Product 101: Four things you might not know about Product Leaders
Product Management can seem like a dark art from the outside. So if you’re working with a Product Leader, here’s the 101 on what makes them tick.
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1. Product Leaders don't make decisions, we just facilitate them
I cannot begin to tell you how much easier my life would be, if, as the Head of Product, I was able to just make all the decisions about what goes into the Product and what doesn't. But that’s not the way it works. Product leaders don't make decisions, we only facilitate them. We gather the data, the facts, and all of the competing priorities, and we help the business come to a consensus on which way(s) forwards will deliver most value.
It is true that Product leaders in your business may chair the forum(s) which decide on each release make up, but so do the rest of the management team. We do not make isolated decisions. We usually drive that consensus through a scorecard that allows us to weigh the various factors that influence our decision making. This approach requires data, which doesn't just come from the Product team but also from Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, Delivery, Engineering and Support. Product are just the keepers of this data. Which leads me to my next point.
2. Product Leaders LOVE data.
Product leaders are pretty evenly split between those who came from technical backgrounds, and those who came from the commercial realm. Either way though, we LOVE data, we love getting it, analysing it, shaping it into pretty visualisations, and using it to make decisions.
We love raw data, polished data, quantitiative data and qualitative data: and we love it because we can use all of it to better understand what to build, when to build it and when to build it. Without data, we are all beholden to our biases and that’s no way to run a buisness.
3. Product Leaders are constrained too
Here’s something that might surprise you: the reality of release and product planning is that a certain percentage of the engineering effort of any release will already have been earmarked for platform and technology fixes and improvements. And another percentage will have been earmarked for satisfying 'contract debt', i.e. things that have been sold but do not yet exist and which customers are expecting to be delivered.
So, while Product may have oversight and some influence over what is included in a release, we are still highly constrained by the demands and requirements of other stakeholders.
For example, an organisation might have a heavy emphasis on core platform development. Once you then add in the inevitable contract debt, technical debt, agreed change requests and necessary bug fixes, only about 30% of the engineering resources in any given release may be actually left up for debate.
This isn't a bad thing! In fact, it's probably a great business strategy, driven by rigorous data analysis, that keeps Products and Platforms healthy, robust and able to meet the needs of your customers. But it does also mean that additional features that the organisation might want to build will take longer than they would like to scope, design, build, test and deploy.
This is another reason why we need good data from everyone across the business to help make the right decisions.
4. Product Leaders' main aim is developing a strategy that serves (or even drives) the company's overall strategy.
Coming back to the data. In organisations where the Product Office is mature or aspires to maturity, your CEO and Senior Leadership team will be looking to them to provide the relevant data to determine which strategies to pursue, and which to discard.
This can be as 'simple' as deciding which features to develop and which to put on the back burner, or as 'complex' as which new geographies to enter, whether or not to move from an on-prem to SaaS strategy (or vice versa), and how to best implement a partner-led growth strategy.
What is the most surprising thing you have learned by working with Product Leaders? Tweet me with your experience @AConsidineTong