Review

I found Product Leadership incredibly hard to read. I had no sense of place, I got lost in the long chapters and dense walls of text. I’m not surprised this book was written by three people, it doesn’t feel like a single piece of work. The nature of product leadership changes depending on the nature of the organisation (startup vs emerging vs enterprise). The authors reflected this in the structure of the book, which ultimately created duplication and made it harder to compare the differences.

If you can stick it out, there are a few great insights into transitioning from a product practitioner to leader. However, I think the books below are a better use of your time.

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How to Lead in Product Management

Roman is one of my favourite product management authors. His concise, to-the-point writing style is incredibly respectful of your time. He delivers wall-to-wall concepts without any storytelling fluff, providing just enough prose to get the point across.

andrewclark.co.uk

Product Management in Practice

I was wrongly skeptical of this book before reading it. In hindsight, I should have read it sooner. I thought the book would attempt to cover product management end-to-end without depth. Instead, I found the book focused on where theory hits practice and things don't work as you expect. Clearly, the author's been in the trenches and experienced that cognitive dissonance between theory and practice. And for that, this book deserves a place on your product management shelf.

andrewclark.co.uk

Principles of Product Management

I appreciate the author’s concise style, but this introduction to product that isn’t worth your time. Look elsewhere for a good introduction to product management.

andrewclark.co.uk

Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• Agile freed product management from focusing on deliverables and specifications, to focusing on customer collaboration
• Product leaders connect vision with implementation → they align the product team directly with the business vision and goals
• You need to be viewed by the entire product team as the leader of the product
• BUT the product management role doesn’t come with authority. You’re not the boss.
• You gain authority through your actions and your leadership skills
• Management is earned through positive behaviour
• If you’re managing a team of makers, judge your day by how well you protected them from distractions and what they were able to make
• Other leadership roles are responsible for bringing a particular perspective to the table but product has to bring them all together
• Product leadership… your day-to-day work becomes less important than how you actually lead a team to accomplish something
• Collaboration is not consensus. Consensus rarely happens, people don’t have to agree every time
• How to hire, onboard, train, and develop people is a problem you need to solve
• Individual growth plans for leaders and their teams are as important as team training
• The product is the entire experience and the community
• Know who’s a roadblock, who’s a decision maker and develop strategies to deal with them

• Articulate your product and design principles clearly.
• A vision should be timeless
• Don’t confuse an enduring mission with a temporal goal.
• Disconnect your future from time / trends / technology / methods
• Be flexible on the details
• Translate the vision into near-term goals in the form of OKRs (objectives and key results) and roadmaps.
• OKRs and roadmaps can and should change as new information is received
• OKRs and roadmaps are living documents, add appropriate caveats
• Get buy-in from stakeholders on the 4-6 strategic goals you want to accomplish during the year → then work with stakeholders to define the initiatives that will fit those strategic goals
• Translate the vision into specific product goals → that must be accomplished over the next year
• Roadmaps help provide focus, create alignment, show priority, create visibility and coordinate across teams
• What they don’t do…
• It’s not a release plan → leave out dates and timelines
• It’s not detailed → JTBD, user stories etc are too granular.
• It’s It is not a commitment → just a guide
• It’s not a Gantt chart → you can’t track dependencies at this level
• The roadmap is not what creates the value → it’s the process of understanding and negotiating that the team goes through → to own the problems and commit to solving them
• Shifting a roadmap to themes can be incredibly powerful.
• A theme is a promise to solve a problem → making learning about the customer / problem important. It gives teams permission to do discovery
• Ask why is this the right time? Why is this important? What matters right now?
• Managing the unknown
• You won’t have all this information to hand → embrace ambiguity
• Split your focus between learning about your customers and building for them
• Form a hypothesis → validate it as quickly as possible through testing
• Think in terms of bets → I bet that by doing X we’ll see Y
• you don’t feel bad if your bet is wrong
• can help encourage a culture of experimentation
• If optimising an existing product → make small bets → and use A/B or multivariate testing
• If betting on a new product → most build an MVP approach
• BUT building MVPs is expensive
• Instead → focus on learning → test the riskiest assumptions (RAT: riskiest assumption test)
• Don’t build more than what’s required to test your largest unknown
• The experience your customers have is a direct outcome of the people you hire and the decisions they make
• Autonomy motivates teams, scales better and moves faster than top-down models
• Diversity is an imperative → create people soup
• Move from inflexible products, processes, and platforms to constant iteration and learning
• Leaders must guide people in a way that’s valuable for the company and for them
• Designing people’s careers is frequently the best way to ensure that teams retain talent
• People want to be challenged, recognised, and respected

