What Should a Head of Product Do?

Becoming a head of product is a career aspiration for many product managers and product owners. But what exactly should a head of product do? Which are the responsibilities the individual should fulfil? Read on to find out my answer.

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The Head of Product Role

A head of product is someone who manages a group of product people — individuals who look after one or more products and who may be called product manager or product owner. Depending on the size and org structure of your company, the role might also be referred to as Chief Product Officer, VP Product, or Director of Product Management.[1]

As the head of product, you play a key part in developing the people on your team, creating an environment that helps them succeed, and improving the effectiveness of the product management function in the enterprise.[2]

The responsibilities I share below are based on my work with product leaders and product practitioners. To make the duties more accessible, I have grouped them into four sets: people management, processes and tools, business strategy and organisational development, and self-leadership. Note that I have kept the description of the responsibilities concise. To learn more, please follow the links in the text.

Be aware that there is no one right way to apply the head of product role or a golden standard for doing the job. You should therefore tailor my recommendations to your team and organisation. The best way to do this is to ask the people on the product management team how you can effectively support them as the head of product.

People Management

• Create an environment where people feel valued and able to speak their minds. Genuinely care about the individuals on your team and show appreciation for their efforts. Practice active listening, empathise with the team members, speak and act with integrity, and build strong, trustful connections. Give people a choice about the products they work on, for example, by using self-selection. This increases motivation and it shows the team members that you value them.
• Set clear expectations and agree on specific, measurable, and outcome-based goals. Having well-defined roles in place will help you with this, as I’ll discuss below.
• Make sure that the product people have the authority and autonomy they need to succeed in their jobs. Individuals who manage products should have full-stack ownership and be empowered to make not only tactical product decisions but also strategic ones. Additionally, ensure that the products are loosely coupled so that they can be effectively progressed and not held back by dependencies.
• Hold people accountable to meet the agreed goals. Use, for example, the CEDAR model and appreciative inquiry techniques to offer feedback in the right way and help people get back on track.
• Develop the individuals on the team. Help them get better at product management and grow as product professionals. This includes acquiring new skills and deepening existing ones — depending on the specific role the person plays. You might achieve this by mentoring and coaching the individuals as well as recommending suitable training courses. Don’t forget to capture the learning and development measure, for example, on a learning roadmap.
• Establish clear career paths to retain team members and show them how they can advance their careers. For instance, someone might start as a feature owner, then take on the Scrum product owner role, next become a portfolio manager and finally a head of product.
• Encourage a growth mindset and create a failure-tolerant environment where experiencing setbacks and making mistakes is seen as a necessary part of learning new skills as well as bringing new products and features to live. One way to do this is to share failure experiences from your career.
• Remove impediments the team members face and act as an escalation partner for problems the individual product people cannot solve. Examples are excessive red tape and the lack of qualified Scrum Masters.
• Help the team members practise sustainable pace so they don’t sacrifice their wellbeing but stay healthy and motivated. For example, encourage people to take regular breaks from work and don’t expect that they work extra hours.
• Grow the product management team. This includes creating job descriptions and interviewing candidates. A great way to develop the team is to organise around products, as I discuss in more detail in the article Tips for Growing a Product Management Team.

Read On …

To read the rest of this article and access the remaining tips, please head over to my website: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/what-should-a-head-of-product-do/

Learn More

You can learn more about successfully playing the head of product role by attending my product leadership training and by reading my book How to Lead in Product Management.

Notes

[1] See Rich Mironov, “Hiring a Head of Product.”

[2] This approach is inspired by Esther Derby’s work, which builds on Kurt Lewin insight that the behaviour an individual shows is the result of the person and the environment, see “Skills Are Only Half the Equation for Success.”

Source: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/what-should-a-head-of-product-do/