Product & Startup Builder

What does it mean to be a senior product leader?

Added on by Chris Saad.

An increasing part of my strategic advisory work is to fill the role of Acting Chief Product Officer (CPO) for startups both large and small.

What does a Chief Product Officer do? They...

  • Business Priorities: Collaborate with all fellow execs (CEO, CRO, COO, CMO etc) to determine the business priorities

  • Define what product is: Establish and clearly communicate to all people and functions in the company what product is. Often product is a misunderstood concept. Many people who have not worked at product--lead companies tend to assume that if a feature or technology exists, then the product is ready for a given customer, market or user-case. This is not true and is a subject for another post.

  • Develop a product strategy: Work with all stakeholders (including sales, marketing, bizdev, CEO, product managers, engineers, support, customers, partners etc) to develop and articulate a clear, focused, ambitious, and pragmatic product strategy. Note that this strategy is distinct and different from the high-level business vision. It often acts as the connective tissue between the high-level business vision and the day-to-day tacts of the team.

  • Develop product principles: Establish and clearly communicate the core principles of the product to all stakeholders. In particular, to the product management team who need to make day-to-day decisions about priorities and features through the lens of these principles.

  • Set KPIs: Determine the high-level KPIs for the product that will ultimately drive the business priorities.

  • Develop a roadmap: Work with all stakeholders to craft a well-prioritized roadmap that ensures that each product cycle ladders up to meaningful new value for a large and growing number of customers. This might include a) de-emphasizing or pruning of the product so that the surface area being worked on is right-sized for the size and shape of the R&D team and/or b) inject more ambition into the kinds of features and polish that the team is aiming for.

  • Maintain alignment over time: Work with PMs, Engineers, Sales, Marketing, BizDev, Support etc to help them digest and execute on the roadmap without unintended strategy drift.

  • Maintain accountability: Hold PMs (and other functions) accountable for their effective execution

  • Escalation: Act as a point of escalation and conflict resolution when PMs are not getting what they need from other functions

  • Rinse and repeat

Along the way, there are a lot of landmines and complexities to navigate.

These might include a number of character archetypes that risk distracting or derailing the focused product strategy. Productboard has published a cute infographic to highlight some of these characters. I've included it below.

Much of the day-to-day work of product leadership is helping these "animals" to make more productive contributions to the product process. As mentioned above, this often starts by ensuring there’s a strong and principled product strategy that acts as a tool for company-wide alignment. A strategy is not enough, though. The product team must engage in a continuous and disciplined alignment process. Disciplined means that they stick to the strategy and principles despite the distractions inherent in the behavior of the archetypes listed below

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