Leadership Skills for Product Owners

Why Leadership Matters

An entrepreneur comes up with an idea, and tries to get funding for it. They prepare the best “deck” or “stack” of slides, and armed with business knowledge, data, sales skills, storytelling and more, they try to convince venture capitalists that their ideas are worth the investors’ money. If they succeed, they may just create something of value to the world and to their nascent company. If they fail, they don’t. 

When they get funding, they’ll build, measure and learn, and decide whether to persevere or to pivot. Their leadership will be responsible for the success, or failure, of the company, perhaps with partners, but that’s a very small group of people, who are already onboard. We’ve all heard of these pivotal founders and the organization structures they create, to shape companies in their image, e.g. Steve Jobs. This funny illustration below shows just how much the leadership, and the character of the leader/s of a company, affects its structure (notice Apple under the late Steve Jobs, for example).

Why Do Product Owners Need Leadership Skills?

We’ve talked about founders, entrepreneurs – independent risk takers. But what about Product Owners that are hired employees and are individual contributors? 

Why do Product Owners need great leadership skills?

Here is why:

It’s often this lack of formal authority that creates the necessity for amazing leadership skills. If you cannot convince others to follow your ideas, to collaborate with you on building them, measuring them, and launching them to the customers, you may be stuck. You won’t be able to just sit and wait for someone to enable or empower you. 

Even when there are product teams assigned to your product/domain (as it should be), you’re still not managing/leading them as a team, only their work, and rely on their partnership to create truly incredible products, instead of just barely functional, or “good enough”. In a hyper-competitive environment, “good enough” isn’t good enough to win over customers from competitors, or avoid churn to more agile competitors.

Think of yourself as the entrepreneur in the earlier example. However, unlike the entrepreneur, you may be building things without asking for any special funding, or convincing anyone. Just not the things you want to build, or not the things the customers need to solve their problems. You may be building what you’re asked, serving as a proxy Product Owner, a middleman, a scribe for tasks of others, etc. 

How Leadership Skills Help Product Owners Create True Ownership: Product Owner Key Roles and Responsibilities

Great Product Owners inspires others

Think of great leaders you’re familiar with – they’re larger than life figures, and when they speak, they capture the attention of the room. Product Owners must be inspiring. Whether you call it EQ, communication skills, presentation skills – those are things great leaders and great Product Owners must have.

When you’re developing your product vision, you must inspire people, even if you’re not managing them.

Great Product Owners are creative and proactive, not reactive

Product Owners that want to move on from proxy to entrepreneur, must take initiative and provide their own ideas and input, instead of waiting for others to ask them to build it. It’s a cycle – by displaying great initiative, you’re perceived as a leader, not a follower, and thus you may eventually become a true leader with formal authority (granted by others, naturally), e.g. Head of Product, or Product Group Manager, etc. (if that is your aspiration).

Even if you continue on the individual contributor path, those skills are invaluable to allow you to develop innovative products (not just copying others’ products).

Great Product Owners delegate and empower others

No one builds the entire product on their own. Product Owners can treat their teammates like hired labor (and expect results that are at best mediocre), or they can empower them, delegate to them things that may (initially) be perceived as “in the product domain”. By doing that, they empower them, and allow themselves to move on to “higher level” work, moving from the Proxy/Scribe Product Owner stance, to move, ever closer, to becoming a true entrepreneur. It’s a win-win.

Leadership Skills for Product Owners: What are some examples of constraint alignment?

For example, if you’re building a new feature, a Product Owner should involve the team (or its representative/s) from the idea stage. It’s called “Product Discovery” and Marty Cagan discusses it at length in his book, “Inspired”.

An idea Jurgen brings up in the book is “Next year, we are going to win the Best Product award for our industry” or “By the end of next year, the public will recognize that we have beaten the iPhone”, and while we should make sure our goals are realistic within our company’s/industry’s context, these types of aspirations, in term of product vision, create a leadership perception. Compare this to “Our features should be launched on time, as planned” and think which is more inspiring.

Finally, you could set a lot of KPI/metric related constraints for anything you aim to build, which will connect the teams to the business purposes, and ensure they don’t just think of the technical aspect on its own, but how it would affect business metrics (e.g. a slower application would reduce conversion, not just be a technical challenge, but a business one).