Demystifying Product Leadership
What are the areas of responsibilities for a product leadership role?
Product leadership can be a fussy concept due to the ambiguity related to product roles in the tech industry. More often than not, two product positions with the exact same job title can entail an entirely different scope of work. In practice, a product leader is responsible for more than just managing a team of product managers. Product leadership is defined by a broad set of responsibilities and skillsets that help to provide clarity to the product teams and, ultimately, deliver value to the end-users as well as meeting the goals of the business.
Since I joined StashAway 4 years ago, the product team has grown from just one person to a team of 10 product managers and designers. As a result, my personal responsibilities and daily tasks have also changed almost completely in order to adapt to the bigger team and new responsibilities. From my experience of moving from an individual contributor to growing and developing the product team at StashAway, I’ve gained a better understanding of the essential elements of product leadership. Below are the five key areas that I am currently focusing on to deliver the most value to my team and the organisation.
Being intentional and strategic in developing the product team
One of the most important aspects of product leadership is to develop and nurture a high-performing team. While project initiatives and OKRs may help drive short-term results, a high-performing team is instrumental in driving long-term growth of the organisation. Therefore, the top priority on any product leader’s agenda is to hire, mentor, and retain the best possible people for their organisations.
Being intentional and strategic is critical when hiring for product positions as every potential new hire brings in a unique combination of skills and personality to the existing team. When drafting new hiring positions or conducting interviews, envision the qualities of an all-star team in your mind and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses in the context of the organisation’s needs in order to find people with the right set of skills and experiences that can elevate the team’s competency.
Besides hiring, product leaders should also actively nurture a healthy and collaborative product team culture built on trust. By empowering people through trust and ownership, product leaders essentially play the role of a coach who delegates challenging tasks to the product managers and designers, and provide guidance and feedback when someone on the team is in danger of getting stuck or going down a wrong path.
Building a good product culture also requires a shared value on constant learning and self-improvement. One of my favourite team norms we have in our product team at StashAway is the product catch-up sessions every two weeks in which everyone in the team takes turns to discuss a specific topic, which could be a general product-related competency or team-specific matters. These sessions helped the team greatly in forming a growth mindset collectively and learn from each other’s experiences, at the same forging stronger bonds with fun activities and non-work conversations.
Creating alignment with internal stakeholders
Because the product team usually collaborates with several other functions in the company, such as marketing, customer service, operations, etc., being a product leader inevitably involves aligning and collaborating with key internal stakeholders.
In the current technology-enabled workplace, there are many channels to connect and communicate with internal stakeholders. Besides having individual ongoing conversations with stakeholders in person or via video calls, you could also improve the team’s internal communications by creating an internal multi-channel communications plan for important team initiatives that require cross-functional collaboration. This can ensure that projects and initiatives gain momentum across departments and efforts are aligned in situations where many moving parts need to be synchronized perfectly to deliver the best result.
Creating and managing the product development process
Product leaders should keep a close eye on internal processes and constantly adjust and evolve the process to match the size and maturity level of the product organisation. In a typical product development process, there are usually two separate work streams where product discovery (research and design explorations) and project delivery (project implementation and release cycles) happen in parallel. Adapting this general concept to a specific situation, however, will require the product leader to possess a deep understanding of the team dynamics and managing the expectations of the internal stakeholders on the deliverables and modes of collaboration to get buy-in for successful process implementation.
Additionally, be mindful of the different stages of team formation before implementing process changes. According to Bruce Tuckman’s group development model, a team usually goes through four stages of team formation after they first come together, as well as after a significant change in how they are expected to work together. The four stages are: Forming — when the team first formed and roles are not clearly understood yet, Storming — when conflicts arise when the team pushes each other’s boundaries to achieve the new norm, Norming — when people start to resolve the conflicts and establish new team norm and expectations, Performing — where team reaches top productivity and best achievements with little to no internal frictions. Based on this theory, when evaluating process adjustment proposals, keep in mind the stage of the team formation and the cadence of change, to avoid getting the product team stuck in a loop of forming and storming and negatively impact the team’s performance.
Generating, retaining and sharing product knowledge
In certain situations, a manager of a functional team may not be required to have a working knowledge of the domain. However, for leadership positions in the product domain, deep product knowledge is normally always a pre-requisite because of the highly specialised and technical nature of the work. As such, product leaders own the unique responsibility to generate, retain, and share product knowledge within the organisation. Proactive product leaders actively identify knowledge gaps in the organisation’s product strategy, design principles, documentation, and best practices to create initiatives that aim to close the gap and disperse product knowledge widely and continuously within the team.
Thought leadership is another common trait for product leaders. By engaging in external knowledge sharing activities such as speaking at conferences or writing for online and offline publications, product leaders could benefit the wider community and create greater impact besides their organisations.
Contributing to product strategy
Product strategy defines what the product is trying to achieve and how it benefits the business and the users. Product leaders contribute to product strategy by providing input and guidance to the product vision and roadmap creation and communicate the strategy across the organisation to ensure shared understanding and alignment.
Because a product strategy has a significant and profound impact on the future of the business, it is crucial to adopt an inclusive and participatory approach by collaborating with key stakeholders closely throughout the strategy development process. A successful product strategy needs to be also deeply rooted in research. Strong product leaders should be advocates of the user’s voice and industry trends and translate such insights accurately in product strategy proposals.
Conclusion
It is important to note the difference between a leader and a manager — a manager is an assigned role within an organisation whereas leadership is a valuable personal quality that could be earned regardless of position. The above five key responsibilities are what I consider to be essential for a product leadership role which helps provide focus and clarity in my day-to-day when the definition of the role could be ambiguous.
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