From Product Management Back to?Strategy

When I moved into product management, almost 20 years ago, it used to be a very senior role. The discussion was about whether or not someone is senior enough to move into product management. In my first official product role, which I got to after managing large dev teams and a business-related role, I managed alone a product with a development team of ~40 people.

While I was deeply involved in the details of the product and as a perfectionist by nature wanted to control every little detail, I had to focus on more than just the product development to succeed. One of the first things I did, for example, was to work with the salespeople on how to sell the product. Only four months after I joined, I gave a presentation in our annual sales kickoff about how to deal with things that our competitors are saying about us. I wanted the entire sales team to know that they have a good product that is worth fighting for, and I wanted them to have confidence in me as their partner in getting business results. It worked well, and I played a key role in closing some of the largest deals we had, doubling the win/loss ratio and increasing revenue significantly year over year.

As you can see, it was a business role no less than it was a technical role, and I had to work at the strategic level to succeed.

A lot had happened in product management since then.

Back in the day, there was no such thing as a “junior product manager”. It was an oxymoron. You had to walk a long way before you could enter product management, and when you did — it was a senior role already. As the product management profession matured, additional levels were naturally added to the career ladder, including junior ones. Add to that the agile revolution, which yanked product managers deep into the execution ( preparing a sprint every other week requires a lot of work! ), and you’ll see why two decades later the focus of product management had shifted.

But the original reason for product management as a strategic, business-related role never went away. Companies need this function in order to thrive. My personal passion is to bring back this very important dimension into product management and leadership. That’s why I started Infinify, and that’s what I do in almost every service we provide — from strategic consulting to startup founders, through the CPO Bootcamp for product leaders, and all the way into our online courses and lectures to product and leadership teams.

In today’s article I have summarized the three most important mindset changes that you need to make in order to be able to change your actions accordingly. Not by coincidence, these are the major mindset changes that the participants of the CPO Bootcamp go through since we make it a point to not only guide them in that direction but also make sure they get to where they need to be.

Product Leadership Is a Business?Role

I make a distinction between product management and product leadership. Product management is the name of the profession and also a description of what some levels do. Product leadership is the role and responsibility of the people leading this profession and paradigm within the company. Job titles generally reflect that distinction but not always. For example, your title can be Senior Product Manager but you are actually required to do product leadership much more than product management (for example if you are the only product person in a startup).

As a product manager, you must understand strategy and business, but your responsibilities as well as your day-to-day activities are focused more on execution. Note that it’s not about inbound vs. outbound product management, since even as a product manager whose focus is mostly working with dev you have to talk to customers to be able to guide those devs in the right direction. But as a product manager your success is usually measured by certain KPIs such as engagement with the features you own or certain conversion metrics.

Unlike product management, product leadership’s success is measured by the business success of the product. Not by specific KPIs within it such as retention and churn, but by overall business performance. By the way, it’s true even if no one told you so. In some cases, that’s how they see your real responsibility, and in others, they don’t even know that you must be there or else they can’t succeed at all.

You Can’t Only Own What You Formally?Own

As an immediate outcome of the previous point, if you want to succeed as a product leader you can’t only focus on the product itself . Before we dive deeper into this I want to remind you again how I define the word product. It can be interpreted in two ways: the actual deliverable and code that is released (the output of your roadmap and work plan), and the abstract entity that is the means to doing business and is what your company relies on to succeed.

As a product leader, you can no longer only own the tangible product, although that’s most likely where you feel more comfortable. It’s where your formal responsibility lies, and most likely the easiest place for you to make an impact. But unfortunately, the impact you can make there is limited. Some products simply can’t sell, not because of what you deliver or how quickly you do so, but because it doesn’t solve a significant problem for your customers or it doesn’t deliver the value that they really need from you — if you can even articulate it clearly enough.

To make a real impact as a product leader, you must engage yourself in everything it takes to make your product a business success. If you keep talking about features and product capabilities, you are probably not there. If you keep looking at usage instead of revenue (you should look at both), you still have a long way to go. If you talk with your stakeholders about what you can do within the product department, you must change your focus.

You need to think about how to achieve the business objectives that your product needs to bring to the company. If you don’t know what they are, now is the time to start asking and make sure you get proper answers. Wait, scratch that, because in most cases people wouldn’t have straightforward answers to give you. Part of your responsibility is to stir the discussions that will cause people to create clarity around the real business objectives and how they relate to anything the company does.

Don’t Wait to Be?Asked

As you can see, to truly succeed you must be deeply involved in what other departments in the company are doing. Part of being a product leader is to get there even if you are not invited, and specifically not to wait for an invitation. In most cases those invitations won’t come, not because people are bad or worried about their own jobs but because they don’t get how much you can help them and that it’s really what the company needs in order to succeed.

Most people, CEOs included, never worked with a great product leader before, so their expectations are set based on what they know and not based on how it could work for everyone’s benefit. Many CEOs tell me that their product leaders aren’t strategic enough, but when I ask them what they really want I can’t get any good answers. They feel the problem but don’t know enough to offer a good solution.

That’s why as a product leader you shouldn’t wait to be called upon, and you need to create your own reality where you are the glue that creates the cross-departmental synergy that really leads the company to succeed. I’m not talking about process synergy, but rather actual alignment so that you create a seamless and consistent customer journey that ends in ongoing revenue. That’s what your real goal should be, and that’s what should keep you up at night. If it isn’t, you should recalibrate your expectations — for yourself first, and then for everyone else in the company, starting with leadership.

Our free e-book “ Speed-Up the Journey to Product-Market Fit” — an executive’s guide to strategic product management is waiting for you at www.infinify.com/ebook

Originally published at https://infinify.com on July 12, 2023.