23 Lessons Learned From Over a Decade of Product Leadership

How do I master product management? How do I ace this role? It seems that it’s expected for me as a product manager or product leader to be a unicorn with wings… How do I deliver it all -- and do it successfully??

These are the types of questions I’m often asked by product managers (PMs) and product leaders who want to be outstanding at what they do. They want to understand where to focus in order to thrive in their extremely demanding product roles.??

To answer these questions, I reflected back on over a decade of product leadership experience and pulled the wisdom I gained to share with PMs and product leaders.??

I have had the opportunity to build products that are used by hundreds of thousands and millions of people and led multi-disciplinary teams of various sizes to deliver such products in exceptional companies such as Fitbit, Teladoc/Livongo, athenahealth, and Cleo. At the bottom of this article, you can find a few examples of the types of strategies my teams and I crafted and the products we launched that unlocked billions of dollars of opportunities.??

Through those experiences, challenges, failures, and successes, I learned invaluable lessons. Below are the top 23 lessons I want every PM and product leader to know to help expedite their knowledge and career:

Strategy:

1. To put a successful product strategy in place, you always need the combination of a) customer voice, b) data, c) market and consumer trends, d) competitive and/or alternative solutions, and e) an in-depth understanding of your company’s business, operations, and its competitive advantages. Bringing these elements together is essential for shaping a sound strategy for building products that will be adopted by thousands and millions of users.?

2. Strategic thinking is the core competency required for every product role, independent of the level. Of course, as you get more senior, the scope and complexity of your strategic work will increase, but every PM (and designer) on the team should think strategically about every project. All team members need to be able to explain how this project will benefit the overall business, how it’s tied to the product strategy, and which OKR(s) it impacts and why.?

3. As a product leader, your biggest contributions to the company will be: a) setting a clear and sound strategy, b) building an exceptional and complementary team, c) creating clear goals and OKRs, d) establishing processes that empower your team to perform optimally, and e) fostering a culture of collaboration that enables cross-functional teams to come together and execute on the strategy.??

Team:?

4. Having a solid team with the right skill set individually and complementary skills as a team, is critical for building the right products. If you are a manager or a leader, spend most of your time hiring the right team and setting them up for success by offering great onboarding and training, establishing the right internal processes, and setting up the right goals and OKRs for them.??

5. Product development is a team sport. The wins and losses depend on the performance of not only the product team but also the performance and delivery of the cross-functional teams! You need all of your cross-functional team members, including design, engineering, operations, marketing, and data teams -- to name a few -- to do their parts correctly for a successful launch of a product or feature.

Customer obsession:

6. Being customer obsessed is the key to the success of a product team, not being competitor obsessed. With that said, it is still critical for any product person on the team to thoroughly understand the competitive landscape, alternative solutions available to your target audience, and your company’s competitive moats (or the ones you aim to create).?

7. As a PM and product leader, one of the most important values you will bring to the table with engineering and other cross-functional teams is your intimate understanding of the customers. Stay close to your customers and have the pulse of their needs in your hands. Always be the biggest advocate to do the “right things” for the customer.?

8. In many businesses, the product team has multiple constituencies as their customers (e.g., clients who are paying for the product and service, end users who benefit from the offering, and internal users). It’s important to identify your customers up front, decide on which customer primarily drives your business, align with the executive teams on how to allocate your overall R&D and product investments, and strategize on how to change that mix over time to build the right products that scale the business.??

Subject matter expertise:

9. Industry and category expertise is critical for success in a product role. As such, gaining industry and subject matter expertise early in your career will give you an advantage in your career growth. This is different from many other roles. Arguably, an engineer, a designer, or a data analyst doesn’t need the same level of industry expertise to be exceptional at their jobs.

10. Having a growth mindset and always being able to learn new categories quickly will give you a huge advantage. New technologies (e.g., AI, crypto, web 3.0) emerge every day, and in the early phases of these new technologies, no one is an expert. If you are a growth-minded person, you can become an expert in any new category if you immerse yourself in that domain and put in the energy required to master it.?

Communication, collaboration, and influence:

11. To thrive in product roles, honing the soft skills required for the job, such as communication, collaboration, building alignment, and the ability to influence, are equally if not more important than the hard skills -- understanding of the customer and market, category expertise, technical knowledge, and design acumen.?

