Product Manager Is The Product CEO
This widely shared post was doing its rounds recently, in the Product Management circles. It proclaims “Product Managers, You are not the CEO of anything.” I couldn’t disagree more with the title and the line of argumentation in the article.
Let me explain the logical fallacy when people say product managers are not the CEO of anything. This above mentioned blog post claims that the difference between a product manager and a CEO is ‘authority.’ Its reasoning goes like this — since product managers don’t have ‘authority’, they are not anything close to being a CEO. The truth couldn’t be farther from this line of reasoning.
First, we need to understand how a good CEO operates. Good CEOs are hardly the authoritarian kind. Good CEOs, just like a good product manager, manage by influence. A good CEO earns the trust and confidence of investors, employees, customers and partners. A good CEO doesn’t wield authority each time to get things done.
My experience working directly with CEOs of fledgling startups to Fortune 50 companies and observing them up close tells me good CEOs rarely use authority. They are not good CEOs because of their position or its power. They are good CEOs because they know how to influence people to get the job done — very similar to what a good product manager does. The emphasis is less on the ‘manager’ in the title, and more on the other aspects of leadership.
Good PMs tell great stories to align the entire organization for the product’s success just like a good CEO.
Ben Horowitz’s classic Good PM vs. Bad PM says, “A good product manager is the CEO of the product. A good product manager takes full responsibility and measures themselves in terms of the success of the product.” Ben’s post is still the best place to understand what a Good PM does.
On bringing the donuts, sorry, Ken, there’s an App for that. Referring to Ben’s article again, if your product managers are going to be gophers for engineering then bringing the donuts might just be the kind of work you want to do. If you want to lead with influence by figuring out the motivations of various members in your product process and bringing your A game to the table, you’ll be on your way to product leadership.
To conclude, the blog post is absolutely right about the PM’s role but misses out on what a good CEO does and how she operates. And because of that, the comparison and argumentation in the rest of the post don’t add up.
In fact, I’m writing a book titled The Product CEO — one that doesn’t bring donuts but fulfills the strategic role of product management.
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