• What hard work are they willing to do each day that get them closer to the outcomes you both seek?
• Developing soft skills is hard → you need to use a coaching approach where you focus on one skill at a time and coach the team member whenever that situation comes up
• Balance Discovery and Delivery
• Great product leaders spend the majority of their time focusing on discovery
• Discover for value and then deliver on that value
• A picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings
• Make discovery a regular commitment, just part of the process → include it in existing rituals (stand-ups, retrospectives, etc)
• Process means nothing without a great team. Choose the team first, and then decide what process amplifies their best efforts.
• Communicate with care → train yourself to listen, to watch your words, and to consider the way they are received

• The best product managers focus on defining and prioritising problems, not solutions.
• Think about success in the short and long term.
• Most metrics suffer from being a single point of measurement
• Use several metrics in the experience to measure the outcome to drive your product strategy forward
• Actionable, measurable, and time-bound metrics that balance the short term and the long term are the best practice by the world’s best practitioners

• Hire a manager of one, great hires are able to manage themselves
• Add people that make your job, and the jobs of the other team members, easier
• Hire people that are going to produce a multiple of what others can produce
• They should ask lots of questions
• Keep learning → educate yourself → understand what skills you have and where you need to improve
• Giving APMs responsibility and ownership above their experience level or skill set provides them with a practical education that would be difficult for them to find anywhere else
• The move from IC to leader means you need to think beyond the product, and point your experience, empathy, communication, and problem-solving skills at the company and the team too
• What can I do to make the people on my team successfull

• In Startups…

• In emerging organisations…

• In enterprise organisations

• Trust Is the glue → building trust starts with making something together
• Internal budgets are generally constructed in a vacuum, so they reveal nothing about the actual cost of the work required to complete a project
• Weigh strategic value versus cost. Determining the cost of the work is not the same as determining the value of the work.

Introduction

• Product leaders are accountable for success but lack direct authority. Great product leaders therefore lead by influence and example, and align their activities with the greater organisation.

Part I. The Product Leader

Chapter 1. What Is Product Management?

• The job of a product manager is to discover a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible
• The Role

Origin story of product management

• The original product managers and in FMCG today are part of the marketing function
• Procter and Gamble ‘Brand Men’ 1931
• ‘Brand Men’ ethos used at Hewlett and Packard 1943-1995
• The Toyota way - a focus on waste reduction
• Product management in technology
• Product and Agile
• Product management is increasingly a standalone function with a seat at the management table and a direct report to the CEO
• Sales, marketing, product … who owns the go-to-market pricing of a product?
• Product management needs to be at least a peer to engineering and marketing, report to the CEO
• Are your product discovery and delivery teams empowered to change the company’s vision, strategy, culture, and processes?

What next for Product Management?

• It’s slowly absorbing parts of marketing, including user acquisition… because a good product is often the most cost-effective and fastest way to grow.
• Product continues to take on elements of user experience, separating the user flows and experience from the visual design.

The value is that the feature actually solves the problem for the users. It’s an outcome that matters, not the output Melissa Perri

Chapter 2. Why Is Product Leadership So Relevant?

• A product leader…
• You need to be viewed by the entire product team as the leader of the product
• Take an active role in building culture and leading their teams through the mundane
• There’s a healthy tension between engineering, product, and marketing
• Product leaders are increasingly responsible for connecting the dots between the executive vision and the practical work on the ground
• Product leaders are needed because as a company grows, founders can’t get into the details enough to understand all the nuances and tradeoffs of those decisions
• A product leader needs to balance the triumvirate of viability, feasibility, and usability
• If you’re managing a team of makers, judge your day by how well you protected them from distractions and what they were able to make
• Management is changing
• Challenges for product leadership
• A responsible and mature culture… “I don’t know but I can find out”
• Product leadership… your day-to-day work becomes less important than how you actually lead a team to accomplish something
• What is difficult for product leaders?

