by Marty Cagan
The product solution they ended up with placed the AdWords‐generated ads to the side of the search results, so they wouldn't be confused with the salesperson‐sold ads, which were displayed on the top of the results.
Also, instead of determining placement based solely on the price paid, they would use a formula that multiplied the price paid per impression with the ad's performance (click‐through‐rate) to determine placement, so that the best‐performing ads—the ones most likely to be most relevant to users—would rise to the top, and the worst ads would be unlikely to be displayed at all, even if they were sold at a higher price.
This solution clearly differentiated for the sales team and ensured quality search results, whether paid or organic.
This is yet another example of how there are always so many good reasons for products not to get built. In the products that succeed, there is always someone like Jane, behind the scenes, working to get over each and every one of the objections, whether they're technical, business, or anything else.
Jane led the product discovery work and wrote the first spec for AdWords. Then she worked side by side with the engineers to build and launch the product, which was hugely successful.
This is yet another example of how there are always so many good reasons for products not to get built. In the products that succeed, there is always someone like Jane, behind the scenes, working to get over each and every one of the objections, whether they're technical, business, or anything else.
Jane took a break to start a family and is now back at Google once again, this time helping out the YouTube team.
People @ Scale
Overview
Most companies know that they need to double down on their efforts to recruit very strong staff as they grow, but they don't always know what other changes are important as they grow and scale.
What are the changes in the leadership roles? How do we maintain the holistic view of product when we have many teams? How do we keep teams feeling empowered and autonomous when they just own a small part of the whole? How do we encourage accountability when the only person that owns everything is the CEO? How do we deal with the explosion of dependencies?
These are the topics we will tackle as we discuss how strong product organizations scale.
CHAPTER 16
The Role of Leadership
The primary job of leadership in any technology organization is to recruit, to develop, and to retain strong talent. However, in a product company, the role goes beyond people development and into what we call holistic view of product.
One of the big challenges of growth is knowing how the whole product hangs together. Some people like to think of holistic view as connecting the dots between the teams.
For a startup, there's typically just one or two product teams, so it's not too hard for everyone to keep in their heads a holistic view of the product. However, this quickly becomes much tougher as the company grows—first to a larger product and soon to many product teams.
One of the big challenges of growth is knowing how the whole product hangs together. Some people like to think of holistic view as connecting the dots between the teams.
The three distinct but critical elements to the holistic view of product are described next.
Leaders of Product Management
To ensure a holistic view of how the entire system fits together from a business point of view (product vision, strategy, functionality, business rules, and business logic), we need either the leaders of the product management organization (VP product, directors of product), or a principal product manager.
This person should regularly review the work of the various product managers and product teams, identifying and helping to resolve conflicts.
For large‐scale organizations, some companies prefer this to be an individual contributor role (e.g., a principal product manager), but let me be clear that this is a very senior role (usually equivalent to a director‐level manager). Since the head of product is first and foremost responsible for building the skills of the product managers, a dedicated principal product manager is able to focus on the product itself and is readily accessible as a critical resource to all the product managers, product designers, engineers, and test automation staff.
If you use a principal product manager for this, he or she should be a direct report to the head of product so that everyone understands the importance of the role and the responsibilities of that person.
Whether this role is covered by the head of product or a principal product manager, this is a critically essential role for companies with large and complex business systems, especially with many legacy systems.
Leaders of Product Design
One of the most important roles in a company is the person or people responsible for the holistic user experience. These leaders must ensure a consistent and effective user experience systemwide. This is sometimes the leader of the product design team, sometimes one of the managers or directors of design, and sometimes a principal designer reports to this leader. In any case, it must be someone very strong in holistic product design.
There are so many interactions and interdependencies—and so much necessary institutional knowledge of the business and the users and the customer journey—that at least one person must review everything going on with the product that is going to be visible to the user. You can't expect any individual product manager or designer to be able to have this all in their head.
Leaders of Technology Organization
Finally, to ensure a holistic view of how the entire system fits together from a technology point of view, we have a technology organization leader (often titled CTO or VP engineering). In practice, that person is often helped by a group of engineering managers and directors and/or software architects.
