Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams PDF
Preview Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams
Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson & Nate Walkingshaw PRODUCT LEADERSHIP How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams Foreword by Ken Norton Praise for Product Leadership The popular narratives around great products focus on the idea, the simplic- ity, and the design, but rarely do they expose what was actually happening on the product team throughout the process. This book offers a unique look into how great product teams and product leaders work. If you build products, you need this book. —Des Traynor, Cofounder and Chief Strategy Officer, Intercom Richard, Nate, and Martin deliver impactful lessons in customer-driven product management practices in Product Leadership. They have collectively walked the walk in applying human-centric design principles time and time again in the wild, which is evident in their message and many useful real- world examples. As a technology leader across dozens of client-facing NAS- DAQ applications, I am challenged every day to drive product innovation at scale while maintaining stability. The approaches in Product Leadership, backed by real, relatable experiences, make this an indispensable reference to deliver and evolve great products for our hundreds of thousands of users! —Heather Abbott, SVP Corporate Solutions, NASDAQ Designers, engineers, and product managers who’ve been looking to take the leap into leadership—look no further. Product Leadership distills the history and future of the field alongside the insights of its luminaries and experts, and presents an invaluable guide for leveling up your skills and execution. —Ryan Freitas, Design Director, Facebook Product Leadership How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, and Nate Walkingshaw Product Leadership by Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, and Nate Walkingshaw Copyright © 2017 Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, and Nate Walkingshaw. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (http://oreilly.com/safari). For more information, con- tact our corporate/institutional sales department: 800-998-9938 or [email protected]. Editor: Angela Rufino Indexer: Wendy Catalano Acquisitions Editor: Nick Lombardi Interior Designer: Monica Kamsvaag Production Editor: Melanie Yarbrough Cover Designer: Edie Freedman Copyeditor: Rachel Monaghan Illustrator: Jonathon Juvenal Proofreader: Amanda Kersey May 2017: First Edition Revision History for the First Edition 2017-05-09: First Release See http://oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?isbn=9781491960608 for release details. The O’Reilly logo is a registered trademark of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Product Leadership, the cover image, and related trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. While the publisher and the authors have used good faith efforts to ensure that the information and instructions contained in this work are accurate, the publisher and the authors disclaim all responsibility for errors or omissions, including without limitation responsibility for damages resulting from the use of or reliance on this work. Use of the information and instructions con- tained in this work is at your own risk. If any code samples or other technology this work con- tains or describes is subject to open source licenses or the intellectual property rights of others, it is your responsibility to ensure that your use thereof complies with such licenses and/or rights. 978-1-491-96060-8 [LSI] Contents | Foreword v | Introduction vii | Acknowledgments xxiii PART I | The Product Leader 1 | What Is Product Management? 3 2 | Why Is Product Leadership So Relevant? 15 3 | Being a Great Product Leader 31 4 | Is There a Formula for Success? 69 5 | Hiring Product Leadership 83 PART II | The Right Leader for the Right Time 6 | The Startup Organization 105 7 | The Emerging Organization 143 8 | The Enterprise Organization 161 iii iv | CONTENTS Working with Customers, Agencies, Partners, and PART III | External Stakeholders 9 | Mapping the Partner Ecology 183 | Final Words 207 | Index 211 Foreword “So you’re the one who decides what color a box of detergent should be?” That’s how one Silicon Valley veteran responded years ago when I told him I wanted to switch from engineering to become a product manager. It was the early days of the dot-com era, and in truth he was right. As you’ll learn in Chap- ter 1, for many years that was what product managers did. But as the role of prod- uct manager expanded into high tech, it adapted and evolved, meaning different things to different people. At some companies, product management was pri- marily an outbound marketing function. In others, it was more technical. Some companies used the term program managers for their product managers, others called them project managers, but called their project managers program managers. (Even more confusingly—everyone just called them all “PMs.”) In the almost 20 years that have passed since that conversation, product manage- ment has matured. Today, in the digital world where we hardly agree on much, just about everyone can agree that product managers are essential contributors at the intersection of business, technology, and user experience. Thanks to success- ful product-first companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, people seem to finally be speaking the same language. Every year I’m contacted by hun- dreds of college students hoping to begin a career as a product manager. That’s awesome: when I was a college student I didn’t know what a product manager was. (Heck, I’m not sure I even knew when I became a product manager.) As the technology industry coalesced around product management, a new prob- lem emerged: how should you lead product teams? For me, making the leap from software engineer to product manager was challenging enough, but it was even harder to go from being an individual contributor product manager to prod- v vi | uct leader. Shifting from managing products to leading people managing prod- ucts felt like uncharted territory. You need to be a people-first communicator who can rally everyone behind a vision without much formal authority. Leading people is hard enough, but leading product managers? Let’s say I made a lot of mistakes and leave it at that. Well, good news friend. No matter whether you’re a product manager, a new product leader, a startup founder, a CEO, or a CTO, your path is going to be much easier than mine was. The book you’re holding in your hands will be your guide to navigating product leadership, the one I never had. Many of the books I found on leadership had solid advice, but didn’t fit cleanly into the rough-and- tumble world of product. Within these pages you’ll hear a diversity of opinions from the industry’s most successful and respected product leaders, insights that will help you lead your team and deliver exceptional products. There is no one right way to build great products; but as we see from the sheer variety of product leaders interviewed and represented in this book, there is a right mentality and approach. You’ll still make lots of mistakes—everyone will. But after reading this book, you won’t make the same ones I did. —Ken Norton Mountain View, California March 27, 2017
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