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• Make sure you’re doing discovery
• Use the scientific method where you can (testable hypothesis, generating evidence for or against) → this gives you something to push back against bad decisions
• Collaboration is not consensus. Consensus rarely happens, people don’t have to agree every time
• Co-create roadmaps with stakeholder (and benefit from the IKEA effect)… meet stakeholders to talk them through. Don’t communicate prioritise over email.
• Every idea should go through the same process
• Amazing teams make amazing products.
• Before you hire you need to know the purpose of your team and the problem you’re trying to solve. This is a form of discovery and takes time.
• Product leaders are squashed between the exec, the product team and other departments
• The product is the entire experience and the community
• You need to put yourself in the shoes of customers and and stakeholders. Have empathy, think deeply about what they want and need.
• The importance of a vision can’t be understated:

Chapter 3. Being a Great Product Leader

Management is about doing things right; leadership is about doing the right things Peter Drucker

• Setting Product Principles
• Setting a Product Vision
• Over communicate the roadmap
• Moving from Vision to Strategy
• From Strategy to Roadmap. Roadmaps help…
• What a roadmap isn’t:
• A roadmap is an artefact that communicates the direction you’re going to meet the product vision.
• No roadmap? You’ll likely try to do too many things, not as well
• Focusing Themes on Customer Problems
• Prioritising Goals and Strategic Activities
• Prioritisation is best done through the lens of valuable, usable, feasible
• Managing the unknown
• Now, Next, Later
• Product Is a Team Sport
• Designing a product team
• Leverage chapters / guilds to share knowledge and experience across squads and tribes
• Autonomy motivates teams, scales better and moves faster than top-down models
• Diversity
• Eternal Optimism
• Developing talent
• Developing soft skills is hard → you need to use a coaching approach where you focus on one skill at a time and coach the team member whenever that situation comes up
• Balance Discovery and Delivery
• The biggest delivery challenge is deciding where to spend the resources you have, how to best align your resources to customer’s needs?
• It’s tempting to spend your time updating the UI and UX → as that’s easier than doing the work to understand the customer
• Discovering the real reasons customers use your product → why they think it’s valuable
• Discover for value and then deliver on that value
• Use your product vision as a lens to focus your discovery
• Use qualitative feedback from your customers to refine what you deliver
• A picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings
• Making Discovery Part of Your Process
• Communication and Constraints
• Managing Politics

Chapter 4. Is There a Formula for Success?

• Focus on the problem.
• The best product managers focus on defining and prioritising problems, not solutions.
• Measuring Success
• Measuring Success as a Problem-Solving Ability
• Common Characteristics of Successful Product Teams
• How to Identify Product Leaders
• While making a list of ideal skills is easier than finding the person that exhibits all of them, we maintain that a majority of these would be present in a good product leader.

Chapter 5. Hiring Product Leadership

• Hire a manager of one, great hires are able to manage themselves
• Add people that make your job, and the jobs of the other team members, easier.
• Good product people understand that it’s a team sport
• They should ask lots of questions
• Do they express empathy for others?
• Don’t hire them if
• Have too many interviews than too few
• Check references
• Get them to meet team members
• Find people with leadership skills → train them to lead in the context of your organisation
• Be curious about product management
• Keep learning → educate yourself → understand what skills you have and where you need to improve
• Create a detailed onboarding checklist for new starters
• Timing for Hiring
• An apprentice program is a good way to feed your pipeline with high-quality candidate
• Think about your talent needs months or years ahead
• Becoming a product leader
• The move from IC to leader means you need to think beyond the product, and point your experience, empathy, communication, and problem-solving skills at the company and the team too
• Here’s a checklist for what it means to become a great product leader:

Part II. The Right Leader for the Right Time

Chapter 6. The Startup Organisations

• Product leaders in startups are need to be skilled practitioners and team builders
• Work out what you can do well → and invest in it further
• All businesses are unique in their own way
• Early stage startups are chaotic. Strategic plans tend to be ignored, if they exist at all, in the pursuit of tactical wins.
• There is no legacy holding you back in startups, so making change is easy
• Ask forgiveness, not permission. Speed is everything. Runway is short.
• Early chaos subsides, and you need to hire generalists. Great for product people who like to wear many hats
• Focus on removing obstacles and making decisions
• Data only becomes a thing when more customers accrue → providing more evidence and chance for experimentation
• Mature startups implement process, and metrics → they aline product, sales, and marketing
• De-risking the future is a huge part of the product leader’s job in a startup
• Engage with prospects, segment the market, target a narrow one
• Embrace operating in uncertainty
• Ascribe metrics to what you can control → so you know if you’re actually making a difference
• You need to manage tradeoff between setting a vision and working on the actual nitty-gritty
• Spend enough time understanding the problem before they start trying to solve it
• Always follow the number one problem. Focus on the #1 problem, not on the #2 or #3.
• There’s no point in building a feature if you don’t know why you’re building it
• Understand the problem you’re solving for both the customer and the company, and how they connect
• Build time with customers or users into your weekly product cycles.
• Develop a roadmap that outlines the core themes and priorities.
• Using a lens like OKRs, the product vision, or other key metrics will help the team decide which things on the draft roadmap are worth executing
• Research, gather data, and prototype until you understand the problem and can articulate a solution clearly and without doubt
• Spend as much time upfront trying to gather information and data to guide your decision making and your requirements before you build anything.
• In the beginning stages of a product, the best conversations focus on thoroughly understanding the problem that you’re trying to solve and whether that is a problem worth solving
• Consciously making the time to listen is a skill we could all be better at
• Managing your team’s expectations
• I have never really been successful with an adopted team
• Figure out where you can add the most value.
• The largest challenge for any organisation and any leader is aligning the vision with the day-to-day work
• Communicating continuously
• Playing the Customer to Discover Core Value
• Once you understand the problem, and the solution you can decide on what the MVP will include or how it might be priced
• Making research accessible → get it into the hands of the team in digestible bits
• Fight for prototypes to be used as a core part of the testing strategy
• Which of the unmet needs will get the attention of the team?
• Most people just want their idea heard and valued → create a carpark for them
• Don’t avoid trade off decisions, acknowledge the reality and embrace them
• To know what to prioritise, a leader must operate at the level of solving problems rather than at the level of functionality.
• Product leaders can learn some surprising things in research,
• “How do we know if we’re successful? And do we agree on that?
• Startup Product Teams
• How to filter, collect and communicate inputs:
• Think about teams in terms of what their ambitions are → create an environment where they have something to look forward to
• Provide a safe place → allow experimentation → results help people calibrate their intuition
• Who will be the humans that delight in exchanging time, money, or energy for your solution? Have you really listened to them? Have you immersed yourself in their world to truly understand their pain

