Rise of the Product Leader

....that are not 'product people'

There is a lot of discussion about the increase of Product leaders that have little or no product experience as an IC and we are seeing the same thing happening all over the world and IMHO it is playing a part in a wider product community issue that we are all seeing : >

That we are still 20+ years into the discipline of modern product mgt - & still justifying our craft - educating businesses on how to leverage a product team to enable their strategic vision

If the only people in product leadership roles were people who HAD walked a mile or 100 in a PO or PMs shoes earlier in their career THIS would likely not be such a problem

There is a reason you would be far less likely to see a CTO, CFO, CMO who had never been a functional IC in that department - because these functions have well established ways of working

In Product we are still ‘establishing’

Which after 20+ yrs is mind boggling 😱

The Product Guru has played a part here too - centralised thought leaders also not always someone who’ve been an IC or hasn’t been for a long time

Still peddling puristic doctrine that’s impossible to deploy in real life without a huge level of contextual pragmatism - again very hard to do if your product leader is NOT IN or has not GROWN UP IN the product community