Product Leadership Principles
A Product Leader’s primary product is the Team itself. Before I talk about how to build a great team, let's cut to the chase and identify the core values a great team embodies:
Product Team Values
As a Product Leader, my job is to support and mentor the members of the team to facilitate these values. Let's look at these responsibilities in greater detail.
Product Leadership Responsibilities
A Product Leader has four essential responsibilities to create a best-in-class environment set up for success. These provide the team with the structure and vision they need to achieve results.
PRODUCT VISION
What is the future we are trying to create? What does our product landscape look like in 3-10 years? What vision are we building towards? What principles are we following? What values are important to us? Defining this provides a North Star to the team they can continuously return to for overarching direction. If it maps to the North Star, it is likely worth doing.
TEAM TOPOLOGY & STRUCTURE
Is the team structured optimally to deliver the best results? Do cross-functional teams and processes set the team up for success?
PRODUCT STRATEGY
How will we accomplish our Product Vision? What is our focus (North Star)? What insights have we discovered? How will we translate those insights into products ready for development? How do we best execute our products to market? This covers everything from how we manage development to how we release products to audiences at scale.
EVANGELISM
Have we communicated our Product Vision, Principles and Strategy across the company for consensus and alignment? Are stakeholders, product and cross-functional teams fully bought into what we are building and how we are building it?
Product Leadership Nuts and Bolts
A great Product Team embodies specific practices and approaches to product. These are developed over time via close mentorship, coaching, and relationship building.
DEEP CUSTOMER UNDERSTANDING
Most product teams pay lip service to understanding the customer. A great product team spends multiple hours every week directly interacting with our customers. This can consist of focus groups, a ‘Voice of the Consumer’ meeting, sitting in on customer support calls, and so forth, but the goal is a high investment in direct customer interaction. Our team will truly know the customer.
HIGH VALUE 1:1s and RELATIONSHIP BUILDING
The product team is structured to embrace relationship building, trust building, team collaboration, and cross-functional team building. Coaching and mentoring are highly valued. Honest, transparent and safe communication is encouraged. 1:1s are never skipped.
DATA-DRIVEN PRODUCT DECISION MAKING
Any product at scale has the potential to provide robust quantitative data that when combined with qualitative research objectively answers key product questions. Product teams will measure results and fully understand how to synthesize engagement metrics.
EFFICIENCY: USE OF AI-TOOLS, CONCISE MEETINGS
To preserve time for Product Discovery and Execution, teams will be strongly encouraged to use and share AI tools that increase efficiencies of any tasks that can be converted programmatically to be managed by a tool. With AI, this is largely limited only by imagination and the time required to identify and configure the tool. AI is dramatically streamlining the product workflow for the teams that focus on using AI; this allows more time to devote to understanding the customer and Product Discovery.
Meeting culture should bias towards allowing time for meaningful product work. Can the meeting be asynchronous? Is it necessary? How short can it be? Meeting hygiene frees up time for the empowered PM to focus.
Summary
A great Product Team embodies values of Empowerment, Ownership, Autonomy, Collaboration, User-Centricity, and Happiness. With these come Accountability and Responsibility. Servant-style leadership focusing on Relationship Building, Mentorship, Support and Trust allows a team to thrive and deliver high quality, resonant products to market that provide the business with bottom-line results.