12. Communication -- including storytelling and timely communication -- and collaboration are the two most important soft skills for the success of PMs and product leaders.?

13. Product management is arguably the most cross-functional role in any organization. You gotta love working with all teams effectively, or I would advise you to look for another role in the company.

14. The strong partnership and tight relationship between engineering and product are fundamental for the success of both teams; they are also essential for the organization to see the full impact of their R&D investments.

15. By nature, a product is something that almost everyone in the company cares about and may have opinions and ideas about. As a PM or product leader, part of your job is to always be open to hearing different points of view about the product as well as genuinely consider all of the ideas around the table. If you prefer to be in a position where there are fewer competing opinions, I would suggest looking beyond the product roles.

Validation and prototyping skills:?

16. The best product teams have many steps, such as prototyping and user testing, to validate their ideas before asking engineers to write a single line of code. By the time they pass something to the engineering team, they’ve already built a high degree of confidence in how that solution will move the key metrics. These days, with awesome prototyping tools such as Figma and Invision as well as testing tools such as Maze, UserTesting, and dscout, every product (and design) team can do a lot to validate their ideas before involving the engineering team.?

17. Building great products that are loved and widely adopted by millions of users is not an easy undertaking. It requires a strategic approach and sound hypotheses to start with. But not every idea or solution will make it out of the gate. That’s where having an iterative mindset and openness to feedback will empower product teams to iterate until they get the solution right such that it delivers the Jobs To Be Done and gets adopted by thousands and millions of users.??

Core product skills:

18. Product-led growth (PLG) is here to stay and, over time, will revolutionize how B2B products will be built, marketed, and sold. I encourage all PMs and product leaders to learn PLG best practices.?A couple of product-led-growth thought leaders that I enjoy their rich content are Elena Verna & Kyle Poyar .

19. Prioritization decisions are owned by the product team. That’s the bread and butter of your job. In order to make sound prioritization decisions, you need to deeply understand the business as a whole (not just pieces of it), utilize data and the voice of customers, and tie your prioritization model to the OKRs.

20. The best product teams start any project with these questions: What problems are we solving? Who are we solving it for (audience and segmentation)? What metrics will this solution move and by how much??

Setting these goals clearly and upfront is essential. Tracking the performance of launches and evaluating them against the initial goals are also super important for enabling product teams to continuously build the right things and deliver business outcomes.

21. Product managers and product leaders are expected to be unicorns that can lean in and fill any shortcomings on a cross-functional team. For instance, especially in early-stage companies, if there’s no designer on the team, the question comes up if the PM can handle the design; if there’s no QA or data analyst, it is sometimes assumed that the PM could fill those gaps. The expectation that PMs have many skills and/or can learn any skills quickly makes the PM job skills broad and, as a result, more challenging than other roles.?

Some, like myself, thrive with those challenges and love product roles because of the broadness of scope and impact. Some others may shy away from it. Either way, it’s fine. The most important thing is to understand what the role entails and be realistic about if the product path is right for you or not.

22. The best PMs are not just focused on outputs but rather on outcomes. There’s a lot written on this topic, particularly by Marty Cagan . I can’t emphasize how critical this approach is. The best PMs won’t just build what they are asked, but rather they listen to all of the organizational and stakeholders’ asks, evaluate them among other ideas, and deliver solutions in a way that can move the needle.?

23. Product management is half art and half science. You have to master both if you want to be an exceptional product leader or product manager.

I hope these lessons help you focus on what matters the most and enable you to strategize and deliver great products that have major business outcomes and get adopted by millions of users.?

#productmanager #productmanagement #productleadership #productdevelopment #productinnovation

Additional information -- Below are examples of strategies crafted and products built by my teams and me:??

• Build products that impacted over 20 million people every day -- the launch of Fitbit’s Sleep Stages & Insights enabled computing millions of members’ sleep every morning and providing them with actionable insights to improve their sleep
• Craft and execute product strategies that unlocked multi-billion-dollar market opportunities -- the introduction of Cleo’s Adultcare & Teens offerings unlocked a $270Bn market??
• Introduce new categories that had millions of adoptions in the first month of product launch alone -- Fitbit’s Female Health category was adopted by over 2 million users in the first-month post-launch
• Transform complex integrations into simple product and user experiences -- building Teladoc < > Livongo’s first integrated product which was a stepped-care mental health offering combining digital solutions and teletherapy????