Product leadership: The glue, broad competencies and spoiled onions

Product Leadership is central.

In particular, in tech companies, but also in companies where the digital solutions make up a part of the business’ value proposition, products and services – and these days, where doesn’t it?

Banks, energy companies, web shops, insurance companies and a trip to the mechanic all entail a degree of ‘digital’ or ‘online’ – where all, or parts, of the product are supported by – or used by you as a customer in a digital format. ‘On the glass’, as we say.

A lot of banks don’t even want you in their branch as a customer, and you don’t want to bother yourself by going there, but instead handle your daily finances through online banking, an app, MobilePay etc.

Your energy company, and heating supplier will meet you digitally through eBoks, and more or less inventive systems, to register energy or heat consumption – everything digitally – even though electricity and heating, is still the same (more or less) product as before. Even so, many elements around the product have been improved with digital services and features.

So why Product Leadership?

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Product Management and Product Leadership is central to make sure that business’ products perform like they are supposed to, and move in a direction where companies can keep creating value for their users and customers – because without value; no customers, and no business.

With increased digitalization, comes increased speed on the development of the ‘value proposition’ that the market can offer the customer. Newer, easier opportunities are offered as a natural part of a market driven development, and what is ‘smart’ or maybe just sufficient today, over time becomes expected if you even want to be taken into consideration by the customers, and live up to their base expectations.

The fact that companies strive to create new, better, smarter products is nothing new – they have always done so. The new part is that digitalization has caused that new opportunities emerge in an interdisciplinary crosssection between a long line of disciplines that used to be more separated.

Today, we mix business, technology, analysis, marketing, and design to a much higher degree, and new opportunities emerge exactly in the creativity that lie in the combination of disciplines. Not so long ago, we would browse content by entering words into text boxes.

Today, the content finds us, based on our interactions. Netflix and Spotify show us relevant content from a catalogue of almost infinite proportions, based on what we haseen, liked, interacted with, and what others like us, with the same hankering for Pearl Jam and Green Day (the early years) listen to.

To create user experiences like this, and thereby value for the user, is far from a simple task. It, specifically, demands an interdisciplinary cooperation – analytical competencies, advanced mathematics, UX, business, and not least the clarity of what you want to accomplish – both on shorter or longer term, and how it fits with the companies’ overall direction.

The Product Leader is: the communicator and value creator

To be able to handle this cross-section, we need Product Leadership. We need a competence in the organization that can act as 1) the glue between disciplines, and 2) ensure value creation of new (and existing) initiatives.

The Communicator
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The communicator must ‘speaks all languages’ – maybe not fluently, but at least understand the various disciplines in order to be able to see them in a larger context, and be, well, the facilitator between the disciplines and the rest of the company.

The communicator also needs to make sure, that people understand each other, so that the ideas from the business and the front line can be transformed into ‘need’, ‘requirements’ and ‘features’ that can be developed by developers, and understand the opportunities that arise, when the hard-as-nails analysts conjure up data-magic, and turns it into components that create better customer experiences – e.g. to be
presented with the next 90’s banger that you had totally forgotten about, without you needing to do anything else than simply stay in your immersive Spotify-universe.
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Without ‘the communicator’ there is a big distance between, for instance, business and technology, and these professions often have a difficult time understanding each other – or at least an easy time of misunderstanding each other.

Luckily, there are several artefacts that can help with the communication between disciplines and ensure a common language, so that we develop ‘the right thing’ – this is where artefacts, and practices, such as product vision, product strategy, user stories, prototyping etc. become key for the Product Leader’s, and the company’s efficiency and value creation.

The value creator
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The Product Leader ensures that we create value for the user/customer and the business, and that this happens in both the short and the long term – and is also able to balance the two.

Where do we have to go in the long run to make sure that our products remain competitive, attractive, and valuable for the customers, and what do we do right now, to make sure that we are headed in the right direction?

As Adam Nash, CEO at WealthFront and former VP at LinkedIn summarizes it: “PMs figure out what game a company is playing, and how it keeps score.”

