Note: if you’re a CPO looking for a new role and based in (or open to relocating to) Texas, drop me a note - I’m helping an investor friend with an executive search (here)
As someone who recently went through interview loops for a variety of product leadership roles, I found it interesting how much the tone around PMs has changed. While there has always been a tension between executives (CxO’s, board) expecting PMs to answer the most strategic questions and cross-functional collaborators (EPD, GTM) expecting PMs to be on top of every detail, for the last couple of decades the role has generally been viewed as valuable. While you would find pockets of frustration (for a variety of legitimate reasons), overall the role was viewed as a necessary and high-leverage one, and the prevailing wisdom was good PMs and good product leaders could really change the trajectory of your business. So while some product folks were indeed unimpactful (the term I like to use is “nothing burgers”), it was not a stain on the role itself, and organizations generally bought into the idea; it was just a matter of finding the right ones.
But in my conversations over the last several months, I noticed 2 new themes:
a belief that AI-enhanced tooling can reduce the # of PMs required
an impatience with how long it takes product leaders to create impact
[1] is a belief I myself prescribe to - whether you think of it as needing fewer PMs because a lot more discovery and analysis can be automated or approach it as an AI co-pilot for a seasoned PM is a better investment than additional, junior folks, this is a real shift. And many folks are constantly writing about how to catch that wave and up-skill yourself, so I won’t go into that in this post. That aspect aside, I also think [2] is the more interesting trend because there’s not a simple explanation for it.
The best story I can come up with is that too many CEOs (or whatever C-level role your product team reports into) have not gotten true ROI from their investment in the function. One CEO who spoke to me about a CPO role described their last head of product as “the worst kind of nothing - an expensive nothing”. They were looking for someone to have an immediate perspective on the business, align the org on a revamped strategy, execute quickly, and show material impact. I saw this expectation, and the failure of product leaders to meet it, again and again in my CEO conversations. I also compiled observations from coaching several heads of product who were actively trying to navigate these expectations. This meme started coming up so often that I began asking some of my own mentors for their view on the issue, and one of them provided a great mental model on how to plan for impact and set yourself up for success as a product leader.
There are fundamentally 3 assets within a product company, and you need to control at least 1 as a product leader to have any chance of impact:
product vision
R&D resources
P&L statement
Let’s delve into each one, gut check why it matters, and talk through the reality in most companies. By the way, I initially balked at the word “control”, but the more I mulled it over, the more I realized that’s what it takes - you might convince yourself that influence is the more appropriate mindset here, but at an executive level real influence and direct control are almost indistinguishable.
Owning the product vision is another way of saying you get to choose where to play and how to win. You get to decide the market, the problem, the persona, the solution, and the differentiation. But so much of “success” comes down to having a viable solution in a growing category, because even the best product in a commoditized space is ultimately an unhealthy business. Now, many product leaders actually fall short of being able to articulate a compelling strategy when given that chance, but the more common situation is that they are never given that chance; the vision is either trapped in the CEO’s head and unarticulated, or it’s a Frankenstein production with many cooks in the kitchen, or past success bites you and you’re stuck just catering to an existing customer base and never veer outside that lane. The net is many product leaders who are deemed unimpactful never got to mold the vision in a way that might have led to innovation or growth. So if you’re stepping into a CPO or Head of Product role, one question you have to ask your CEO is whether you get to shape the portfolio to any meaningful degree.
The second major lever that can drive impact is the R&D organization - controlling this dictates the quality and complexity of your product, as well as time to market and cost to maintain. Managing PMs is one aspect of this, but the more the various EPD functions (Design, Engineering, Data Science, User Research, QA, SRE) are brought together under 1 leader, the more that person can put real weight behind big bets. When I think about all the organizations that whiffed on their ambitious goals, it usually comes down to mis-alignment between Product, Design, and Engineering leadership. I once worked with an engineering leader who was quite product savvy, and his team was constantly in every major workstream for the company somehow - I asked him how he had such consistent impact, and his response was “if you have a seat at the table and you manage engineers, there’s no way you should not be solving P0 problems”. So while I am all about partnering with my engineering and design peers, there is a certain sense behind the emergence of a CPO that runs all R&D, sometimes titled CPTO. If you’re a product leader exploring an opportunity, this doesn’t mean that you should demand to manage engineering - but you should make sure that line of communication to your engineering peer is rock solid and that you can move as one.