The CTO, managers, and architects are responsible for the holistic view of the system implementation. They should be reviewing the architecture and systems design of all the software—both systems developed by your own staff, as well as any systems designed by vendors. They should also have a clear strategy for managing technical debt.
Again, this is a critically essential role for companies with large and complex business systems, especially with many legacy systems, and should be placed in the organization somewhere that makes these people visible and available to the entire technology organization (this is usually a direct report to the head of technology).
Holistic View Leadership Roles
The larger the company gets, the more critical these three roles are, and their absence is usually all too obvious. If the product or site looks like it was created by half a dozen different outside design agencies, with conflicting user models and poor usability, you're probably missing a head of design or principal designer.
If projects are constantly getting stuck because product managers don't understand the implications of their decisions or product managers are constantly asking developers to look at the code to tell them how the system really works, then you're probably missing a principal product manager.
And if your software is a big mess of spaghetti and it takes forever to make even simple changes, you're probably suffering from significant technical debt.
You might ask what happens if one of these people gets hit by a bus or leaves the company? First and foremost, don't lose these people! Take care of them and don't give them any reason to want to leave or feel like they need to become a manager to make more money.
Second, you should always be trying to develop more of these people, and each of them should have at least one person they're working to develop into a strong second. But they are a rare and incredibly valuable commodity, as this learning does not happen overnight.
Some companies think the answer to this is to try to document the system to the degree that everything is captured somehow in a way that members of the organization can all go to get the same sorts of answers for which they use the principal designer, principal product manager, and software archite
ct.
I know a few organizations that have tried hard to achieve this, but I have never seen this succeed. The systems always seem to grow in complexity and size much faster than anyone can document, and with software, the definitive answer always lives in the source code itself (at least the current answer—not usually the rationale or the history).
One final note: These three holistic‐view leaders—the head of product, the head of design, and the head of technology—are obviously very valuable individually, but in combination you can see their real power. This is why my personal preference is to have these three people sit very close to one another, sometimes in the same physical office.
CHAPTER 17
The Head of Product Role
I've written this chapter for three specific audiences:
If you are a CEO or executive recruiter and you're looking for a head of product, this chapter will give you a deeper understanding of what kind of person you should be seeking.
If you are currently leading a product organization, I'd like to offer this up as your key to success.
If you have aspirations of one day leading a product organization, this is a frank discussion of the skills you'll need to acquire.
In this chapter, I use the title VP product to refer to this position, but you'll also find titles ranging from director of product management to chief product officer. Whatever the title may be, I am referring here to your most senior product role in your company or business unit.
Organizationally, this role typically manages the product managers and product designers, sometimes the data analysts, and generally reports to the CEO. With some exceptions, it is important that this role be a peer to the CTO and the VP marketing.
I'll say right up front that this is a difficult role, and it is difficult to perform well. Those who do succeed in it make a dramatic difference for their companies. Great product leaders are highly valued and often go on to found their own companies. In fact, some of the best venture capitalists only invest in founders who have already proved themselves as great product leaders.
Competencies
Specifically, you are looking for someone who is proved to be strong in four key competencies: (1) team development, (2) product vision, (3) execution, and (4) product culture.
Team Development
The single most important responsibility of any VP product is to develop a strong team of product managers.
The single most important responsibility of any VP product is to develop a strong team of product managers and designers. This means making recruiting, training, and ongoing coaching the top priority. Realize that developing great people requires a different set of skills than developing great products, which is why many otherwise excellent product managers and designers never progress to leading organizations.
One of the worst things you can do is take one of your poor‐performing people and promote them to this leadership position. I know that may sound obvious, but you'd be surprised how many execs reason, “Well, this person is not very strong, but he works well with people, and the stakeholders seem to like him, so maybe I'll make him the head of product and hire a strong individual contributor to backfill him.” But how do you expect this poor performer to help develop his or her team into strong performers? And what message does this send to the organization?
For this position, you need to ensure you hire someone who has proven ability to develop others. They should have a track record of identifying and recruiting potential talent, and then working actively and continuously with those people to address their weaknesses and exploit their strengths.
