Product Collective - 💪 Become a product leader

Becoming a Product Leader

If you want to move into a Product Leader role, the transition is full of excitement and uncertainty. The excitement comes from the potential of having a bigger impact on the organization through guiding and coaching your team. The uncertainty comes from all the stuff that comes along with managing people. Fortunately, several people have moved into Product Leadership and shared their experiences and lessons learned.

Advancing from Product Manager to Product Leader. Every profession has level bands of proficiency with rising expectations. The transition between those bands is a critical time of growth and a lot of uncertainty about the new expectations—“what worked before might not work going forward.” Product Management is a relatively new profession, so the bands of proficiency are not as steeped in institutions—yet there are clear stages in the careers of most PMs. Adam Harmetz discusses the bands of proficiency for Product Managers and focuses on the transition from “Product Manager” to “Product Leader.”

(via @AdamHarmetz)

How to be a great Product Leader. One challenge long acknowledged in the tech industry is how difficult the transition can be from a software engineer to an engineering manager because of the vast distinction in the skill set to be great at the new role. Equally challenging but less talked about is how much this same challenge exists when transitioning from a Product Manager to a Manager of Product Managers, i.e. a Product Leader. Sachin Rekhi shares some lessons he’s learned along the way, making his own transition from a product manager to a product leader.

(via @sachinrekhi)

Continues below...

It’s official – February is behind us! In a place like my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, that doesn’t necessarily mean that winter is over. But flipping the calendar past February, to me, is symbolic that Spring is at least coming soon enough. And Springtime gives everybody a bit to look forward to. 

At home, it also means that it’s time to do a bit of “Spring Cleaning,” which includes getting rid of the things that we’re not often using and generally tidying things up. But let’s face it – chances are, there’s a lot to clean up at work, too. Maybe it’s time for a bit of a different kind of Spring Cleaning.

There are several ways to approach an “at work” Spring Cleaning:

• Have you revisited the dashboards you use to keep track of how your product is working recently? If not, it may be time to think about whether the metrics you’re tracking are still all relevant.
• Have you counted up all of the subscriptions/platforms your team is using? Are you actually using all of these?
• Have you reviewed your roadmap lately? I know that it may feel like you just finalized it, but we should always be thinking about how to proactively iterate it for the future.

There are plenty of ways to go through Spring Cleaning at work. Take the time to think of your own. My bet is that you won’t regret how it feels once you’ve tidied things up at work. 

Your go-to guide to product leadership. Product leadership (PL) isn’t just another way of saying product management because Product Leaders go beyond managing products. True, there’s no absolute definition of product leadership, but you can explore the common traits, what it takes to become a great product leader, the essential product leadership qualities, and more. Adam Bennett put together this guide to cover key product leadership topics.

(via @PLEDalliance)

The first 90-day plan for new Product Leaders. Product management is still relatively new, but it’s different for each sector and every company. The same applies to Product Leaders who pave their path and define their roles. Shubhansha Agrawal’s career transitioned from an engineer to a product manager to leading a global team of product managers with Yelp. Based on that experience, Shubhansha shares her learnings and a comprehensive 30/60/90 day action items and pitfalls for new Product Leaders.

(via @MindtheProduct)

Max’s story: From Design to Product leadership. In 2014, Maxence Mauduit joined Buzzvil as a product designer. At that point, Buzzvil had 20 members total, and the design team was only 3 members, including Max. There were no PMs, and their focus was on a B2C app called Honeyscreen. Today, Buzzvil counts over 120 members and offers Monetization and Engagement booster solutions to dozens of publishers. They still manage Honeyscreen too, but they use the service as the best showcase of our tech. Max evolved along with Buzzvil’s growth, to be a product team leader. He also manages Buzzvil’s design team, which now counts 8 talented members. Here’s Max’s story.

(via @mmaxence)

Product Collective's Talent initiative already introduced many candidates to companies hiring! As a refresher, if you're looking for a new job, you can apply here and companies will be reaching out to you about their open roles.

There are 10+ companies hiring from Talent now. Check out a few highlights from this week:

• Mos (Series B, backed by Tiger Global)
• Rippling (Series D, backed by Sequoia)
• Stelo Labs (Seed Stage, Backed by Andreessen Horowitz)

If your team is hiring, reply to this email to learn more about it. Or sign up here to have immediate access to almost 200 candidates from our community.