Product Leadership

Introduction

In today’s lightning-fast technology world, good product management is critical to maintaining a competitive advantage. Product leaders have become increasingly central to company success, with their choices, decisions, and actions intrinsic to the achievement or failure of the business. Product management teams are growing quickly, yet their roles and responsibilities are still poorly defined. As with any fast-evolving market finding, developing and guiding successful product leadership is a major challenge, further complicated by the fact that product leaders tend to have all the responsibility for success and failure, but little authority over the assets and resources necessary to deliver those outcomes.

We see product leadership as being both distinct from and inclusive of product management. As we’ll discuss in this book, leadership often comes with a lot of executive responsibility, but not always the authority afforded to executives. A great leader almost always has great management skills. Conversely, management can be delivered without any discernable leadership skills. A product manager may be a good or bad leader, but a good product leader must be a good product manager too.

Successful product design and development relies on strong product leadership. Organizations are using combinations of internal teams and agency partners to design and develop world-class ...