Startup CXO

Chapter 95The Product Development Leaders

Products are the lifeblood of a company; it's how customers experience and think about a company. A company's product is often synonymous with the brand—from Coca‐Cola to Salesforce to Nike. And while a company can survive if some functions are ineffective, a company will never survive if their products are poorly designed, suffer from quality issues, or simply aren't useful. Getting your products right means getting the Product Development organization right, and that falls squarely on the shoulders of the Chief Technology Officer and the Chief Product Officer.

I'm referring to Product Development quite broadly as the section responsible for designing, developing, and operating software products as a whole team. This means Engineering and Product Management as well as other functions in the product development process like data science, user experience, quality, infrastructure, and others. It is important to see this as one team since all these functions have a shared goal of building products that customers will use.

One of the challenges in Product Development is getting these separate functions to be one team, to communicate, collaborate, and to understand their roles/responsibilities so that they can create an effective product and customer experience. Part of your role as leader is to help make that partnership between the groups effective and, ultimately, make the partnership with the company effective.

The role of the product ...