The Product CEO

This my introductory post on this blog. So, I wanted to start with shedding some light on the title of this blog -- the product CEO.

So, who is a Product CEO?

Let me start off by saying that there isn’t one. At least not as a recognized job title or a designation, in most organizations. 

One might be inclined to think that it is the Chief Product Office (CPO) – but that’s not who (or what) I am referring to here.  

Every product manager is the CEO of the area / function / feature / whatever they are working on. This might sound like a slightly over the top assertion. So, bear with me as I lay this out. A product manager needs to think himself as the CEO of the product, in the same way as the CEO should care about everything to do with the company, a product manager should care about every aspect of the product – right from usability testing to technology to experience design marketing to messaging. There are multiple activities owned by different functions that need to come together for a successful (or not) product release. A product manager may not be an active driver or directly own all or most of these aspects of a product launch or release. However, he needs to be in involve and participate in different capacity (be it ideation / planning / validation / execution) and in varying degrees.

A product manager needs to work with marketing to draft the product messaging or positioning or the hero features for the product page on marketing website.

He needs to work the operations team to map out the product fulfilment / delivery in the various sales route or channels

He needs to work with the engineering to ensure the architecture design scales for horizontally and vertically to more users and use cases in the future.

He needs to work with the designer to make sure the all the experience and interactions are optimized towards the desired/target usability metrics and aligned to the real user scenarios and workflows.

He should jointly work with usability testing to identify scenarios and work out a plan (criteria, target users, target workflows etc.)

He needs to work with the quality assurance / engineering team to ensure that the certification and quality metrics are well defined and tracked on an ongoing basis leading up to the release.

Depending on the organization, there could be more areas where a product manager might need to get this hands into. My intent is not to list out everything that a product manager does or should do as part of this day to day job. The key message is that a product manager needs to think and act beyond addition to his core function / responsibility of defining the product roadmap, strategy and requirements (more on those later!). He needs to be that fulcrum around which the other key aspects of a product launch or release comes together to deliver on the end user value and business value.

So, the question that you should ask yourself as a product manager is am I able to rise above my role as product manager and be the CEO of my product. If not, it is time to go back to the drawing board.