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- [00:00]
A
Creating great products isn't just about features or roadmaps. It's about how organizations think, decide and operate around products. Product Thinking explores the systems, leadership and culture behind successful product organizations. We're bringing together insights from multiple product leaders pulled from past conversations to explore one shared topic offering different perspectives and lessons from real world experience. I'm Melissa Perry and you're listening to the Product Thinking podcast podcast by Product Institute. Today we're digging into what it takes for product leaders to operate at the next level. Not just building great products, but actually running a business. Great CEOs don't stop being product people, but they have to widen the lens. We'll start with Mercedes Chatfield Taylor, who breaks down the three primary paths to CEO go to market, finance and product. And what product leaders need to close the gaps if they want that seat. Then we'll hear from Sean Kim, who shares what product empowerment really looks like at places like Amazon and TikTok. He shares valuable lessons about clear metrics, real ownership and the expectation that not everything will work as planned. And we'll wrap with Fabrice Demasri who reframes product work as investment decision making, focusing on risk, roi, payback and treating stakeholders as co investors. Let's start with Mercedes. If somebody wants to become a CEO, what's the path that they should look at?
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B
Yeah, really good question. And so let me just take a step back. There are three sort of really primary paths to CEO and there are outliers. I'm sure after this podcast we can think of 15 other outliers, but the big ones are the go to market CEO. So somebody who's come up the ranks of sales, generally sales taken on a CRO role, taking on a president role and become a CEO. And we could talk about what those gaps might be when they become a CEO. Second one is finance. So chief Financial officer is the outward facing chief Financial officer, not the accounting type, but the strategic CFO who then becomes a COO or president and then becomes CEO. And then the third is product. So the product manager who becomes a product leader who becomes often a chief Product officer who becomes a coo, president who becomes a CEO. So the steps are similar in terms of starting off as an ic, becoming a manager, taking on more responsibility. That's the typical path. What I would say to address the question of gaps particular to cpo. And we just did. I just finished a CEO search where we hired a CEO who in our first meeting told me at my heart I am a product person. That is what I do. I'M a product person. I will address the company from a view of what is this product, who is our icp, what's our market? The question for a first time CEO who comes with that mindset is generally not dissimilar from the other two folks, but how will they communicate with the board? How will they learn that board communication, how will they manage their board? So that's one gap and that's any first time CEO. Generally two is will a Chief revenue officer, will a phenomenal Chief Revenue officer report to this person comfortably, happily? And the flip side of that same question is can you hire as a CPO and a great enterprise? If it's an enterprise SaaS company, let's say, or a great SMB to mid market, whatever it is, if it's a sales driven company, a great CRO, can you hire a great CRO and will they report to you? And then the third and final piece is just around the holistic view of the company. And again not different, a little bit different from cfo. Because CFO is one of the roles. CEO, cfo, Chief People Officer should have a view of the entire organization, right? Chief Product Officer doesn't necessarily have as holistic a view of the entire organization. And so how will you run finance? How will you oversee the entire administration of a company? It's a broader role than is Chief Product officer. So then like how do you close those gaps on the board piece? And I, I tell every product person, every Chief Product officer to look for a board seat. You know, do not wait until you are a CEO to go look for your board seat. There are plenty of opportunities to be voice of the customer, voice of the market, voice of tech at a strategic level, at the board seat. In a board seat, in a company that is non competitive with your company. So what are your strengths? Where can you add value and what are you interested in and get that board seat so that that will start to close the gap between have you interacted at the board level? How do you communicate at the board level? Have you seen great CEOs communicate at the board level? The second obvious one there, I hope it's obvious, is, is participate in your own board meetings. Be that partner to the CEO, to the cfo, to the CRO, to the cpo, people officer to the CTO and collaborate at the board level. Collaborate for those quarterly board meetings. Make sure that you have a voice at those board meetings and talk to your CEO about why you want a voice at those board meetings. You want a voice because you have aspirations to Be a CEO, you want a voice because you want to participate. You want to lighten their burden. A CEO should be thrilled to have her burden lightened by somebody who wants to do some of that board calm. And Most people, most CEOs will, once they trust you, will allow you to participate. So that's one area, the board piece.