Product Vision and Strategy
The product vision is what drives and inspires the company and sustains the company through the ups and downs. This may sound straightforward, but it's tricky. That's because there are two very different types of product leaders needed for two very different situations:
Where there is a CEO or a founder who is the clear product visionary
Where there is no clear product visionary—usually in situations where the founder has moved on
There are two very bad situations you may encounter related to product vision and strategy.
The first is when you have a CEO who is very strong at product and vision, but she wants to hire a VP product (or, more often, the board pushes her to hire a VP product), and she thinks she should be hiring someone in her own image—or at least visionary like her. The result is typically an immediate clash and a short tenure for the VP product. If this position looks like a revolving door, it's very possible that's what's going on.
The second bad situation is when the CEO is not strong at vision, but she also hires someone in her own image. This doesn't result in the clash (they often get along great), but it does leave a serious void in terms of vision, and this causes frustration among the product teams, poor morale across the company, and usually a lack of innovation.
The key here is that the VP product needs to complement the CEO. If you have a strong, visionary CEO, there may be some very strong VP product candidates that won't want the position because they know that, in this company, their job is primarily to execute the vision of the CEO.
One situation that unfortunately happens is when you have a visionary founder CEO, and she has a solid partner running product who is very strong at execution, but the founder eventually leaves and now the company has a problem because nobody is there to provide the vision for the future. It's generally not something a VP product can easily turn on and off, and even if they can, the rest of the company may not be willing to consider the product leader in this new light. This is why I generally prefer when the founders stay on at the company, even if they decide they want to bring in someone else as the CEO.
If you're wondering what to do when you have a CEO who thinks she's a strong visionary leader, but the rest of the company knows she's not, you need a very special head of product, one that is a strong visionary, but also has the ability and willingness to convince the CEO the vision was all her idea.
Execution
No matter where the vision comes from, all the great vision in the world doesn't mean much if you can't get the product idea into the hands of customers. You need a product leader who knows how to get things done and has absolutely proved her ability to do so.
There are many aspects that contribute to a team's ability to execute consistently, rapidly, and effectively. The product leader should be expert on modern forms of product planning, customer discovery, product discovery, and product development process, but execution also means that they know how to work effectively as part of an organization of your size.
The bigger the organization, the more critical it is that the person has proven, strong skills—especially in stakeholder management and internal evangelism. The product leader must be able to inspire and motivate the company and get everyone moving in the same direction.
Product Culture
Good product organizations have a strong team, a solid vision, and consistent execution. A great product organization adds the dimension of a strong product culture.
A strong product culture means that the team understands the importance of continuous and rapid testing and learning. They understand that they need to make mistakes in order to learn, but they need to make them quickly and mitigate the risks. They understand the need for continuous innovation. They know that great products are the result of true collaboration. They respect and value their designers and engineers. They understand the power of a motivated product team.
A strong VP product will understand the importance of a strong product culture, be able to give real examples of her own experiences with product culture, and have concrete plans for instilling this culture in your company.
Experience
The amount of relevant experience, such as domain experience, will depend on your particular company and industry. But at a minimum, you are looking for someone with the combination of a strong technology background with an und
erstanding of the economics and dynamics of your business and your market.
Chemistry
Last but certainly not least, everything previously discussed is still not enough. There is one more thing: Your product leader must be able to work well on a personal level with the other key execs, especially the CEO and CTO. It will not be fun for any of you if there isn't that personal connection. Make sure the interview process includes a long dinner with at least the CEO and CTO and probably the head of marketing and head of design. Be open and make it personal.
The Group Product Manager Role
There's a role in larger product organizations that I find especially effective. The role is titled group product manager, usually referred to as GPM.
The GPM is a hybrid role. Part individual contributor and part first‐level people manager. The idea is that the GPM is already a proven product manager (usually coming from a senior product manager title), and now the person is ready for more responsibility.
There are generally two career paths for product managers.
One is to stay as an individual contributor, which, if you're strong enough, can go all the way up to a principal product manager—a person who's an individual contributor but a rock‐star performer and willing and able to tackle the toughest product work. This is a very highly regarded role and generally compensated like a director or even VP.