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Martin Eriksson has 25+ years experience building world-class online products in both corporate and start-up environments for global brands such as Monster, Financial Times, Huddle, and Covestor. He is the Founder of ProductTank, the Co-Founder and Curator of Mind the Product, and a Product Partner at leading venture capital fund EQT Ventures. He is also the author of the best-seller Product Leadership, How Top Product Leaders Launch Great Products and Build Successful Teams (O'Reilly, 2017).

Martin Eriksson

When Ben Horowitz wrote his groundbreaking memo <a href="http://a16z.com/2012/06/15/good-product-managerbad-product-manager/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">good product manager, bad product manager</a> nearly 20 years ago he described a product manager as the CEO of the product. While this has gotten a lot of people excited about the job I couldn’t disagree more. Unless you’re the founder and the product manager at the same time, you are not the CEO of anything. In this post, I&#8217;ll explain why.
While you could argue that a product manager is ultimately responsible for the success or failure of a product in much the same way the CEO is ultimately responsible for the success of the business, even that similarity is a stretch. A product manager ultimately has a CEO behind them somewhere, and can always pass the buck. Now, most product managers don’t pass the buck, and this ownership of the problem and willingness to make the hard decisions is where a product manager gets closest to being a CEO. However, there is a massive difference between having someone behind you or actually having the final say.
Where the two roles differ completely is in authority. Product managers simply don’t have any direct authority over most of the things needed to make their products successful — from user and data research through design and development to marketing, sales, and support. Even today’s most senior product leaders only have hiring and firing control over their direct reports — other product managers. Does that sound like any CEO you know?
<a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/interpreting-the-product-venn-diagram-with-matt-lemay-and-martin-eriksson/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Watch this Fireside chat on Interpreting the product Venn Diagram with Matt LeMay and Martin Eriksson where the role of a product manager is discussed in depth. </a>
A CEO, on the other hand, stands truly alone, with ultimate responsibility for the success or failure of not just the company but every product in it. The CEO also controls all the resources of the company — with hiring and firing prerogatives across the company and having a final say on the budget. Does that sound like any product manager you know?
<h3>Not just semantics</h3>
This may seem like mere semantics but the distinction is important. Too many product managers I meet buy into this trope of CEO-of-the-product and believe their role is to act as an authoritarian CEO, often with disastrous results. These product managers tend to believe they have all the answers, that they produce the best solutions and designs, and that their teams should just do what they’re told. They’re mini-CEOs after all!
<h3>Lead, don’t command</h3>
Truly successful product leaders instead embrace their lack of authority. Instead, they lead their teams and the wider company through communication, vision, and influence. Product managers focus on collaborating across the company, bringing together the best people to move the product forward, and setting those teams free to execute on their product vision.
In Daniel Pink’s book To Sell is Human, he refers to this skill as the ability to “move” people from one mindset to another. Successful product managers and leaders spend a significant portion of their time engaged in these ‘moving’ activities. They bring everyone together around a shared understanding of the customer problem so that everyone can be involved in helping solve it to further the business goals.
<a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/product-management-team-sport/">Product management is a team sport</a> after all, and the best teams don’t have bosses &#8211; they have coaches who ensure all the skills and experiences needed are present on the team, that everyone is in the right place, knows where the goal is, and then gets out of the way and lets the team do what they do best in order to reach that goal.
<a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/building-extraordinary-teams/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Read this post on Building extraordinary product teams by Federico Iglesias</a>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-10684" src="//wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Youre-not-the-boss-of-me-GIF.gif" alt="Youre-not-the-boss-of-me-GIF" width="500" height="200" />
As Ken Norton, Product Partner at GV, says in my upcoming book <a href="http://productleadershipbook.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Great Products and Build Successful Teams</a>, “When you’re a product manager, you’re generally not the boss. You need to gain authority through your actions and your leadership skills, not your role.”
Most of the product leaders we interviewed for the book echoed sentiments like this. “A lot of people say the product manager is like the CEO or the captain of the ship — I don&#8217;t really think of it that way. When you describe things like that, it makes it seem as though you&#8217;re making all the decisions or driving how everything works together, and you’re not,” adds Mina Radhakrishnan, the first Head of Product at Uber.
<a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/mtp-prioritised-ama-with-mina-radhakrishnan/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Watch this AMA session with Mina Radhakrishnan</a>
<h3>You are not the CEO</h3>
You are not the CEO of your product, you are not Steve Jobs, you are not a <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/netflix-abstracts-team-out-of-product-design/">lone genius</a> designing a product from your ivory tower. Never forget that as a product leader you are only as good as your team. Setting them up for success and giving them the space and air cover to do their best is ultimately how you and your product will be successful.
Just because you can pass the buck to someone higher up the chain of command, it doesn’t mean you should. You should live and die by your product’s success and failure, because giving it your all is important whether you’re the CEO or not.
<h3>But one day&#8230;</h3>
&#8220;I think actually product leaders, not surprisingly, are often seen as great potential candidates for the CEO or COO when they get further on in their career. That&#8217;s because at an executive level, all the product management attributes are relevant. As a product manager, you&#8217;re focused on the money, the users, the data, and on the future&#8221; says Tanya Cordrey, Non-Executive Director &amp; Digital Adviser at the ‎Schibsted Media Group.
So while you may not be the CEO of anything right now, the funny thing is Product Leaders make for great CEOs. Some CEOs could maybe even do with acting more like Product Leaders. All those skills of leading without authority, moving mindsets, and setting your team up for success are what define great CEOs too. If you want that title, keep working on those skills and who knows where you might end up!
<hr />
<a href="http://productleadershipbook.com"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-10691" style="border: 0px;" src="//wp-content/uploads/2017/03/product-leadership-book-199x300.png" alt="Product Leadership Book" width="199" height="300" srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/product-leadership-book-199x300.png 199w, /wp-content/uploads/2017/03/product-leadership-book.png 331w" sizes="(max-width: 199px) 100vw, 199px" /></a>Enjoy what you’ve read? Good, because there’s an entire book full of this stuff!
I’ve been working with two masters of product <a href="https://medium.com/@rmbanfield" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Richard Banfield</a> and <a href="https://medium.com/@nwalkingshaw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Nate Walkingshaw</a> on writing a book that all product professionals can benefit from. Partly out of curiosity and on the back of our own experience, we’ve interviewed almost one hundred product leaders. Their insights and experiences will open up the conversation and take the lid off the mystery of great product leadership.
The <a href="http://productleadershipbook.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Product Leadership book</a> is being published by O&#8217;Reilly and will be out on shelves in May 2017 but you can pre-order the book on <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Product-Leadership-Managers-Successful-Products/dp/1491960604/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Amazon</a> today!
You can follow us at <a href="http://twitter.com/rmbanfield" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">@rmbanfield</a>, <a href="http://twitter.com/bfgmartin" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">@bfgmartin</a>, and <a href="http://twitter.com/nwalkingshaw" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">@nwalkingshaw</a>.
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