When I first got into product, being the “CEO” of your product was a familiar saying that was often cited in product articles and blogs everywhere you looked. I never really understood what that meant because I had never been a real CEO before. I had grand ideas of what that meant but never understood having never been a CEO. With that said I disagreed that product managers were CEOs. As I grew more into my PM role I came more to the realization that PMs were fewer CEOs and more like quarterbacks of a football team.
A quarterback is the director of the offense on an American football team. He calls plays, makes decisions, calls audibles, reads the defense, and the team usually wins or loses based on the quarterback’s performance. I resonated more with this analogy of a PM than the “PM is a CEO” because I played football in high school, follow collegiate football and the NFL. I love watching Tom Brady or Drew Brees each week and they remind me of the coordination and effort a PM has to make to win.
This is also very closely related to how I run my product team at Weave. The team wins or loses based off of my decision making, analysis of customer feedback, the competition, company strategies, and metrics. Matching our output to what the customer or business needs is a result of the effort put in planning and analyzing, often months or years before the product ever launches. This same effort is often seen in the most successful quarterbacks in college and the NFL. If I can throw a certain completion percentage we have a high likelihood of winning the game, or in other words, launching a successful product.
However, my view of PMs being quarterbacks is slowly shifting back to PMs being CEOs as I have a better understanding of what success looks like for a business. Weave has grown astronomically in the last two years, and for various reasons. A stellar engineering and product team has met customer demands and delivered world class products. We’ve followed our gut instinct on what the customer needs and not what the competition is doing.
We work closely with the other departments to maximize the effort to meet ever changing company needs that has lead to record breaking sales months, month after month. Our onboarding team is working round the clock to onboard all the new customers that sales have closed. Weave, now valued at over a billion dollars, has taught us a lot about what matters and what success looks like. A few months ago we hired one of the top Chief Product Officers in the state to help us grow, scale, and dominate new markets.
In our first interview our new CPO asked us how we would run product like a CEO, understanding how much revenue our products are making, how much they are costing us, and what success for these products looks like. These were tough questions because as a quarterback PM, I was focused more on getting products to market that were in demand by our customers, than what the financial impact of those products was. Due to this approach that I and other PMs took, we overwhelmed our training and support teams with dozens of new features and products that needed attention to maintain and support causing severe growing pains.
Support tickets skyrocketed and customers were unhappy with us and our inability to meet all of their questions and inquiries. We have since shifted focus on resolving these tickets and building the tools necessary for the supportability of these features and products.
I am excited to announce that this isn’t a temporary change, Jeff our CPO has distilled a new mindset of viewing our product portfolios as their own businesses. As part of this initiative, we are starting a new Product Business Review that will take place every six weeks where as a PM I will have to run profit and loss analysis on each of my products, track these metrics over time, demonstrating their success and the pain they’re causing to the business.
Having never run a real profit and loss analysis, this will be a new and exciting endeavor. We ran a mock product review a week or so ago and I got some great feedback on how we should do it to show to the best of our ability the impact of our products not only on the top line but also the bottom line.
I made the mistake of showing all the numbers from our texting product aggregated across all of our customer, how many inbound and outbound texts went through our system. This is impactful and looks great but doesn’t show unit of one economics, and the trend over time. Unit of one economics is the aggregate average usage of a customer, this tells a better story than just sharing the big picture usage like how many text messages were sent, its more impactful to show average text messages per sent per customer and the trend over time. This will tell us if our customers are using our product more or less over time. This is the feedback I received and will implement next time.
Not only will I be a CEO for my product squad my tech lead will act as a CTO and the both of us together will run our squad like its own entity. we will both be accountable for the numbers we present every six weeks. This will help us grow as professionals, and prepare us for bigger career roles in the future.
My purpose in writing this article is I want to track this journey as we as a product team at Weave put on a new hat (among many others we already wear) and document the implementation of “Becoming CEOs.” Luckily, Weave’s current CEO, Brandon Rodman, is a great example of how to run a company, so we will have some great role models and mentors around us to help us become CEOs.
