Product Leadership Archetypes

Just recently SVPG Partner Christian Idiodi hosted Shreyas Doshi on his Product Therapy podcast, where they discussed the role of product leadership.

If you haven’t yet listened to this interview, I would strongly encourage it, as I loved hearing Shreyas’ thoughts on this critically important topic. You can find the full episode here.

Shreyas described three different archetypes of product leaders: the craftsperson (“it’s all about the product”), the operator (“it’s about scale”), and the visionary (“it’s about the future”).¹

I hope you listen to the full interview as Shreyas shared valuable context and nuance that I consider essential for this foundational topic. But for those that can’t take the time, he shared this summary chart with me:

I immediately resonated with this taxonomy of product leaders, as I know so many of each. And as Shreyas pointed out, yes, most people have skills from multiple archetypes. But he also pointed out that everyone has a preference, and that preference influences so much.

One thing I found remarkable about this interview was that Shreyas was able to describe each of the three types of product leaders, seemingly without judgement. He very clearly articulated each archetype, and what each is good at, and he shared this so objectively that his opinions on their relative merits were hard to decipher.

But like Shreyas, I also advise a lot of CEO’s on their head of product hires, so after this interview, several people have asked me which archetype I thought they should be focused on?

The purpose of this article is to share some opinions about the relative value of each archetype in product companies. And especially when talking about operators, there is some additional nuance that I believe is important to understand.

Product Craft – The Foundation of Effective Product Leaders

While I agree that it’s normal for product leaders to have skills in multiple of these three roles, I view the craft skills as table stakes.

I realize I’m very biased on this point, but if you believe, as I do, that at every stage, companies live or die by their products, and that the product teams care about what the product leader cares about, then it’s really non-negotiable that the product leader be absolutely skilled and passionate about the craft of product.

I don’t care how skilled a product leader is in terms of an operator or a visionary if she is not, first and foremost, very accomplished regarding the craft of product. And when this is not the case, this accounts for so many weak product organizations.

The Visionary

The issue of visionary product leaders is mainly an issue when there are too many cooks in the kitchen – in particular, a visionary founder with a visionary product leader. This situation rarely lasts long, and Shreyas addressed this in his talk.

But in practice, most product leaders that are all about the craft, are also very interested in, and usually pretty good at, product vision, and if and when they start a company of their own, they can then exercise those muscles.

The Two Very Different Types of Operators

Which leads me to operators.

This is the difficult one to discuss. That’s because there are two very different types of operators I see out there. One is absolutely gold, but the other is the root of the problem for so many companies.

And this is because there are two very different approaches to scaling an organization; through coaching, or through process.

Steve Jobs actually talked about the problematic ones in the Lost Interview, when he talked about the perils of process people. These people have good intentions, but are essentially trying to use process as a scalable substitute for thinking.

Yet the craftsperson knows that thinking is at the very core of product craft, and precisely what we need to scale.

When someone is recruited from a large, well-known company, many of those companies are good at trying to please as many stakeholders as possible, but not good at product, and that’s the last thing you want to bring into your company.

Yet someone that deeply understands the craft of product, and is skilled at bringing out the best in product people, yet also knows how to align a large organization in order to accomplish meaningful goals, can be exactly what your company needs to get to the next level.

What’s The Best for You?

So first and foremost, it’s essential to get someone that has real product craft skills.

If you’re a growth stage company or larger, then having additional skills for scaling the craft through strong coaching and organizational alignment would be ideal.

If your founder is good at vision and wants to continue in that role, then just coach your product leader that they are there to help make the founder’s vision a reality. If your founder is not good at vision and needs help, or if that founder has left and there’s a new CEO that is not visionary, then most product leaders that are strong at craft can also provide the necessary vision.

But in my experience, while it’s important to understand each of the three product leadership archetypes, the key to successful and effective product leadership is strong craft plus coaching.

Special thanks to Chris Jones and Shreyas for their comments and suggestions on early drafts of this article.

The little taglines for each are mine. ↩︎

Product Leadership Archetypes

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