I've written this chapter for three specific audiences:
In this chapter, I use the title VP product to refer to this position, but you'll also find titles ranging from director of product management to chief product officer. Whatever the title may be, I am referring here to your most senior product role in your company or business unit.
Organizationally, this role typically manages the product managers and product designers, sometimes the data analysts, and generally reports to the CEO. With some exceptions, it is important that this role be a peer to the CTO and the VP marketing.
I'll say right up front that this is a difficult role, and it is difficult to perform well. Those who do succeed in it make a dramatic difference for their companies. Great product leaders are highly valued and often go on to found their own companies. In fact, some of the best venture capitalists only invest in founders who have already proved themselves as great product leaders.
Specifically, you are looking for someone who is proved to be strong in four key competencies: (1) team development, (2) product vision, (3) execution, and (4) product culture.
The single most important responsibility of any VP product is to develop a strong team of product managers.
The single most important responsibility of any VP product is to develop a strong team of product managers and designers. This means making recruiting, training, and ongoing coaching the top priority. Realize that developing great people requires a different set of skills than developing great products, which is why many otherwise excellent product managers and designers never progress to leading organizations.
One of the worst things you can do is take one of your poor‐performing people and promote them to this leadership position. I know that may sound obvious, but you'd be surprised how many execs reason, “Well, this person is not very strong, but he works well with people, and the stakeholders seem to like him, so maybe I'll make him the head of product and hire a strong individual contributor to backfill him.” But how do you expect this poor performer to help develop his or her team into strong performers? And what message does this send to the organization?
For this position, you need to ensure you hire someone who has proven ability to develop others. They should have a track record of identifying and recruiting potential talent, and then working actively and continuously with those people to address their weaknesses and exploit their strengths.
The product vision is what drives and inspires the company and sustains the company through the ups and downs. This may sound straightforward, but it's tricky. That's because there are two very different types of product leaders needed for two very different situations:
There are two very bad situations you may encounter related to product vision and strategy.
The first is when you have a CEO who is very strong at product and vision, but she wants to hire a VP product (or, more often, the board pushes her to hire a VP product), and she thinks she should be hiring someone in her own image—or at least visionary like her. The result is typically an immediate clash and a short tenure for the VP product. If this position looks like a revolving door, it's very possible that's what's going on.
The second bad situation is when the CEO is not strong at vision, but she also hires someone in her own image. This doesn't result in the clash (they often get along great), but it does leave a serious void in terms of vision, and this causes frustration among the product teams, poor morale across the company, and usually a lack of innovation.
The key here is that the VP product needs to complement the CEO. If you have a strong, visionary CEO, there may be some very strong VP product candidates that won't want the position because they know that, in this company, their job is primarily to execute the vision of the CEO.
One situation that unfortunately happens is when you have a visionary founder CEO, and she has a solid partner running product who is very strong at execution, but the founder eventually leaves and now the company has a problem because nobody is there to provide the vision for the future. It's generally not something a VP product can easily turn on and off, and even if they can, the rest of the company may not be willing to consider the product leader in this new light. This is why I generally prefer when the founders stay on at the company, even if they decide they want to bring in someone else as the CEO.
If you're wondering what to do when you have a CEO who thinks she's a strong visionary leader, but the rest of the company knows she's not, you need a very special head of product, one that is a strong visionary, but also has the ability and willingness to convince the CEO the vision was all her idea.
No matter where the vision comes from, all the great vision in the world doesn't mean much if you can't get the product idea into the hands of customers. You need a product leader who knows how to get things done and has absolutely proved her ability to do so.
There are many aspects that contribute to a team's ability to execute consistently, rapidly, and effectively. The product leader should be an expert on modern forms of product planning, customer discovery, product discovery, and product development process, but execution also means that they know how to work effectively as part of an organization of your size.
The bigger the organization, the more critical it is that the person has proven, strong skills—especially in stakeholder management and internal evangelism. The product leader must be able to inspire and motivate the company and get everyone moving in the same direction.
Good product organizations have a strong team, a solid vision, and consistent execution. A great product organization adds the dimension of a strong product culture.
A strong product culture means that the team understands the importance of continuous and rapid testing and learning. They understand that they need to make mistakes in order to learn, but they need to make them quickly and mitigate the risks. They understand the need for continuous innovation. They know that great products are the result of true collaboration. They respect and value their designers and engineers. They understand the power of a motivated product team.
A strong VP product will understand the importance of a strong product culture, be able to give real examples of her own experiences with product culture, and have concrete plans for instilling this culture in your company.
The amount of relevant experience, such as domain experience, will depend on your particular company and industry. But at a minimum, you are looking for someone with the combination of a strong technology background with an understanding of the economics and dynamics of your business and your market.
Last but certainly not least, everything previously discussed is still not enough. There is one more thing: Your product leader must be able to work well on a personal level with the other key execs, especially the CEO and CTO. It will not be fun for any of you if there isn't that personal connection. Make sure the interview process includes a long dinner with at least the CEO and CTO and probably the head of marketing and head of design. Be open and make it personal.
There's a role in larger product organizations that I find especially effective. The role is titled group product manager, usually referred to as GPM.
The GPM is a hybrid role. Part individual contributor and part first‐level people manager. The idea is that the GPM is already a proven product manager (usually coming from a senior product manager title), and now the person is ready for more responsibility.
There are generally two career paths for product managers.
One is to stay as an individual contributor, which, if you're strong enough, can go all the way up to a principal product manager—a person who's an individual contributor but a rock‐star performer and willing and able to tackle the toughest product work. This is a very highly regarded role and generally compensated like a director or even VP.
The other path is to move into functional management of the product managers (the most common title is director of product management) where some number of product managers (usually somewhere between 3 and 10) report directly to you. The director of product management is really responsible for two things. The first is ensuring his or her product managers are all strong and capable. The second is product vision and strategy and connecting the dots between the product work of the many teams. This is also referred to as holistic view of product.
But lots of strong senior product managers are not sure about their preferred career path at this stage, and the GPM role is a great way to get a taste of both worlds.
The GPM is the actual product manager for one product team, but in addition, she is responsible for the development and coaching of a small number of additional product managers (typically, one to three others).
While the director of product management may have product managers who work across many different areas, the GPM model is designed to facilitate tightly coupled product teams.
This is easiest to explain with an example.
Let's say you're a growth stage marketplace company, and you have roughly 10 product teams. You may likely have those 10 teams split up into three types: a platform/common services group, and then a group for each side of the marketplace (e.g., buyers and sellers, riders and drivers, or hosts and guests).
There might be one VP product and three GPMs—one for each of the three groups, for example, a GPM of buyer side, a GPM of seller side, and a GPM of platform services.
So now let's drill in on the GPM for buyer side, and let's say there are three product teams comprising the buyer‐side experience. The GPM of buyer side would have one of those teams, and each of the other two teams would have a product manager that reports to the GPM.
We like this because the buyer side really needs to be one seamless solution, even though there may be multiple product teams working on different aspects of it. The GPM works very closely with the other PMs to ensure this.
This role is often called a player‐coach role because of this dynamic of leading your own team, in addition to being responsible for coaching and developing one to three other PMs.
This role is often called a player‐coach role because of this dynamic of leading your own team, in addition to being responsible for coaching and developing one to three other PMs.
Some GPMs go on to become a director or VP of product management, some go on to a principal product manager role, and some decide to stay on as a GPM because they love the blend of hands‐on working with their own product team, as well as the ability to influence other teams and other product managers through coaching.