The CEOs You’ll be Working With

The previous posts were somewhat ‘heavy’ so today I’d like to have a shorter and lighter post. Hence, today we’ll […]

You want to approve a new product strategy or a north star
You want to enforce alignment between departments based on the strategy/north star (see here for more details)
You want to make a leap-of-faith and experiment with a new product (which is not trivial to implement) that may open the company to new opportunities, but could also result in a waste of time, after all (this what happens with experiments from time to time).
You want to promote a re-org or a fundamental change of processes and how things work
You want to increase the budget to your department

The ‘Wonder boy/girl’

It should be very feasible to convince this person to experiment and try new features and approaches.
This person will give the product a ‘place of honor’, and hence the product managers in the company will feel significant.
Processes will be flexible and nothing is written ‘in the stone’

This stereotype usually lacks the experience of how to manage a company. They also don’t allow themselves to be bound within rules or policies. Therefore – expect chaos across the board.
They are probably very ‘opinionated’ and hence if your idea/suggestion is interpreted as not aligned with their vision – it probably doesn’t have a chance.
They may overlook the small details and focus purely on the big vision, which will make it harder for them to stay disciplined and enforce a new methodology or an approach, because they may find it unimportant or just a disturbance.

Will push towards making the company a real business as soon as possible instead of letting it search for purpose and product market fit indefinitely.
Will push you, the product manager, to be more business oriented and to look for the money.
Very down to earth and can help you build a solid revenue projection

Will push towards making the company a real business as soon as possible. Yes, I wrote it in the pros as well. This fact can become a real problem if the company does need the time to reach a product market fit.
Very little tolerance for experimentation and initiatives
May push towards local optimizations on revenues and miss the long term optimizations on market share because of that.
Very tight budget that may not allow the grow the company needs

Knows how to sell; Knows how to tell a story. You should definitely listen and learn.
Can probably help you frame the story of your product and its value proposition.

May focus on the amount of closed deals rather than chasing the right customers.
May put too much energy into a specific prospect or customer even though the right thing to do could be to let go.
Vision and strategy may not appeal to them. They may favor pure opportunism and hence force you to release a bunch of useless features

Past features that were developed but never used (or served a single customer)
Customers whose hunger is never fulfilled even though you gave them everything they wanted to date
The customers who churned because your team never reached the roadmap items that should have cater to them (because they worked on a bunch of other useless features)
The lack of any meaningful progress on the roadmap and having the competition closing the gap much more quickly

Quite straightforward. No bullshit. Less politics.
If your product edge is indeed a technological one, then having such a leader is a huge plus.

May lack proper business understanding, including marketing and sales
May focus on the engineering aspects of the solution rather than the value the product needs to deliver
May not possess great communication skills

Too much focus on growth while forgetting to turn this into a business
Lack of knowledge in sales and marketing may not create enough awareness to the product

A true understanding of PMF and why it’s important
A true understanding of the importance of the supporting units – marketing, support, sales and engineering, and how they should work together
A true understanding on how to run a company