Chapter 7. The Emerging Organisation

• Managing the growth of the team is now the key challenge
• Maintain a user focus
• Checking the Ego
• Supporting transitional leaders
• Practical advice for transitioning leaders
• Execution Informs Vision
• Building Teams

Chapter 8. The Enterprise Organisation

• Enterprise organisations need to innovate, build great products, and disrupt themselves before competition does
• Customer expectations are increasing, as acquisition costs
• Legacy systems are hard to maintain and upgrade
• Enterprise organisations must avoid complacency after success
• Recognise that you constantly need to challenge yourself → to see if what you’re doing is working. Should you be trying something else? Should you change?”
• Allocating resources is challenging, it’s hard to know when to stop putting resources towards something, because it’s not as life-or-death as it is in a startup company
• Maintaining Focus as You Scale
• Some companies have their revenue-generating customers dictate their roadmap
• Avoid sanitised data → speak to your teams and their customers. Get information from the source → ensures you make better decisions
• Measure the right thing
• How do you pick and choose which measurements to focus on and why those are meaningful?
• Company Culture
• Communicating with Internal and External Customers
• Get really interested in understanding how the customer is measuring success
• On collaboration → champion connection over artefacts
• Tap into internal sources of ideas → remove the ‘not invented here’ mentality
• A 15-month roadmap recaps what we accomplished during the prior quarter → include what you delivered over the last 90 days
• A portfolio approach lets you consider all the products in a holistic manner while assigning resources to each product according to its current stage and needs.
• Take executives’ hands off the reins and introduce a level of autonomy within your company

Part III. Working with Customers, Agencies, Partners, and External Stakeholders

Chapter 9. Mapping the Partner Ecology

• Experience maps are a temporal display of the touchpoints and interactions between internal teams and customers → but you can also include partners
• Look at which players in your network of providers and partners are giving or receiving value
• If you work with an outside firms elevate exceptional communications to the primary objective → become partners
• Finding Common Value
• How do you know what is a priority if there is no communication product strategy?
• Trust Is the Glue → building trust starts with making something together
• Get clients to agree to giving access to their users
• Get out of the building:
• When and Why to Use Consultants
• What does a website cost?
• Working with outsider firms is inevitable, so it’s better to understand how to make the partnership work than pretend that your team can do everything alone.
• It’s extraordinarily difficult to produce a great product if the scope is broad and the money is not there
• RFPs aren’t helping anyone.
• Beware the wrong incentive. If you’re paying a consultant on the basis of time, then the consultant is incentivised to spend more time on the project.
• Weigh strategic value versus cost. Determining the cost of the work is not the same as determining the value of the work.
• Measure the value based on the equivalent effort of hiring all those people
• Clients know how much they’re paying → that brings a level of urgency to both sides → creating a level of focus, and vision, and momentum that is often lacking internally
• It’s very possible a leader will hire the external team while simultaneously recruiting for full-time
• What to look for in a good product partner:

Final Words

• Make It Valuable, Feasible, and Usable
• Maintain a Learner’s Mindset
• Think Outside the Box
• Embrace Change
• Stay Humble