“Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.”
– Charles Eames
Leading teams that build great products is a dynamic and complex responsibility.
To be successful, one must operate with empathy and humility as much as, if not more than, strategic thinking, executional excellence, or domain expertise. At the same time, successful product leadership does requires a great deal of vision, diplomacy, instinct, data driven decision making, and of course patience and the ability to course correct in service of changing customer needs.
In summary, as a product leader, I am an ambassador for the product. I bring the vision to life by shaping product scope with radical focus, transparency and ongoing ruthless prioritization. I serve as a champion of our customer and my team’s creativity, drive alignment, and am deeply committed to maintaining a co-authored iterative journey from product conception through optimization.
VISION & EMPOWERMENT
Sharing a mission and vision is critical to executional success. When the team feels part of the development of the “north star” vision, believes in the mission, and understands “why” tradeoffs are made they remain motivated to act.
Further, in effort to create a productive and authentic environment, I communicate my values and principles transparently from the start. This allows for more predictable responses to people and situations in tough times.
My preference is to openly share ownership and recognizing individual contributions and successes. However, it is also my duty to act with humility and remain accountable for failures, as these are opportunities for the future improvement and growth of all, rather than incidents of blame.
CUSTOMER EMPATHY
To be an empathetic product leader, one must actively listen to customers and observe pain points while remaining humble enough to learn and change. This means that as a leader I am capable of not only intellectually identifying what someone is going through, with but to feel and understand it with them. This also means being able to feel comfortable being incorrect and adjusting based on sights and learnings.
EXECUTION & PROCESS
A process should be as unique as the team who employs it or the customer it serves. I support disciplined execution drawing from agile best practices, data analysis, and design thinking methodologies. I seek to develop an efficient environment with ongoing optimization to achieve the best results. Individuals and leadership should remain aligned and be able to measure their progress; while at the same time be empowered to stay nimble enough to achieve results without feeling the weight of a process.