Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

“Two, if you don’t do X, all of the things that depend on X in the system don’t exist.

“Be stubborn on vision, flexible on details.”

The initial problem for many product leaders is they have a massive reservoir of data and insufficient methods for turning that data into insights. Leaders need a process for how to pick and choose which measurements to focus on and why those are meaningful.

time. Instead, a productive use of time is figuring out what the right questions are and where to get the answers to those questions. A culture where it’s OK for anyone on the team to say, “I don’t know, but I can find out,” nurtures responsibility and maturity, and is a far better strategy than pretending to be a human search engine.

With the speed of change only on the rise, it puts more pressure than ever on an enterprise organization’s ability to innovate, build great products, and disrupt itself before a competitor does.

The job of the startup product leader is to explain how their business can potentially solve the user’s problem and whether you have agreement with the client. “In the beginning all you need to create is a high-level plan,” says Weinberg. This is step one for Weinberg and his teams. In this high-level plan there are a handful of questions that need

“Sometimes the near term gets all the attention. I’ve helped [my team] get resourcing and help so they can see further out.” Asay believes that when product leaders help lift the team’s eyes a bit and see the longer-term horizon, then everybody wins. “My job is to be the glue,” says Asay.

In our experiences in organizations large and small, having the trifecta of smart people, a trusting culture, and a guiding framework can amplify results significantly. What is common in high-performance teams is that they are cross-functional, collocated, and autonomous.

This underlines the importance of choosing balancing metrics — tracking both performance-oriented numbers like revenue, ARR, and CAC, and quality or customer satisfaction numbers, such as LTV and NPS.

A core product or platform provides a lens through which other business and operational decisions can be filtered. It becomes infinitely easier to project out from the core and inform marketing and sales, customer service and support, and customer success.