(2023-12-06) Cagan Alternatives To Product Leaders

Martin Cagan: Alternatives To Product Leaders. In this article, I wanted to talk about alternatives to covering the product leader’s responsibilities. See prev (2023-11-28) Cagan Alternatives To Product Managers.

This one is a little more complicated because the product leaders have a pretty wide range of responsibilities, and those responsibilities normally vary depending on whether the product leader is a manager of individual contributors, or if they are a manager of managers.

The article Product Leadership Is Hard summarizes the many responsibilities of a strong product leader operating in the product model, and tries to explain why the job is a tough one to do well. (2023-11-28) Cagan Alternatives To Product Managers

Most companies that don’t have capable product leaders are not operating in the product model – most have stakeholder-driven feature teams.

*The first thing you’ll notice is that companies that have strong true product managers also have strong product leaders. In nearly every case, it is the strong product leaders that are the ones that coach and develop the strong product managers.

But the reverse is unfortunately also true. If the company has weak product managers, it’s almost always a direct result of having weak product leaders.*

Product Leadership at Early Stage Companies

In smaller companies, it is very common that one of the cofounders (often the CEO or CTO) can be that effective product leader. In most cases, this is a very good thing.

In fact, one of the common problems is when a founder brings in a product leader prematurely, and that person simply does not have the product or customer knowledge that the founder has, and so does not have the trust of the founder or the other leaders and stakeholders.

Product Leadership at Scale

But at a certain point, the founder acting as head of product simply ceases to scale. Especially when that founder has never done this before, and doesn’t understand the level of investment they need to make in order to develop a product leadership team under them.

This is the situation I’m discussing in this article

The founder might still keep responsibility for the product vision (I like when they do)

Alternatives to Product Leadership

I want to be clear up front: I’m sharing below the main approaches I’ve seen attempted, but the truth is, for a company at scale, I don’t know of any real alternative to strong product leaders, because I haven’t seen any of these alternatives consistently work

Leading With Command and Control

not willing or able to invest in developing one or more strong product leaders, and truly empower those people

The most common version of this is that the founder delegates to one or more business leaders, and each of these stakeholders takes responsibility for driving product for their area. Hence the so-called “peanut-butter” product strategy, stakeholder-driven roadmaps, and the feature teams that support them.

However, sometimes the founder / CEO tries to continue to play the role of product leader herself, and then you’ll see a large, consolidated product roadmap

The focus is now on output, and not outcomes. Tech debt issues accelerate as a consequence of the project focus. Product managers become project managers. Design is run like an internal agency. Innovation rarely happens because the engineers are simply there to code. The best people usually start to leave.

When I said earlier that strong product managers are almost always found in companies with strong product leaders, it is because this is the key to empowerment

In order to truly empower people, you have to have both the experience to effectively coach, and also be immersed in the strategy and execution to help the product teams make good decisions and achieve successful outcomes.

Leading With Process

The second alternative to product leadership is something I’ve also written a great deal about already. (2022-01-23) Cagan Scaling With Process Vs People

I don’t want to repeat all the arguments again, especially since so many people have already heard my rantings against process people destroying product organizations

Leading With Proxies

try to create a separate group that attempts to cover at least some of the product leadership responsibilities – especially product strategy, and improving the effectiveness of the product managers – but almost always with people that are considerably less experienced than true product leaders

Leading With Product Leadership

So we’re back to the need for true product leadership.

I’m not sure why so many companies resist the concept that a strong product company requires strong product leadership. I literally can’t think of a more essential competency for a product company.

If you’re a product company, especially a tech-powered product company, I argue this is the single most important thing for you to get right.

If you’re a startup, the goal is product/market fit. If you’re a more established company, then your goal is consistent innovation creating value for your customers and your company. The key in both cases is strong product leadership.