Five Traits of Startup Product Leaders

Product leaders come in all flavors. Startups succeed by shipping great products and great products come from having the right person leading the product. In a startup, the product leader is often a company founder — the CEO, a founding VP Product, the CTO or a mix of co-founders.

The product leader shapes the norms and priorities on product in these formative stages. How the company thinks about product, how product is discussed internally, how user feedback is acquired and processed, what quantifiable data is obtained and weighed, and how product decisions are made are all directed by the person leading product.

As the company changes and grows, the product leadership needs to evolve. Sometimes, the individual leading product adapts, and sometimes a new leader needs to take over. The successful startup has someone who can adapt her product leadership to match the company’s needs, or the successful startup is able to make the personnel change with minimal impact on building the product.

In recruiting product leaders for venture-backed startups, I’ve learned that good Product Leaders possess five characteristics that I’ll describe as The Innovator, The Executioner, The Influencer, The Analyzer, and The Business Owner. A Product Leader is not singularly one of these types, but a collection of all five where one or two traits may be stronger than the others.

The Innovator — She is creative and visionary. She listens intently and frequently to user needs but sees the product used in ways beyond how users behave and the needs they describe. She loves discussing ideas, holding brainstorming sessions with employees and customers, and is constantly thinking about ways to evolve the product. She asks questions, tests concepts, and gathers data (and opinions) from customers, analysts, and experts on product ideas. She spends a lot of time talking to customers about solving their needs but also pays attention to market trends, technology developments, competitor products, and other queues for inspiration.

The Innovator sets a compelling product vision and constantly evaluates ideas against that vision.”

The Executioner — She drives outcomes and results. She pays close attention to details. She’s motivated by achieving goals, meeting deadlines, and hitting milestones. She applies process to guide the team’s execution but does not overapply it. She rigorously applies product development methods like iterative design, Agile, SCRUM, and Lean Startup concepts to build products. She builds respect with her team and with Engineering by meeting expectations, being accountable, and staying focused and organized. She studies best-practice product management methods and applies them as appropriate in developing the product.

The Executioner sets the goals, timetables, practices and expectations to drive the company to a shipped product.”

The Influencer — She is a gifted listener, communicator, negotiator, and relationship builder. She knows the product stakeholders: understands their motivations, goals, resources, and constraints. She takes into account her stakeholders’ needs but also knows how to acquire their commitment and resources to move the product forward. She comes to product decisions through direct give-and-take feedback and sets product direction through gaining buy-off and commitments from her product and design teams and from key players throughout the company. She is skilled to involve the product team, key functional stakeholders, customers, partners, and industry influencers in the product creation process.

The Influencer marshals the resources and aligns the company towards a main product direction.”

The Analyzer — She relies heavily on user information, research, and data to make product decisions. She sets metrics and measures product performance based on customer behavior. She applies analytic frameworks and tools — like A/B testing, cohort analysis — to draw insights from the customer data. She is a big believer in usability testing and collaborates with Design and Engineering to test, measure, and evaluate new features. She pays close attention to the tradeoffs and dependencies among functionality, user experience, and technology capability and coaches his product team to do the same.

The Analyzer applies the right metrics and interprets the data to make good product choices.”

The Business Owner — She thinks of product as a business. She knows the company’s business and financial goals intimately and aligns her product objectives to them. She builds the business case for the product, quantifies risk factors, and calculates the financial outcomes for building the product. She is crack at financial analysis and incorporates financial metrics (e.g., CPA, LCV, ARPU) to make product decisions and evaluate product performance. She tests business models, sizes markets, builds pricing scenarios, calculates margins, determines capital requirements, and builds bottoms-up budget plans. She studies her competitors incessantly and strives to beat competitors to win the market.

The Business Owner evaluates the financial opportunity and required investment to build, launch and market the product.”

A great Product Leader recognizes her one or two strong traits and either works to build up those other traits or hires people who are already strong in those areas. It’s the CEO's job to ensure that the individual leading product shows up every day exhibiting these traits to build the company’s product.

Thanks to Will Aldrich (@waldrich), Gary Swart (@garyswart) and Andy Chen (@andychen) for commenting on earlier versions of this post.

This post first appeared at https://medium.com/@edzschau