- [06:03]
A
I don't recommend tools unless I actually use them. So when I tell you granola has become a daily essential for me and most of my team, that means something. We're all in a lot of meetings. Granola is an AI notepad that quietly enhances your notes in the background. No bots joining your call, no awkward recordings, just cleaner thinking after every meeting. It's the rare tool that gives you time back instead of asking for more of it. You can try it yourself with 3 months free on any paid plan. At Granola AI ProductInstitute, we talked about how do product people find their path to Chief Product Officer? Which is a really hot topic, but one that's been coming up a lot lately too, is people who want to become CEOs out of the product realm. And what have you been seeing out there when it comes to how the CEO landscape is changing and what makes a great CEO today?
- [06:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, look, the macro is definitely challenging at the moment. And so in general, what I will say is that people who have run rule of 40, even rule of 50 organizations, so with an emphasis on profitability, sustainability, repeatability, scalability, and I think the days of grow at all costs are gone for the moment. And so we've seen a real emphasis on that. So people that have taken companies through transition, transformation, and gotten them to profitability and some type of outcome are highly, highly sought after. So that's one piece, I'd say. The other piece is that there is an emphasis on do more with less. And so people that have run, really like I talked about Rule 40, Rule 50, but also people that just know how to run efficient, effective, scrub, scrappy organizations and have held multiple hats. So really get the organization working together. Collaboration has become increasingly important and it's no longer like a buzzy thing. It's like, you know, how do you bring together the best leadership in sales, marketing, product engineering, finance in a lean team environment. So that's been a big change over the past, I'd say two years.
- [08:11]
A
That's a really interesting one.
- [08:13]
B
Anybody who is a Chief Product officer in a company should be in the succession planning line for the CEO of that company. Every CEO should have a succession plan. I'm always shocked when we're doing CEO searches because really. And I'm grateful to do them, but really, there should be a succession plan. Every CEO, every CPO should be planning their succession so that when they go to the board and say, I'm the one, you have your succession plan set up. Right. Don't forget that if you want to take on the CEO role, someone has to take your role. And then number two, make sure that you are as exposed and experienced across the areas that might be natural gotchas, which we talked about. Like, again, so finance at the board level, driving revenue. But yeah, I mean, we've seen it in dating, we've seen it in auto, we've seen it in fintech, we've seen it in banks, we've seen it in big enterprise, we've seen it absolutely in PLG. Like, I can name 10 PLG CEOs we put in place in the last year and a half.
- [09:17]
A
I think this is very inspiring for a lot of CPOs out there who want to take the next leap or product people who want to become a CEO. It's funny, I actually, when you reached out and said, I want to talk about this, I had put a career chart out for product managers on my LinkedIn and everybody was like, well, what's after CPO? I'm like, oh, I didn't put CEO in there. But like, yeah, it could be CEO. It could be CEO. And it started this whole debate. So I think a lot of people are going to be very excited to hear about that.
- [09:41]
B
It's never too early to start planning for this. And it's worst case, it makes you a great Chief Product Officer. You know, worst case, it makes you a great VP of Product. Like, either way, a little, you know, recruiter secret is that, you know, when we go out and we're asked to find a Chief Product Officer, when we're asked to find a Chief Marketing Officer, when we're asked to find a Chief Revenue Officer, do we want the person who never wants to be a CEO or do we want the person who's got great ambitions? We want the person who's got great ambitions. And it's, it's not that we want to hire the person who's like, gunning for the next job. That's not what I'm saying, but I'm saying like a well rounded, broad executive in any one of these areas who's constantly looking to make themselves surrounded by great team members who they can promote and empower so that they also can move forward. That's the kind of person you want to hire. And for this role, one thing I would just remind everybody of is it's like Chief Product Officer to coo, Chief Product Officer to president, Chief Product Officer to CEO. It can go cpo, coo, CEO, it can go cpo, president, CEO, but none of it's going to happen without asking for more. So when you're in your VP of Product role, look for more. When you're in your Chief Product Officer role, look for more. Look for. And the way to look for more is not about what's in it for me. It's like, what can I take off your plate, CRO? What can I take off your plate? Cmo, what can I do to make your life easier? Cfo, what can I take off your plates? CEO for the board meeting. And that is the way you will naturally get promoted. Make your peers and your boss's life easier. It's the same thing I told my college kids, like, hey, when you get your first job, like, what do you want to do? They're like, what do I do? And I'm like, make your boss's life easier. Just make their life easier. They get promoted.
