leaders' opinions about HoPs and their roles and responsibilities. Petra Wille - loomista, the author of ‘Strong Product People’ shared some thoughts from her experience about the HoPs roles and responsibilities:
- Helps everyone understand the company’s business and goals by translating them into its product strategy and then setting directions and goals for the product team.
- Build the product management team. This includes such things as finding and hiring great product managers, developing and growing product manager capability and capacity, and monitoring product manager performance and performance of their products.
- Create the right environment. This includes creating an environment that allows product managers to do their best work and making sure decisions get made (but not making all the decisions).
Another perspective belongs to Joff Redfern -VP of Product Atlassian- who said:
Building a Shipyard!
He mentioned that the people who run a shipyard don’t actually build a ship themselves; They hire the shipbuilders, they create an environment for building ships, and they provide their people with the support and tools they need to do great works. So, he suggests that your role as an HoP is to build a better shipyard. The ships (products) your team build can only be as good as the shipyard that produces them.
There are three aspects that play a crucial role in corporates' and startups' successes. Good HoPs have the ability and responsibility to influence each of the 3Ps of Organizational Success. These aspects are People, Product, and Processes.
In the pie chart, you can see the categories and subcategories of HoPs activities. But really… what do they mean? Let see the following for more details:
People:
- Hire: Reading applications, interviewing, employer-branding activities, etc.
- Onboard: Pre-first-day planning, admin — hardware, accounts, etc. — welcome day, stakeholder intros, initial 2–4 week 1:1s, etc.
- Grow: Reflecting on your team, empowering and inspiring them, reflecting on individual performance, coaching/1:1s, staying approachable, your own growth, etc.
Product
- Now: Evangelizing, explaining why everyone is doing what they are currently doing, clarity, transparency, alignment, etc. within the product team and toward the rest of the organization.
- Future: Creating an overall product vision, strategy, principles, and goals that deliver user value while keeping the company alive, taking everyone along on this journey, keeping politics at a low level, etc.
Processes:
- Discover: Helping everyone understand the value of the product discovery, making sure employees are getting in touch with real users, checking on hypotheses and experiment-driven product management, making sure decisions are based on data/gut feeling and user feedback, and ensuring there is an alignment process, that stakeholder management works, and PMs are telling their stories well, etc.
- Deliver: Making sure there’s a plan but keeping it agile, ensuring maximum value is delivered with minimum effort, checking the status with each PM, limiting distractions such as the next random “low-hanging-fruit” idea, removing obstacles like too many frontend devs, deescalating if things go wrong, making sure there are post-initial-launch iterations, making sure successes get celebrated, etc.
Take some time and assess your maturity and activities in the mentioned areas. Think about your last time in each area. How good you were in that areas? Think about it and specify the answers in the pie chart. When you see your results, choose one area that needs to improve. Design a maturity improvement roadmap for that area, mention a due date for yourself, and commit to becoming a better HoP by improving your knowledge and skills. This helps you become a better version of yourself within the HoP activities scope.
Last Words
Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.
-Jack Welch | CEO General Electric
When you act as an HoP, it is crucial to keep in mind that product people and their maturity development is your key responsibility. Empowering them by setting a calm, agile, and innovative environment helps them do their best to deliver the right value to the right market. Give them a delightful employee experience and turn on the flashlight for them to see their journey. By doing this, the world could be a better place to work for you, for them, and for your corporate/startup and all the stakeholders can benefit from your mindset.
Reference: This blog is inspired by the ‘Strong Product People’ book by Petra Wille — loomista. Help yourself and read the entire book.
Thank you for reading this blog ladies and gentlemen.
Take care… -Aidin