We, constantly get ideas for how to improve our value proposition, products and services. At the same time, we know that many ideas fail to realize the expectations we have for value creation:

• The customers don’t see the value (or too few do)
• The customers don’t know how to use the products, because they aren’t designed simple enough
• It turns out to be a lot more complicated and expensive to build and deliver the products than first assumed

All of these risks threaten to dilute the value that we thought we would create. The Product Leader’s role is to ensure this value creation – ensuring that we don’t risk building something that does not provide any real value.

The world is complicated and changeable, and we have a difficult time of predicting the effects of the effect of our new initiatives. Therefore, we must get continuous feedback and start building learning loops, so we can learn as fast and cheap as possible.

The Product Leader is a kind of mini CEO

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The Product Leader’s role is therefore entirely central, and even though it can seem inefficient that you need ‘yet another role’ in your tech organization, to be able to develop digital products and services, this role is crucial!

So crucial that many modern companies view the Product Leader role, as one of the most important in the company and a typical career path towards senior management. Many places, you talk about the role as a kind of ‘mini CEO’ – CEO for the particular product that the product leader is responsible for.

The layers of Product Leadership

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The good product, the good user experience and value creation for the company, in both the short and long term, is created when the delivered features and functions, and the user experience are aligned.

When you know what you want to accomplish for your customers, and really live up to it – and delivering that over time, requires that you work both strategically with the long term in mind, and makes sure that you position the product correctly in the market.

The product leader ensures this for their product and/or product portfolio, through structured and professional work with product vision, product strategy, roadmap, delivery, discovery and learning loop. All of these are central elements, with a set of competencies that the Product Leader has to master, in order to work efficiently and optimizing the company’s value creation.

The Product Leadership’s elements can be seen as an ‘onion’ as depicted below.

• Learning comes partly from the continuous product discovery, but also through learning from follow-up on the activities and features, that are already on the market through your product – including how it is used, what are the pains, and where are the new possibilities for giving customers even more value.
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• The product vision ensures that we know the direction for our product, where it is supposed to go – that is, what the ‘destination’ is, so that it is properly positioned in the market to create value in the long run.
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• The product strategy shows the way to the destination, and speaks about goals; what the customer should experience, principles for the product, sequence for executing, launch etc.
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• The roadmap is a part of the strategy, and the best bet on what actions to take, to deliver on the product vision. This includes tactical balancing regarding sequence and dependencies to other parts of the company etc.
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• The actual value creating activities are the deliveries, that are created and delivered to the customers and gives an increased value for customers/users and/or the company. This includes ensuring efficient execution, design and form, performance, launch – eventual bundling of partial deliveries, regarding how it presents most value
for the user to accept and start to use functions and services.
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• A continuous exploration of what is the right thing to build for the customers and how it should look and be designed, happens through Product Discovery, where you
constantly establish learning – or feedback loops, so that you know you’re on the right track, and are building certainty and evidence that you are creating real value.

Potentially bad, spoiled onions

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You can argue that product leadership always exist in one form or the other. Because, every company is successful in delivered new initiatives. So, someone is controlling or influencing the process of creating new products, features and services.

However, it is not in all organizations that the Product Leadership competency is very mature. You can see this, for instance, when there is no learning related to new development. That is, when there isn’t any real coherence between the upper strategic layer of the onion and the learning, that has to take place.

Often, it is decided ‘from above’ that we need to develop a new functionality – maybe because a competitor has launched that exact functionality. But whether the functionality even makes sense for the customers, and how it should be designed, so that the customers find it valuable, is often not tried out and validated via i.e. prototyping.

Many organizations do not bother to measure and follow up on whether the functionality is really used after launch, and if the customer even finds the new function useful and/or valuable. When that happens, there is too much distance between the layers of the abovementioned model.

The onion has become too tall or too long, and disconnected – a chopped onion? There is no coherence between the outer and inner layers – so no or little connection between vision/strategy and actual execution. No learning or follow-up, and therefore the aspired value creation does not come into play in the newly developed initiatives.