- [11:36]
A
Mercedes made one thing very clear. Stepping into a CEO role isn't about abandoning product. It's about expanding your scope of responsibility. It's about learning to operate at the board level, building succession behind you and proving you can lead across revenue, finance and operations, not just product. But here's the interesting tension. If you want to run the whole business one day, you also need to know how to create leaders who can run parts of it without you. That's where real empowerment comes in. Next, we'll hear from Sean Kim on what it looks like when product leaders are truly given ownership, not tasks. At Amazon and TikTok, PMs are expected to move metrics, negotiate for resources and take accountability for results. No one tells them what to build. They're told what outcome matters. Here's Sean.
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C
It was essentially our jobs as PMs to come up with the problem set and solutions. We knew what the business objectives were for the company. It's like, hey, we got to improve retention. Here's the retention metric. We got to improve. Here's how it's going to translate to dollars for the business, right? Here's the locations. You know, this is. I'm talking about Amazon. Here's the locations that you own. What do you need to make this happen? That's essentially the directive. And then as a pm, you got, yeah, you really have to come up with the problems you want to solve to help ensure that we're improving retention for customers. No one's there telling you what to do. I haven't had a single person at Amazon tell me exactly what to do. They were like, hey, here's the metric.
- [13:07]
B
Move it.
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C
Go figure it out. And then our job was essentially to come up with the plan, negotiate on what resources we needed to make that plan happen. Like, oh, I need three more PMs and 30 more engineers. And then the executive team, like, do you really need 30? What can you do with 15?
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B
Right?
- [13:25]
C
And then that's kind of the dance you're doing is like, okay, here's the resources I need to make this happen. And, and, and the executive team is saying, well, I can give you half that. You know, how much? How much can you do with half? And then, can you. And then. And then also negotiating on timelines like, okay, this can get done three, three months. And they're always going to be asking you to do it in two months, right? So you're like, well, it's pretty hard to do in two months. How about 20 engineers? And we do it in, you know, a month and a half or whatever, right? Like, there's, like, negotiating happening from that perspective as you kind of want to buffer in, like what you can and can't do. But, but ultimately, if the, you know, no one's telling you what to do, no one's ever telling you what to do. Like, hey, come with a plan, you tell me what you need, and then we come with a plan. They look at it, they might poke some holes at it, right? And make sure you, like, have a very good foundation on what and why you're building what you're building. And then, and then they might question the resources as well. But ultimately, that's the job. And then you come in and you actually execute. They give you the resources, you hire the people, and then you, you build it, and then you report on it and say, hey, it worked or didn't work, right? And then you never get penalized if it didn't work either. That's just an expectation that, of course, not everything's going to work. If everything works, the assumption is, like, you're probably not thinking big. You're probably just trying to optimize little things here and there, right? So it's really what the leadership team did at Amazon was challenge you to think bigger. Like, bigger, bigger. Think bigger, think bigger, take bigger risks. What do you need for this to happen? And report back on the results, right? So that's how you feel really empowered. It's like, you know, I'm running a business at that point. You're just negotiating on resources and timelines. And it's also very similar to TikTok is we've got to improve intention DAU publish rates, meaning like number of people that actually publish videos every single day, the number of times people open the app within a 30 day period. And then obviously now with E commerce, how many people are actually purchasing products? So those are the metrics you got to move and they come to you and say, what are you going to do about it? And then we say, well, I want to build these features and we believe this is going to help improve publish rates or this is going to improve retention, it's going to improve E commerce, purchasing and so on. So as long as. And then this is what I need. I need like this many engineers, I need this many designers, and this is when I can get it done. And then same thing like, can you get it done faster? It's always like obviously, faster, faster, faster, faster. Right, so, but so that's essentially the job. And I think like as a pm, you have to ensure that you're balancing. It's a good balancing act. It seems like, okay, I got to make sure, I got to have the right number of resources from all those perspectives, making sure all the teams work well together and then obviously delivering on what you promised.
- [16:09]
A
So Sean showed us what empowerment actually looks like. Clear metrics, real accountability and resources tied directly to outcomes with the understanding that not every bet will pay off. But when you zoom out, that kind of ownership is really about how you allocate time, money and talent. If teams are negotiating resources and expected impact, they're not just building features, they're deciding where to place bets. Next we'll hear from Fabrice de Masary, who pushes this even further by reframing product leadership as disciplined investment thinking inside the business. This is what it looks like to run product with an investor's lens.