The last piece of the puzzle in terms of having real impact is ownership and accountability over revenue and churn. This one is particularly tricky, because there has been a movement in recent years to tag the product team with revenue goals, but that’s a half-measure. As someone who has been a GM, been given a revenue number, and then been told you can’t change the demand gen campaign, the deal qualification criteria, the pricing model, etc I can tell you that pretend ownership of P&L is quite common. Most times the revenue and retention targets change because of what the business needs, but there’s no corresponding strategy or staffing shift to actually enable the team to hit more ambitious goals in a quicker timeframe. If you’re not dictating the sales playbook and success motion, then you’re putting an immense burden on the product to take care of adjacent users, tangential use cases, change management, customer education, etc. This is why growth leaders have enjoyed some success - you can actually control both the product and GTM with a PLG motion. This is also why product leaders who run business units can do quite well because they can align the product vision with the customer journey; and if they happen to also run R&D and control delivery, then everything is lined up for impact.
While this wasn’t a framework I’d used as a lens before, looking back now I can see that roles where I had impact I was able to move one or all of these levers; conversely, most mis-steps were a byproduct of thrash around controlling one of these. By the way, you might be wondering what this means for individual PMs or mid-level managers; my view is in those roles you want to make sure you have influence with your product leader, and that your product leader can exert control over these assets. It can be a bit of circular dependency in the sense that it’s hard to build influence without impact, and the impact requires the ability to direct these assets…which is why the minimum viable role for a PM involves agency on these dimensions, even if it’s for a subset of the product surface.
Irrespective of your level, this post is really a reminder to all PMs that from a CEO’s perspective, your role is to have a perspective, be accountable, and change the business’s trajectory - if you want any shot at doing that successfully, then make sure you have the ability to shape either product vision, resource allocation, or business KPIs.
Hopefully this mental model helps PMs as they look for and grow into their roles. If you’d like discuss this post live with me, you can continue the conversation with my digital clone / second brain LemonAid.
As always, I’d also love to hear from readers about their lessons learned from creating impact - please chime in via comments👇 or join the chat via the Substack app.
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further reading / references
I talk more about expectations of product folks, which are different than most other functions, in The Product Paradox (audio episode via 5 Minute Fridays)
assuming you are set up for success as a product leader and have the ability to pull the 3 levers outlined in this post, you’ll still need to have Product Leadership Principles of your own to operationalize your decision making
if you end up owning both the product strategy and business KPIs, you’ll need a way to connect the dots between those core assets, which I delve into in From Daily Decisions to Bottom Line
if part of your charter as a product leader is (re)starting innovation, check out Creating an Innovation Culture (video episode via 60 Minute Stories)
childish drawing / interpretation
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This piece hits so close to home. I would love to read up more on companies where the model you described works in practice. What are the lessons learned? How are these orgs and reporting strictures designed? How are people handling multiple product lines successfully?
It's almost fascinating to watch how product people evolve from having borderline ultimate control over the vision, development direction, and P&L when the product is at its earliest stage, to having close to none once an organization is sufficiently big.
It boils down to the autonomy of each individual being reduced as we build the structural hierarchy. While we treat that as obvious, it is not.
Of course, a high degree of autonomy creates different challenges altogether. It's enough to look at Spotify. Their apps are a literal UX person's nightmare, and that reflects how their product organization was structured back in the day (the (in)famous Spotify Model).
The opposite example would be Amazon, with thousands of ongoing live experiments at any given moment. They make sure they're all aligned through a set of metrics and an automated rollback mechanism. If something doesn't help the bottom line, it gets scraped, sorry.
At a meta-level, it's all about striking the balance between autonomy and alignment (https://brodzinski.com/2025/05/role-of-alignment.html).
A side thought: influence or control over the product does not necessarily translate to impact. Look at the early-stage product development and you'll see plenty of bad calls, building stuff that shouldn't be built in the first place, wasting money.
It's not just ineffectual. It's plainly harmful.