Lemon #88. The role of
leadership
While reading ‘Inspired’ from Marty Cagan, we learned about the role of product leadership. Marty Cagan says:
The primary job of leadership in any technology organization is to recruit, to develop, and to retain strong talent.
However, this quickly becomes much tougher as the company grows. One of the big challenges of growth is knowing how the whole product hangs together.
We’ll see below some different types of product leaders:
- Leaders of Product Management. This is the person in charge of product vision, strategy, functionality, business rules and business logic, VP Product.
- Leaders of Product Design. The person in charge of the holistic user experience. There are so many interactions and interdependencies that at least one person must review everything going on with the product that is going to be visible to the user.
- Leaders of Technology Organization. The person in charge of fitting systems together from a technology point of view. It’s the CTO or VP engineering.
First and foremost, don’t lose these people! Take care of them and don’t give them any reason to want to leave or feel like they need to become a manager to make more money.
Second, you should always be trying to develop more of these people, and each of them should have at least one person they’re working to develop into a strong second.
Some companies think the answer to this is to try to document the system to the degree that everything is captured somehow in a way that members of the organization can all go to get the same sorts of answers but in reality, I know a few organizations that have tried hard to achieve this, but I have never seen this succeed. The systems always seem to grow in complexity and size much faster than anyone can document, and with software, the definitive answer always lives in the source code itself.
Marty Cagan @ Inspired.
Jorge Moreno
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