When in the company, there isn’t an anchored responsibility and a clear mandate etc. between roles, persons, organizational units for the different layers of the onion, the organization does not achieve the required product leadership, and end up delivering features that are not creating any value.

Maybe the company has product leaders on staff, but maybe their responsibility is limited to a single feature, and maybe it isn’t clear who has the overall responsibility for the product. This causes a long distance from strategy to execution – maybe there is no strategy, maybe there is no execution – or execution on the wrong things.

The onion has become spoiled or has fallen apart.

Clarity and Product Leadership

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It is the Product Leadership competencies that ensures coherence between the layers of the onion, so the company ensures the value of its development efforts.

To generate real value creation in short and long term, companies must develop their Product Leadership maturity. This includes having the right people, with the right
competencies, and giving them the right context to do their job.

This includes a clarity of roles, tasks, responsibility, and mandate for the people that are involved in digital product development.

A role with a wide range of competencies

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It is far from a simple role to fill the shoes of a Product Leader. The role is perhaps the most complex in the organization – exactly because it is so wide in its reach. As mentioned earlier, there are several ‘product skills’ that you as a Product Leader have to master – including all the layers of the ‘onion’ that reaches all the way from product vision, strategy to execution and learning.

And that includes a certain degree of understanding for all the other disciplines, that come into play when creating digital products.

The Product Leader must, as a part of leading the product, also master communication and create a common language. That requires knowing enough about creating the good user experience and being able to put yourself into the user’s needs, exercise user involvement, and thereby have a general understand of UX.

You must understand data and analysis, including understanding analyses, but also get into close cooperation with data analysts, so that you can understand the, for instance, quantitative results that you achieved – or why you didn’t achieve them.

Simultaneously, data has become a very central element in the creation of the good user experience, and again, you need to understand how you use data.
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You need to have an extensive and deep knowledge of your product, and have extensive understanding for the market that the product and the company is operating in, so that you can analyze the market and know, what’s moving out there.

This is crucial to understanding the market, and simultaneously, you must have the ability to think strategically and consider how you want to position the product in the market.

Additionally, you need to have a good understanding of what’s going on inside the company, and what the company’s most important priorities are, and a good understanding of business development and how the business is being created inside the company, what the business model is, and how the money is made.

You know that many ideas and new measures fail, so that a central part of the mindset is to drive a learning process – or product discovery method to ensure value creation. This includes the ability to set goals and work with goal orientation for both the product in general, but also for the partial elements, that you are working on here and now.

Additionally, you need a certain understanding for the technological possibilities – not that you need to be a development specialist, but you do need an understanding of the technology, and how you develop with this particular tech, so that you can
talk to – and at times challenge the developers, on what can be done.

Besides the understanding of the technological opportunities, you also need to have a certain understanding of the method of developing and delivering of technology, including the delivery apparatus, for instance agile methods, so that you are well acquainted with how technological development happens, but also that you master the artefacts, that the development team rely on in the instance – e.g. User stories, visualizations etc.

Without a good understanding of these disciplines, it is partly difficult to understand the professional groups that you are cooperating with, but even harder to communicate to others besides those groups – for instance, what results you have achieved, if you don’t have a very good understanding for those analyses that have been made, and the story that the data tells.

Additionally, you must have the ability to lead the product and communicate. This requires a number of ‘soft’ skills, that you communicate clearly – both in writing and verbally.

You must be able to communicate effectively to the team and stakeholders – including through various artefacts such as user stories and product strategies, and additionally, you have to be able to pull an elevator pitch out of your sleeve, when you are suddenly faced with the CEO or a VP by the coffee machine.

And you got to be able to present at the executive level when it comes to your product. You lead the product, not the people – So you don’t have any formal managerial responsibility over your team members and/or stakeholders, but even so you need to be able to lead and influence, show the way and make people around you pull in the same direction as you. Here, disciplines such as informal management, leading without authority, listening, bringing competencies into play, asking coaching questions, and general stakeholder management, are crucial competencies.

Is that it? :D
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If you thought it was easy being a Product Leader, then you have signed up for the wrong job – however it is the greatest job, when you create the right surroundings and can develop products, that really make a difference.