Product Leadership FAQs

What is product leadership, and who exercises it?

Product leadership is the act of guiding a group to achieve desired product outcomes. It’s not limited to senior managers like a head of product, Chief Product Officer, and VP of Product Management. Product managers also exercise leadership by aligning and guiding stakeholders and teams toward product goals. This type of leadership, often called emergent or lateral leadership.

Figure 1: Emergent and Assigned Leadership

Figure 1 shows emergent leadership on the left and assigned leadership on the right. The former is based on influence, which, in turn, is founded on trust. Emergent leadership has to be earned. Only if people trust the person in charge of the product will they follow their advice.

Assigned leadership, in contrast, is granted. The head of product in Figure 1 exercises leadership because of the position they hold. This allows them to tell their staff members what to do, even though a commanding leadership style should be the exception, not the norm. (See the leadership styles question below.) Additionally, managers with positional power rely on emergent leadership to influence their peers and bosses.

You can learn more about the different leadership types by reading the article Decoding Product Leadership.

How can I get better at leading others?

You can significantly increase your ability to lead, even if you are not the boss, using the measures below.

• Build Trust: Consistently demonstrate expertise, reliability, and integrity. Team members and stakeholders are more likely to follow your lead if they trust your judgment and believe you act in the product’s best interest.
• Show Empathy: Understand and respect the perspectives, needs, and emotions of others, even when you disagree. Empathy helps you connect with people and gain their support.
• Communicate Effectively: Practice active listening and provide honest, constructive feedback. Clear communication helps align the team and stakeholders around shared goals.
• Set Clear Goals: Define and communicate clear, outcome-focused goals for the product. Use frameworks and templates, like my goal-setting framework and GO Product Roadmap, to make goals transparent and hold people accountable for results.
• Practise Collaborative Decision-Making: Involve others in decisions, leverage their expertise, and seek buy-in. Know when to delegate and when to make the final call.
• Address Conflicts: Don’t shy away from difficult conversations, and learn to leverage disagreements as a source of creativity and innovation.
• Practice Self-Leadership: Manage your own time, energy, and mindset. A growth mindset and self-care increase your resilience and effectiveness as a leader.

For more tips, see the articles Decoding Product Leadership and Leading without Being the Boss.

What are the main responsibilities of a Head of Product?

The head of product, also referred to as Chief Product Officer, VP and Director of Product Management, should take care of the following five responsibilities.

People Management: Developing team members, creating a supportive environment, defining roles, coaching and mentoring individuals, setting goals, offering feedback and holding people accountable, and growing the team.

Processes and Tools: Establishing effective product management processes, selecting tools, and ensuring continuous improvement.

Portfolio Management: Proactively managing a group of products, creating and evolving a product portfolio strategy, and developing a product portfolio roadmap. Note that this responsibility is sometimes delegated to a dedicated product portfolio manager.

Business Strategy and Organisational Development: Contributing to business strategy, representing product management at the leadership level, and advocating for organisational changes to support product management.

Self-leadership: becoming a better, more resilient leader by developing mindfulness, embracing a growth mindset, cultivating self-compassion, and learning to work at a sustainable pace.

You can find more advice in the article What Should a Head of Product Do?

What leadership style should I use?

Researchers, including Daniel Goleman, have identified leadership styles to describe common leadership behaviours. A visionary leader is someone who aligns people through a shared inspirational goal, a democratic or participatory leader is inclusive and involves people in decisions, an affiliative leader connects people and builds teams, a coaching leader develops people by helping them reach their goals, a pacesetting or directive leader sets standards and shows people how to move forward, and a commanding leader, also referred to as autocratic, makes the decisions and tells people what to do.

It is important to understand that there is no one right way to lead, certainly not in product management. While most people have a leadership style preference, the effectiveness of a style is defined by its context. Being a visionary leader, for example, is not helpful when a product is in crisis and about to miss a critical release date or has stopped working due to a major bug. To apply the right leadership style, consider the needs of the people you lead and the situation you are in. Ask yourself how you can best help them move forward and create the desired outcomes in the current situation.

Be careful, though, not to exercise directive and commanding leadership for extended periods. Pacesetting means that you expect high standards of yourself and that you are never quite satisfied with your work. In the worst case, this can exhaust you and lead to burnout. Similarly, commanding leadership requires that you correctly identify what has to be done. What’s more, it can lead to a loss of motivation and ownership and have a negative impact on team morale.

