Product leadership puts our product management skills to work at a larger scale by developing our business strategy and digital transformation skills
We learn all the core product management skills within the Associate Product Manager and Product Manager roles. Senior, Lead and Head of Product Management are about learning and adding leadership skills to our abilities. We're now expected to work at a larger scale, amongst a complicated set of value contexts, possibly in an enterprise setting that's undergoing significat change.
This is the heart of what the move from practitioner to expert mastery means for many product leaders working on public services. We still have the ability to ‘get our hands dirty’ and use our product management skills, but they’re often used to apply product management at scale or to promote product management craftsmanship through example. We’re increasingly likely to be managing value within management and leadership teams, rather than delivery teams. We’re also responsible for the performance management, support and development of the members of our profession. We’re often working in spaces where we have influence, not authority: we’re being asked to support business strategy and digital transformation but are not solely responsible for the outcomes and often not playing a lead-role in this work. This means that the ‘soft-skills’ of teaching, mentoring, coaching and facilitating are hard. Our colleagues responsible for workflow are likely to have more mastery than we have within our profession, and may become key allies in our professional development.
As product leaders we need to remain brilliant at both the basics of product management and of leadership. Every now and then a flash of inspiration is needed and will emerge, but what our profession and our organisation needs from us most of the time is excellence in the basics that keep everything going:
- Product leaders will not always be the best product manager in the profession since we should aim to hire hiring people better than us - but we should remain an excellent product manager, none the less
- We should be the strongest product leaders in the profession, and lead by example.
The career pathway to date has prepared us for this. We are now a visible, first point of contact for the profession, so need to live up to the expectations of that role but recognise that we must share leadership amongst the profession in order to avoid being a bottleneck, and to release the true value of the profession as a whole.
‘Product leadership’ is something that’s emerged as a valuable role in the last 2-3 years. Mind the Product has introduced a Leadership Forum, and organisational improvement was a key theme of the 2018 Mind the Product conference in London. Mind the Product has now introduced a quarterly product leaders meetup to its London events, aimed solely at Heads of Product, Product Directors, and Chief Product Officers. Summer 2017 also saw the release of a book on Product Leadership, much of it generated through insights from Mind the Product’s international network of product leaders.
Reading:
- The Rise of Product Leadership, Brian Crofts
- Product Leadership, Martin Eriksson et al
Simon Wardley (business intelligence professional & creator of Wardley ‘Value Chain’ Mapping) has made the following provocative statement about leadership in general:
Almost all companies are clueless on strategy, it's all meme copying and gut feel. There's an entire field yet to be discovered, to be understood. It's a wonderful time.
- Twitter, 11 Jan 2018
More specifically, John Manzoni (Chief Executive of the Civil Service) has challenged leadership in the civil service to improve to meet the needs of a complex, multidisciplinary government context:
We need leaders with empathy, who can manage their teams through transformation and encourage continuous improvement. Leaders with broader experience, who are effective in a complex, multidisciplinary world, who lead with their hearts and their guts, as well as their heads, who see the big picture. Leaders whose instincts - developed through experience - are collaborative; who are used to working across boundaries, confident beyond their own professional area, and inspire and empower their teams - building on the commitments in our Leadership Statement.
- Civil Service transformation speech, 24 Jan 2018
We have a need and an opportunity to help shape product leadership and in doing so to help shape Civil Service leadership.
Reading: A civil service fit for the future, John Manzoni