(2020-11-19) Cagan Product Leadership Is Hard

Martin Cagan: Product Leadership Is Hard | Silicon Valley Product Group In this article, I’d like to try to share a high-level overview of the product leadership role. As you’ll soon see, to provide you a detailed view would take more than 400 pages. But hopefully, there will be enough to increase your awareness of the role of strong product leadership, and give you an appreciation for just how hard the job is to do well.

Most leaders have both management and leadership responsibilities, although the percentage of each varies with their level in the company. Most first-level managers are primarily managing with a little leadership, and senior leaders are primarily leading with much less time spent managing.

Let’s first discuss the management responsibilities, which primarily involve coaching and staffing.

it’s normal for first-level managers to need to spend on the order of 50% of your work week on coaching.

taking staffing seriously is hard, and it takes a substantial amount of time and effort, and you’ll likely feel like this is not the product related work you prefer to do. But as Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos says, “Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will be, the single most important element of Amazon’s success.”

LEADERSHIP

There are essentially two main ways that you can lead a product organization.

You can lead by what’s known as “command and control.

The alternative is that you can lead by empowering the teams, by instead assigning them business or customer problems to solve (agency)

you will need to provide those teams with the strategic context necessary for them to make good decisions.

This is why, for example, at Netflix the mantra is “Lead by context, not control.”

the majority of the strategic context comes from the product leadership: the product vision and principles, the team topology, the product strategy and the specific team objectives.

To be very clear, these elements of the strategic context are the specific responsibility of the product leaders. Individuals on the product teams may contribute ideas or insights, and that’s a great sign of a strong culture, but these are ultimately leadership responsibilities.

Product Vision and Principles

how the vision improves the lives of our customers

Some companies refer to the product vision as their “North Star”

3 and 10 years out.

It is worth noting that the product vision is typically the single most powerful recruiting tool for strong product people

Product principles complement the product vision by speaking to the nature of the products that your organization believes it needs to produce. The principles reflect the values and ethics of the organization, and also some strategic decisions that help the teams make the right decisions when faced with difficult trade-offs.

The product vision is more art than science. It’s purpose is to persuade. It is meant to be emotional. You are talking about how you will improve the lives of your customers.

Team Topology

The team topology refers to how we break up the work among different product teams to best enable them to do great work

Our goal with the topology is to maximize empowerment. We do that by striving for loosely coupled, but highly-aligned teams.

Product Strategy

The product strategy describes how we plan to accomplish the product vision, while meeting the needs of the business as we go. The strategy derives from focus, then leverages insights, converts these insights into action, and finally manages the work through to completion.

The output of the product strategy is a set of business or customer problems to solve (team objectives)

The product strategy is where strong product leaders distinguish themselves. They decide what the focus will be and what it won’t be

Team Objectives

leaders need to ensure that each product team has one or two clear objectives they have been assigned (typically quarterly), which spell out the problems they are being asked to solve.

The team is given a small number of significant problems to solve – the team objectives. The team then considers the problems and proposes clear measures of success (the key results), which they then discuss with their leaders.

The litmus test for empowerment is that the product team is able to decide the best way to solve the problems they have been assigned (their team objectives).

Ongoing Evangelism

to the product organization, and across the company more broadly.