To learn more about leadership styles, read the article How to Choose the Right Product Management Leadership Styles.

What are some practical ways a Head of Product can support their team?

Genuinely care for the team members and empathise with them. Schedule regular one-on-one meetings, practise active listening, and show appreciation for their efforts. Ensure that their roles and responsibilities are clear. Involve them in setting goals, empower them to do a great job, and offer constructive feedback.

Make sure that they have an actionable learning-and-development plan available. Mentor and coach the team members if required, for example, to enable them to make strategic decisions for their products. Foster a growth mindset to help people develop, remove impediments, and create a failure-tolerant environment to help them innovate. Encourage people to work at a sustainable pace so they stay healthy and motivated.

You can find more guidance in the article What Should a Head of Product Do?

How can I offer effective feedback?

Offering feedback and helping people improve is part and parcel of being a leader. My feedback framework, which I have developed specifically for people leading in product management, helps you give effective feedback. As Figure 2 shows, it consists of five steps.

Figure 2: A Feedback Framework for Product Leaders

Step 1, Connection: Before discussing the issue, take some time to check in with the other person. Ask them how they are and what’s going on for them. This allows you to empathise and build trust with the individual. This, in turn, will have a positive impact on the conversation, and it will make it easier to share difficult feedback.

Step 2, Objective: Describe the desired outcome of the meeting and state the context in which the issue occurred.

Step 3, Issue: Ask the other person to share their perspective. What did they observe? What is their version of what happened? And how are they feeling about the issue? Listen with the intention to understand. Then describe your observations. Stick to the facts. Don’t judge, blame, or accuse. Be kind but frank. Don’t generalise, sugar-coat, or exaggerate. State the impact that the issue has had, including the feelings it has triggered in you.

Step 4, Causes: Once you’ve shared observations, determine the issue’s underlying causes. Create a shared understanding of why the problem occurred. Find out what caused the other person to act the way they did, and what drove their behaviour. What were their underlying motivation?

Step 5, Actions: Determine the actions required to address the causes and improve the situation. Encourage the other person to come up with suggestions rather than telling them what to do. Additionally, clearly state the actions that you want to ask them to take and share the changes you are willing to make. The latter shows that you are willing to contribute to solving the issue and change your own behaviour if necessary.

For more guidance, read the article How to Offer Constructive Feedback: A Framework for Product People.

How can I effectively structure and grow a product management team?

To structure a product management team, a group of product managers and/or product owners, organise around products. Assign the right individual to manage each product, considering the specific capabilities required for different types of products, for example, technical skills for platforms, market knowledge for user-facing products. Ensure each product manager has long-term responsibility for their product to encourage strategic thinking. If a product requires more than two or three development teams, it may be too much for one person, so consider adding specialised roles, like feature owners, to support the main product manager.

To facilitate growing a product management team, establish shared standards for roles, processes, and tools. Ensure everyone understands the role they play, including their responsibilities, and be clear on the desired skills new hires should have. Standardise the product management processes and the tools and templates used to facilitate collaboration and reduce cost. For instance, you might decide to use my Product Vision Board and my GO Product Roadmap.

Grow the team in a piecemeal fashion. Avoid rapidly increasing team size, as this can overwhelm people and reduce productivity due to the effort to phase in the new hires. Adding one or two people at a time allows you to refine hiring practices, improve onboarding, and address integration challenges before further expansion. Consider developing current employees into product roles as well as hiring externally, focusing on both product expertise and strong leadership and collaboration skills.

Additionally, give the product people the necessary autonomy over their products, including authority over product strategy, discovery, and delivery. To achieve alignment, use an overarching product portfolio strategy, which directs and constrains the strategic decisions for individual products.

To learn more about growing a product management team, read the article Tips for Growing a Product Management Team.

How can I prepare for moving into a Head of Product role?

Transitioning to a head of product role, sometimes also referred to as Chief Product Officer and VP/Director of Product Management, means shifting focus from managing an individual product to developing and guiding people and, in many cases, managing a product portfolio.

The former includes helping team members grow, for example, by mentoring and coaching them, and developing the product management team. This requires letting go of direct product work and prioritising team development and organisational impact.

To prepare for the role, gain experience in managing different products, ideally in different organisations and across multiple life cycle stages and events. and develop your ability to address product management challenges methodically. This will equip you with the expertise and knowledge to advise and guide others, and it will help you understand how much specific product management practices can vary depending on the context.