- [16:46]
D
The product management came out of the IT department, not on the business department. So culturally there was always been some difficulties of people considering themselves as a business function and not as an IT function. And even the rest of the company still has this bias view of what you're doing. So you've been pushed to talk about discovery, talk about what you should do and the fact that it's complicated and you first see an uncertainty. But people in front of you don't understand that. All they want is to know when this specific feature would actually get Out. So we've been, I'd say, battling against the profitability call with what I call product explaining. Okay, we talk about all these frameworks which people don't understand and we need to stop doing that. That for me, the first thing, forget discovery, think about what it means for the people in front of you. So you talk about risk, everybody understand the risk. When it comes to finance, of course, you consider different risk of an investment beyond doing metric trees, which are great, but so many people tend to forget that you need to prove causation. It's not just drawing it because it's satisfactory. You need to build a model. The third part is really thinking about whatever investment that you're doing with your team when it comes to time represents money. So if you take a typical team in Europe, there's going to be 1 million euros a year that you're going to invest. Right. And usually people don't understand. They say, okay, I'm building the feature. First things that what was the cost of it? The real cost? Second part is, okay, when will I have a net margin of, I don't know, 150k because I spent six weeks on that. No one thinks about that. That might be the most important thing to talk about with your teams and with your stakeholders. You have different level of risk. Discoverability, discovery are here to mitigate that. That's okay. You have different level of risk depending on who you are on your teams, on the opportunities that are in front of you, you. And at the end of the year, as a cpo, all I'm interested in how you going to take that 1 million euro and invest it wisely so that at the end I have more engagement and more money in the bank. And that's for me where we need to shift our mindset from frameworks, processes and fancy jargon that we have and talking about money, roi, payback and margin.
- [19:23]
A
When you're trying to work with stakeholders, especially ones who are just get it done right. I just want to see products right. They don't understand quite the whole product management landscape. How do you get them to start thinking as what you call co investors instead of just people who demand that you build X, Y and Z.
- [19:41]
D
Usually it starts with the loss aversion, right? Everybody is loss averse. Nobody wants to be responsible of investing in something which has zero return. Anyone would be. That's gonna have consequences on me, my team, my position, my credibility, whatever. And I like to, I'm sorry, it's a bit cruel, but I like to play with those emotions So I usually I'm in the situation, for example big companies or with some salespeople, not all salespeople, we're gonna be just like what you depict. I want that done. And it might even be that you're internally considered as a studio, right. So you cannot play as if it was your money because they will never consider you as an investor. So play with it. Play as if you were a financial advisor. So you think, okay, what I'm good at in product is building things. Right. But it's assessing the risk if we give me that level of money or that time. So three months, I don't know, 300k for example. And you want that result. Okay, considering what I know about what you're pushing as an investment, the risk of you missing the target is 90%. So are you ready to go on and being responsible of that? Because my only responsibility as a financial advisor it tell you what is the level of risks and what are the odds of missing the target. So usually make people think differently and say I can help you because I'm good at this. That's what we're good at de risking situations. All the frameworks that we have and the tools are here for that delivery is the easy part. The second part is what they're going to invest. So I take co investors. It's not co investor in terms of putting really money on the table is okay, you're talking about a feature but just building a feature is not going to make it. I'd say pop everywhere and people will. There's no build it and they will come as we used to say, let's add 50% of my cost on the go to market and go to customer. Are you ready to invest this kind of money? Which risk you see on the go to market parts and what you're going to do to make sure that it happens. And if you don't do it, I'm not going to be the one responsible. So that's why I said having skin in the game, it's not only about asking for things that you know that I'm not going to do the go to market instead of you. I'm not the one that's going to push the sales to pitch that. I'm not the one that's going to call leads. It's going to be you, it's going to be your teams. If you don't put the money, the right resources on the table, we're going to fail. So that's up to you to now bring whatever you can bring on the table to make sure it's a success. People start thinking differently when you answer in that way. And I'm not even talking about saying no here. I'm talking about are you okay with this level of risk? And usually people are not.
- [22:44]
A
I worked with a VP of product once who printed out a bunch of money on a piece of the paper and labeled them all and gave the stack of investment to the leaders that he was trying to get the prioritization requirements from. And he outlined everything that you were just talking about. Here's our trade off decisions, here's where we are, here's where we could de risk things. Where would you put your money? And they talked through it all and he said just handing them something that seemed like cash made them realize, oh, all of this actually does cost money and we need to be thinking about our different risk profiles and how we're investing in here. And it changed the entire perspective of what they were working towards. So I thought that was a really cool exercise with it. What are the types of like prioritization activities or things that you would do with stakeholders to get alignment around those things? Would you run a meeting? What kind of frameworks would you use to help build your case here?
