Chris Jones

One surprising common thread among many of the best product companies is the legendary coach, Bill Campbell. During their formative years, Bill literally provided executive coaching to the founders of Apple, Amazon, and Google, as well as several others.

get a sense of Bill's views and values, here is one of my favorite quotes about the role of leadership in a strong product company:

Leadership is about recognizing that there's a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.

At the core, I see three critically important differences between the strongest product companies and the rest:

The first is how the company views the role of technology.

The second is the role their product leaders play.

The third is how the company views the purpose of the product teams—the product managers, product designers, and engineers.

Technology allows us to solve problems for our customers in ways that are just now possible.

Whether the product or service is an insurance policy, a bank account, or an overnight parcel delivery, that product now has enabling technology at its core.

As such, in strong product companies, the purpose of the product team is to serve customers by creating products customers love, yet work for the business.

Instead, they are mainly there as facilitators, responsible for staffing the in‐house (or even worse, outsourced) feature factory, and keeping the trains running on time.

They are responsible for staffing and coaching the product teams; they are responsible for the product strategy and converting the strategy into action; and they're responsible for managing to results.

in strong product companies, the product leaders are among the most impactful leaders in the company.

Further, a focused and compelling product strategy—based on quantitative and qualitative insights—is among the most important contributions of product leadership.

Because the teams are provided, or are pressed to provide, roadmaps of features and projects, the focus of the team is delivery—delivery of these features. And features are output. Even if someone were to complain of lack of business results, who would you hold accountable?

In contrast, in strong product companies, teams are instead given problems to solve, rather than features to build,

the empowered product team model, the product manager has a clear responsibility, which is to ensure that the solutions are valuable (our customers will buy the product and/or choose to use it), and
viable (it will meet the needs of the business). Together with a product designer who is responsible for ensuring the solution is usable, and a tech lead who is responsible for ensuring the solution is feasible, the team is able to collaborate to address this full range of risks