Inside the High-Performing Product Team

Understanding the key players and their essential skills.

In my last post, I covered the styles of product organization. Today, I’d like to explore the people and skills that make up an effective product organization. It’s not an exhaustive list, but a combination of what I’m thinking about today and what my experience tells me is common and important.

Chief Product Officer

Let’s start with the top product leader. This person usually has the title of Chief Product Officer (CPO) or Head of Product. I’ve always said the title doesn’t matter so much as long as they do what they need to do. 

The CPO sits with and between other senior leaders to resolve a lot of different interests and viewpoints. She must interact with sales, support, finance, and technology. She has the job of aligning product strategy with overall business strategy. A big part of this gig is negotiation and pairing with these perspectives. She’ll end up working with:

• The Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) to understand why business is being won or lost within her product portfolio or lines. The CRO and the CPO have two different time horizons, with CROs being a bit more concerned with the immediate quarter and year, whereas CPOs need to have a short-, mid-, and long-term view where long-term means a couple of years.

• The Chief Financial Officer (CFO) must understand the profits and losses for her various products—expenses, revenue, profitability, etc. These conversations are sometimes painful, as products that don’t achieve or sustain profitability may get axed. 

• The Chief Technical Officer (CTO) owns what we’re building. Are we building it in the “right way?” Is what we’re building minimal enough? Is it producing useful feedback or validation? Are legacy systems holding products back due to the high cost of change? There’s potential for a lot of tension in these discussions, but performance requires these roles to be actively involved in negotiating those tensions.

There are others, but my point is that the CPO has to resolve many different concerns before conversations about products and users can happen effectively. It’s not always visible work, but it’s happening. Good CPOs surface these tensions and the corresponding negotiations within their team as strategy and vision. This requires a very particular set of skills.

Effective CPOs need to be good at listening and negotiating. They must be good at storytelling  and influencing other parts of the organization that may sometimes have competing agendas. They don’t have the authority to tell the CFO, CRO, or CTO what to do, so they’ll often have to make the case that their product strategies will create wins for these other roles and, in turn, the business. It’s no wonder that CPOs often end up becoming CEOs. I think the skillset prepares them for the top chief role.

Product VPs and Directors

With our CPO’s focus dominated by strategy, markets, and working with the senior leadership team, she’ll need help to make her organization function. That’s where the middle layer comes into play. Role names will vary here, but we’ll keep it simple. VP of Product and Director of Product are the common titles that come into play.

The biggest responsibilities I see for these people fall into three big buckets: people management and development, communication and coordination, and synthesizing strategies into objectives. Let’s poke at each one in turn.

These leaders need to build a strong team of product managers. In addition to the normal people management activities any manager undergoes, they must develop the skills within their PMs. Equip them for success. Product management is not an easy gig, so the investment in skills development compared to other groups might be higher than usual. Hiring is a big part of people management, but a lot of what makes a good PM is tacit knowledge. What’s going on in the firm, market, etc? There’s also the practice and refinement of skills that take a while to master, such as storytelling or influencing without authority. 

VPs and directors in product organizations help the CPO, who can’t be everywhere at all times, scale their efforts. Solid and regular communication is needed to bridge the gap between the boardroom and team room. Changing a product strategy? Overcommunicate that vision by a factor of 10. The best leaders occupying these roles aren’t bothered by this repetition.

Larger organizations may have single-product, multiple-team setups. Dependencies might need to be negotiated across product and technical leaders. We hate to see scaling for scaling's sake, but in larger organizations, the “teams of teams” concept is a real necessity. These leaders have a huge impact on how well this can work. We should have already, but let’s add relationship-building to the big list of skills a product leader needs to bring.

Keep this in mind: the product organization is often one of the smaller organizations in a company. It’s common to see 20–30 people in a product group within a large enterprise or Fortune 500 organization. It’s not like you’ve got 1000 people with specialized skills. Lots of capability needs to be concentrated into a handful of people. 

Product Manager

I think it’s funny that engineers have so many ways of describing their badassery. There’s the 10x developer. There’s the notion of “being full stack.” What’s the equivalent for product managers? Unicorn product managers?

Product management can be a tough gig just because of how many frickin’ skills are needed to be effective at it. Let’s tally them up:

That’s a lot. Who could possibly be expected to max out each one of these? They’re all really important, so what do we do with this conundrum? 

We have to lean into two things to make effective product managers: the product team concept and developing these people so they have a fighting chance to succeed. I already mentioned the latter, and I might post on this in the future, so let’s focus on the team thing.

The good news is that there are a couple of focus areas that make the job a hell of a lot easier:

1. Storytelling and communications: Get good at comms, storytelling, and incorporating data into your stories. Tell the stories of customers, users, and the market to get your technical teammates on board. Remember, effective PMing is really about influencing without authority. The engineers and the people who build our products don’t work for us—they never work for us. So we need to get them excited and build that camaraderie of “we’re all in this together.” 

2. Build the full-stack team: Some of these skills can be distributed across members of a product engineering team. One example is delegating problem-solving to the engineers. They love doing that. Your job is to set them up with the right constraints and provide timely feedback so they solve the right problem. 

The cool thing is that developing these capabilities will serve you well as you gain responsibility and transition to a leadership role (assuming that’s your goal). They’re timeless and classic.

We encourage our clients not to worry so much about background and pedigree when considering new PMs. Look for people who are good communicators and leaders. They’re the ones that will find a groove in product management.

Advantage: Product Team

Product management has a few unique advantages that offset the job's difficulty. 

All product managers, no matter the level or title, must operate as leaders. Good leaders inspire. They overcommunicate. They bring people along with stories and data, giving them the why and the purpose so the strategy can take hold.

PM organizations tend to be small. This isn’t a diss. It’s a power! A source of leverage! Within the PM group, there’s a unique opportunity to have fewer and shorter communication paths. If you can communicate half as well as your average 14-year-old “Call of Duty” player, that’s a huge lever for effectiveness.

An effective product organization isn't just about the titles and roles. It's about the people and the unique skills they bring to the table. From the CPO navigating complex strategic relationships, to the VPs and Directors scaling efforts and bridging communication gaps, to the Product Managers mastering essential skills, each layer plays a vital role. The key lies in fostering strong communication, continuous skill development, and a culture of collaboration. By focusing on these elements, we can build a product organization that thrives, getting stronger with each passing day.