- [23:36]
D
Actually I have two logics here. The first logic would be if I have, let's say a modern product organization when I have teams responsible of whatever area impact teams, fee, three teams, I don't really care care as long as I have a clear ROI link to the strategy, right? And usually I try to build not really cases, but I want what I call pitches, I want them to bring thing which is we think there might be something interesting here. I don't want you to over engineer business case because I have never seen a honest business case in my life ever. Even if you build it, you still have this optimism bias. Now if you have a more, I'd say less modern organization. What I built in the past was what I call investment forums. So the idea was really to take the risk, the discussions and the decisions together. And in the past if someone from Spain was interested by something, they will do this. We all know that this list of whatever they want, which is let's say refined enough for them to make sure that you cannot say it's not interesting because they can say I know on my market that blah blah, blah and that was always a pain. Not what we built was a way for all the countries to take a look of whatever proposal were made by the others and they're going to judge if that's interesting for their own markets. So is there something in Spain that pushed by Spain could be interesting in Germany? If it's not, we might have a problem there because Germany will say I'd like something which is good for me too. So you start changing the relationship between okay, we are all responsible of selecting the things that should have the best impact for all of us. And so you're really here to make the decision. But I know that we started to see a kind of behavior of people doing roadmaps without even talking about roadmaps. I vividly remember one example of someone from Spain what pushed an opportunity and we all agreed that it was interesting, but not right now. And the answer that she gave was I understand, I hope that maybe in the future we might be able to invest in that. So they felt responsible of the success and responsible of the failure and responsible of the right usage of our resources. So we changed drastically the relationship that we had of together that became to be a good relationship and start to make friends with them before that would be completely impossible to be honest. So usually VC is going to say that yeah, I'd like to make only deals that transform into unicorns, but it's never going to happen. So you conscious that you need to diversify your portfolio. That's the first thing. And second thing is that you know, you invest in teams and not really in products. The first thing is what I call strategic investments which are directly correlated with the okrs. If you have cards, the strategy that you have, which I think that's going to push the product into the the right direction.
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C
Right.
- [26:42]
D
And that should represent 60, 70% of what you do. And then you have low hanging fruits and for all the hanging fruits are a mix of sometimes enablers that you do for the other teams that they need to be able to operate. So if salespeople or ops or marketing wants to migrate to braze and they say that's important for them, of course you need a way to assess it compared to the other enablers but it's not because it's not directly linked to a feature that is not important for the business of the company. And you have micro optimizations which I think that not a lot of ROI but not a lot of risk too. So sometimes you need those small improvements, small things because I don't know, you're spending more time at discovery and you have your team that is a bit in an idle state. So it's low roi, low risk and then you have bets, I like to talk about bets when it comes to things that are really unsure. And this kind of project said you're okay to, I don't know, spend three weeks every year on things that could build the future of the company, things that could, you could lose the three weeks altogether and that's okay. But if you don't do it well, you might just be replaced by others, you might miss the next wave of technology, etc. So you just get killed by the market. And the way that you consider your investments should be just like Vasing saying, I might have one bet, it might be unicorn, it might disappear. Then I have strategic ones and I know that bit by bit I should have money. And if it costs low hanging, that's low risk. But at least I have a return now going to the team spot the risk aversion of people is different, right? Usually people that work in platforms, for example, they're more risk averse and as an investor you should consider that. So if you're working on in the startup, everything is a bet, right? You're pre pmf. Everything is a bet. If you try to push people from big companies that are attached to their level of security, asking them to act like a pre PMF startup, it's never going to work. It's a fantasy, never going to work. And same thing for platforms. You can make them think a little bit like investors, but maybe they are more, I'd say bankers, that's Wall street investors. So you need to accept that. The last part is if you push people into a direction when you're going to create anxiety because they are not okay with that, it's how you actually push people to burnout. So that's not just detail, that's really important. And that's really important for you as a product manager and especially for you as a leader.
- [29:25]
A
That's it for today. I hope you got something useful from these clips. Whether you're thinking about stepping into bigger leadership roles, building stronger ownership in your teams, or starting your own business. If you want to hear the full conversations, check out episodes 194, 193 and 202. And if you want to level up your product skills or grow your career, head over to Product Institute for a productivity boost. I encourage you to try out granola, the AIPowered notepad for meetings, which I use every single day. You can now get three months free on any paid plan. Just go to Granola AI ProductInstitute. Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking podcast. Make sure you like and subscribe so you never miss an episode. We'll see you next time.