Additionally, I recommend developing your leadership skills, including empathising, trust building, active listening, offering constructive feedback, and resolving conflicts. A great way to develop these skills is by leading a team of product people who collaboratively manage a product.

You can find more advice in the article Tips for Becoming a Head of Product.

Why is self-leadership important for product leaders?

“Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power,” Lao Tze once said. Self-leadership is the practice of understanding who you are, why you do what you do, and how you do it. It helps product leaders develop resilience and adaptability, stay healthy and motivated, and be better role models and happier individuals. The following four practices will help you with this.

Develop Mindfulness: Product leaders often have busy, stressful jobs. Mindfulness means being aware of what you’re doing and how you’re feeling, instead of rushing from task to task. This helps you stay calm and focused, put things into perspective, and develop resilience. A great way to develop mindfulness is to meditate regularly. Another helpful practice is to write a journal and capture your work reflections, for example, once per week.

Cultivate Self-Compassion: Be kind to yourself. Don’t be overly self-critical or ignore your own well-being. Taking care of yourself helps you stay healthy and motivated. Don’t expect too much and don’t beat yourself up if you haven’t achieved what you intended. Adopt a growth mindset instead.

Embrace a Growth Mindset: Be willing to challenge yourself and acquire new knowledge and skills. Don’t believe that achievements are down to talent alone. With the right effort and mindset, everyone can learn and improve. Don’t let mistakes or failures stop you—see them as opportunities to grow. Mistakes are a normal part of the learning process. As Albert Einstein famously said, “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.” Additionally, foster an open mind and take an interest in new ideas and feedback. Don’t get stuck in your ways—different situations may need different approaches.

Carefully Manage Your Time: As a product leader, you usually have a demanding job that often seems to require more time than you have. It is therefore important that you are aware of your workload and carefully manage your time. Adopt a sustainable pace and don’t take on more work than you can realistically handle. Ringfence time in your calendar for strategic work and ensure that non-urgent but important tasks receive enough attention.

You can learn more about these topics in the articles Mindfulness Tips for Product Managers and Product Owners, Growth Mindset in Product Management, Leveraging Failure in Product Management, and Sustainable Pace in Product Management.

What is servant-leadership?

Servant-leadership is a leadership model that is based on the idea that “one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead,” writes Robert Greenleaf, the creator of the model. Leaders should “make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served.”

Servant-leadership means leading from the heart: recognising that genuinely caring for the people we work with and building strong relationships with them are prerequisites for achieving great things together. If we don’t empathise with the people we want to lead, they are unlikely to trust and follow us.

Caring for the people we lead is not unique to servant-leadership. It plays a key part in other leadership approaches, too. Transformational leadership, for example, urges leaders to show genuine concern for the needs and feelings of their followers, for example, and Goleman’s leadership styles, discussed above, recognise affiliative leadership as an approach that puts people first. In an agile context, servant-leadership is often regarded as the default leadership approach.

For more information, read the article Should Product People be Servant-Leaders?

What are common product leadership mistakes to be avoided?

• Thinking that exercising leadership requires holding a management position like VP Product Management and Chief Product Officer.
• Neglecting building effective relationships, not empathising enough with peers, direct reports, and senior stakeholders, and not making enough time to listen and connect with others.
• Using roles and responsibilities that aren’t clearly defined or, even worse, that are unknown to the individuals who should fill them.
• Failing to empower people, not delegating enough work and not letting go of (detailed) product decisions.
• Ineffective decision-making: not involving the right people, especially in important decisions, trying to please individuals like senior stakeholders, and agreeing on weak compromises.
• Shying away from difficult conversations and conflicts. Not holding people accountable to their commitments or tolerating inappropriate behaviour.
• Ineffective goal setting: not using the right goals, not securing the right level of agreement, and not regularly reviewing the goals and the progress made to meet them.
• Not investing enough in shared ways of working, in processes and tools.
• Being attached to a single leadership style, not paying close enough attention to the needs of an individual or group, and the situation you are in.
• Not practising self-leadership: not looking after yourself, not taking enough breaks, being overworked and stressed for prolonged periods.

For more guidance, read the articles Decoding Product Leadership, Empathy in Product Management, What Should a Head of Product Do?, Understanding Empowerment in Product Management, How to Offer Constructive Feedback, Making Effective Product Decisions, How to Leverage Conflict in Product Management, Leading through Shared Goals, How to Choose the Right Product Management Leadership Styles, and Sustainable Pace in Product Management.