What does a product leader do?

Posted by Max on November 1, 2018 in Blog, leadership | Leave a comment

Product leaders delight customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways. 

Gibson Biddle, VP Product Netflix

 

In my experience product leaders (PL, may also be called product owner or managers) lead the teams that build amazing experiences for customers.  PL’s understand existing and target customers, the companies strategic context and then translate this into a prioritised list of work and experiments for the team to design, deliver and maintain.

Being a product leader is an incredibly challenging job, as it spans leadership, agile product development process and has ultimate accountability for the success of their product.  The three critical PLs skills are:

1. Making great decisions – building the most valuable thing for our customers and Monese
2. Getting things done – executing the result of those decisions quickly and safely
3. Leadership – building and maintaining high-performing teams

 

You can find more thoughts and advice by following the links above, or the best articles and resources at the links below.

• Customer obsession by Gibson Biddle
• Good product manager bad product manager by Ben Horowitz
• Product management, the good, the bad, and the ugly by Elad Sofer
• Checklist for product owners by Roman Pitcher
• Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG)
• Product Manual by Product Hunt

 

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Feature image credit: xaviereusebio

These are ‘tools not rules’ deliberately as this advice should be used to inform and guide and should not be used to constrain or control.