New leaders are busy working towards the goals and proving themselves. In the process, they become unaware of the image they project to the team and to the senior management. When things don’t move the way they planned, they can end up projecting one or more of the following images – a.
New leaders tend to spend a lot of their time and energy in fire fighting. They tend to move from one firefight to another until they put off all the fires. Unfortunately, there is always some fire or the other in fast-moving firms and so they can continue this eternally until someone
New leaders tend to mimic their bosses’ style and actions. This happens in a very unconscious manner and may or may not work depending on the context. In my first leadership role, I started following (unconsciously) my manager’s style of working. My manager was hands-off, looked only at high-level details, and provided
A typical scenario that plays out when disseminating Product vision within the company: Product leader unveils the vision in a town hall or a large gathering of employees. He/she shares compelling stories and memorable sound bites. The leader gets applauded A few weeks later, while conversing with a few employees, he/she realizes
A story on the importance of business strategy towards constructing product vision and strategy. Jeff joined Webaan, an early-stage startup from an MNC, to lead Webaan’s product agenda. Webaan was a B2B SaaS startup focused on web analytics. Since this was a big role transition, he decided to approach this with an
Looking into multiple vision statements, I realize that there are only two broad possibilities (and a combination of these two) to define your product vision. One is Customer value/experience (what the product delivers) and the other is the platform (what the product becomes). In detail: Customer Value/Experience: Your vision is expressed directly
This is the first post on ‘Product vision’ under the Product Leadership series. Product Leaders & PMs write product vision statements for a variety of reasons – to inspire teams, to provide a sense of direction, and to ease decision-making at all levels. But what does a product vision mean for a
After reading my previous post, a budding product leader pinged me, “Venkat if I have to follow your advice, I would have to start spending more than 50% of my time on stakeholder management”. This was her reaction to my last post on a framework for stakeholder management (article link in the
Why this post? While transitioning from an individual contributor to a leadership role, your perspective would change from “How do I make an impact?”, “how do I leverage others’ expertise to make an outsized impact?”. So, at leadership levels, the importance of stakeholders increases multifold. Given this importance, a leader needs to
Aarti joined Bell Technologies, a fast-growing startup as a Group PM to lead customer experience. In her role, she had to deal with Karan, a tough stakeholder. Karan used to challenge Aarti by constantly questioning her approach, priorities, and decisions. Aarti initially took everything at face value and kept answering his questions,
