EMPOWERED

CHAPTER 3Strong Product Leadership

The heart of this book is the importance of strong product leadership.

To be clear, by “product leadership” I mean the leaders and managers of product management, the leaders and managers of product design,¹ and the leaders and managers of engineering.

For this discussion, I will distinguish between leaders and managers. Certainly, many leaders are also managers, and many managers are also leaders, but even if both roles are covered by the same person, there are different responsibilities.

Overall, we look to leadership for inspiration and we look to management for execution.

The Role of Leadership—Inspiration

The subject of strong leadership, is of course, a major topic, but it is a clear and visible difference between strong product companies and most companies.

The purpose of strong leadership is to inspire and motivate the organization.

If product teams are to be empowered to make good decisions, they need to have the strategic context necessary to make those decisions.

Part of the strategic context comes from the senior leaders of the company, such as the purpose of the business (the mission) and critical business objectives, but the product leadership has four major explicit responsibilities:

Product Vision and Principles

The product vision describes the future we are trying to create and, most important, how it improves the lives of our customers.

It is usually between 3 and 10 years out. The product vision serves as the shared goal ...