Gokul Rajaram explains what makes a great product vision — customer-focused, appropriately ambitious (stretch but attainable), differentiated, and framed with a multi-year horizon — and describes top product leadership qualities: focusing on impact, recruiting broadly, setting culture, modeling execution, and coaching others.
This is a great question around what a great product vision looks like. Let's start with a vision. I think a great product vision has three or four characteristics. One, it has to be customer focused. Because ultimately your customers are the whole reason for your product. If they don't exist, your product doesn't exist. A lot of product visions are company centric versus customer centric. So you need to be customer focused and you need to talk about what problem you're solving for the customer. Second, vision should be a bit of a stretch, but not unrealistic. Your vision needs to be attainable. If it's too much of a stretch, you'll have a hard time rallying your team around the vision. And so things like be the best. That's kind of a little bit lame. Get to the root of what you mean when you say be the best. Be the best on what dimension? Be the most about what dimension, in how, what way. Third thing is you need to show differentiation. Something in your vision should explain why your product is different. Why does it serve the customers differently than everyone else? So what aspect are you going to be different in? The remarkability part of it. And then look, you got to end a vision look a few years down the road. So ideally five years, I would say you want people to say blank about your product so your product vision doesn't need to state each of these parts. But being customer centric, being stretched but not unrealistic, being differentiated and looking down the road a few years out, basically, I think those are the three or four things that we need to have in a product vision. Yeah. In terms of product leadership, I think if you think about product leaders, the best product leaders, first, they care about impact. They know that launching a product, ultimately, what's the goal of launching a product? It is to solve customer problems and drive outcomes for the business. So they don't set up feature factories where they don't say, here's the accomplishment we had, we shipped XYZ feature. They talk about the product organization's impact in terms of impact on the business. What business impact did we have? What impact did we have on customers? Second, they recruit amazing teams. You know, they don't just leave recruiting to the recruiting team, but they step in, figure out and figure out how to help recruit not just amazing PMs, but also most of the great product leaders I know help recruit amazing engineers, business folks, marketers, etc. So they feel a sense of ownership to recruiting across the company and building. Because ultimately product only succeeds if it's surrounded. If the product function is surrounded by great colleagues, and product leaders recognize that. Third, they're a culture setter. They understand the kind of culture the founders want to set in the company because they were closely with the founders and they influence that in a champion of that culture. Fourth, they themselves are the model of execution. Many leaders, I think sometimes once you get to a certain level in your career, you start delegating and you don't get involved in execution that much. But I think great product leaders or great leaders show execution, show that they can roll up their sleeves. And especially in things like how meetings are run, how planning is done, how to communicate, how to run product reviews, how to set delivery estimates. They step in and coach people and show them how to execute, how to operate at a company. They're essentially, they can be a model ic. They need to demonstrate how. You know, I think some of the best product leaders actually have 10 or 20% of the time where they're IC product people on certain projects to show the rest of the team how, at least from their point of view, a great product should be built. And then finally, they're coaches and communicators. They coach, they figure out who the diamonds are in the rough and across the company, whether it's product. Again, the best product leaders coach people across the company, not just in their team, and help develop them into the future leaders of the company.
