The Five Tenets of GREAT Product Executives

 

There are five over-arching tenets that define great product professionals. It doesn’t matter if your role is an entry-level Product Manager or CEO, these five tenets of product are your guide to success.

 

 

Tenet #1

Be an anthropologist. Know your customer better than anyone else on earth.

 

Most clients over the years have come to me without knowing their customer. It didn’t matter if the company was big or small, in consumer tech or digital; they all relied on an in-house definition of their customer, often developed from sales charts, marketing briefs, and satisfaction surveys. But this data—charts, graphs, and casual conversations—isn't enough. It often leads to mis-allocated resources, stalled innovation, and openings for your competitors.

 

So how, exactly, do you know your customer better than anyone else on earth?

 

Be an anthropologist. Get out of the building and observe individuals using your product, or your competitor’s product, in your customer's natural environment. Acting like an anthropologist is one of the most important lessons I can share about managing product. To put it simply, go to where your customer is... and then observe. Some examples:

 

• My team got up before dawn and watched people make breakfast in their homes to design a feature set for a private-label toaster. Yes, a toaster!

• We went to home improvement stores and watched people shop to redesign that store’s web navigation. We also watched people fix broken windows and screen doors - using this store for all necessary supplies.

• For the redesign of a pair of (really) expensive headphones, we threw dinner parties for users in their homes and watched as customers described their new gear to their guests.

• To add workout features to a popular music app, we went to gyms, running clubs and bowling alleys to study people who were active about their health and their music.

 

The results of these seemingly simple observations provided insights and innovations that had a giant impact. That home improvement store sold $20B through their online store last year. The toaster was a bestseller in the USA for three years, and that music app gained millions of paid users the following year as a result of having workout-specific features. And the headphones? We opened the North American market for those cans, and they sell out every year.

 

And we’ve learned a lot about how to be product anthropologists, how to study customers. Like how taking notes via a laptop is less than 50% as effective as taking notes with a legal pad and a good pen. Or that transcribing written data into a computer the day of observation is paramount. Or how simply watching the hands, the arms, and the eyes of your subject can give you a treasure trove of information.

 

Be an anthropologist. Record your findings and work hard to not bias yourself or your subjects. Do this at any management level from Product Manager to CEO and it will lead to an understanding of your customer that no one else has. I mean really, no one else will have that data, and that data will be like gold.

 

 

Tenet #2

Set Strategy. Tell Everyone.

 

Product strategy is a forward-looking exercise. It’s typically led by the product owner, shaped in partnership with the C-suite, and rooted in one core equation:

 

Product Strategy = Customer Needs + Company Resources + Company Goals

 

Having worked with hundreds of product owners over the years, I’ve seen product strategies that are so light in content that they fit on a single page. I’ve also seen dozens of strategy docs that are more than 100 pages long. Both have their uses, but when strategies fail, it is usually due to one of the following issues:

 

• Your strategy lost sight of the customer.

• Your strategy is too granular, bogged down in departmental detail.

• Strategies are not evangelized by product execs.

 

First - You’ve lost sight of the customer:

Every part of your strategy, from the product roadmap to revenue forecasts, must be rooted in a deep understanding of your customer. Is my customer frustrated with something we changed recently? Did we get rid of a feature that should have been left intact? Why did five percent of my customer base move to a competitor? If you don’t have the answers, all your strategy work is just a guess. This is why Tenet #1 is the foundation for great product execs: be an anthropologist first, strategy will follow.

 

Second - Too much detail:

I’ve seen this over and over again; the 100-page strategy doc filled with department-specific Gantt charts is not a strategy, it's an execution plan. Every organization needs a distilled, one- or two-page strategic summary: key goals, big milestones, major challenges. That’s what gets posted on walls, not buried on the public shared folder.

 

Third - The strategy is not evangelized:

I’ve asked several product execs why they keep strategy a mystery to their staff and the answer is simply that they don’t see the need to share the vision for their products. ‘People just need to work their tasks,’ they say. This is a mistake. In practice, the most successful product execs can’t stop talking about their strategies; every meeting, every coffee chat, every stand-up.

 

• Repeating your product strategy builds cohesion: Everyone rows in the same direction.

• Repetition fosters empathy: When the whole company knows the strategic goal is to "reduce critical bugs by 50%," the customer service team's complaints are no longer just noise, they're crucial data for a shared mission.

• Repetition drives alignment: A public strategy becomes a compass for decision-making at every level.

 

Make your strategy visible. Post your roadmap. Update it regularly. And talk about it constantly. A strategy that isn't shared is just a document. A strategy that is repeated over and over again becomes the heartbeat of the company.

 

 

Tenet #3

Evangelize Your Customer. Be their voice in every meeting, decision, and action.

 

You've done the deep anthropological work and built a product strategy around your customer's intimate needs. The roadmap is set. But your most critical job isn't over when you "hand off" to the development team - it's just beginning.

 

As the product executive, you hold the deepest understanding of the customer. Your responsibility is to translate that knowledge on a day-to-day basis, always advocating for the customer’s experience while the product is being developed.

 

Here are four powerful ways to be sure the customer isn’t forgotten during development:

 

• Be the relentless customer advocate.

• Make personas living documents.

• Codify the obvious.

• Bridge the gap between builders and users.

 

One - Be the relentless customer advocate:

Your customer must be a presence in every meeting from engineering stand-ups to marketing and sales forcast meetings. Your goal is to be so consistent that your team knows you as the unwavering voice of the user. You want to hear them say, "Brian never lets us forget who we're building for!" That's not being annoying; it's being effective.

 

Two - Make personas living documents:

Some of the greatest product executives use 'living personas' that represent your key customer segments. When they gain new customer insights from research or support tickets, they update their personas, print them, and then hand them to everyone on the development team. These personas then become living documents that sit on everyone’s desk. I recommend using pictures and first names, adding a note at the bottom of each one-page persona, "When in doubt about what ‘Jessica’ might need, ask the product team. We're here to help.

 

Three - Codify the obvious:

Never assume that knowledge about user experience is universal. I reviewed a prototype for a tabletop radio this spring where the volume knob had to be turned down to increase the volume. Bizarre, but to the Gen Z engineer who designed it, the mechanics of an analog radio were a complete mystery. Great product leaders document core user expectations, even the most basic ones, to prevent costly and embarrassing mistakes. Your team doesn't know what they don't know.

 

Four - Bridge the gap between builders and users:

There is no substitute for direct exposure. I’ve worked with several product execs who send their engineers and designers to the customer service desk two or three times a year. This is powerful, and I've seen teams emerge from these experiences with a profound new empathy that leads to better, more intuitive code, engineering and design. I believe this practice is on the rise, and I’m all for it.

 

Ultimately, being your customers’ advocate isn't a phase in the product lifecycle; it's the constant, driving force. And when the customer is the driving force behind everything you do and say that loyalty is rewarded with sales, and fewer trouble-tickets down the road.

 

 

Tenet #4

Guard Against the Naysayers. Counter Bad Assumptions with Data, Not Emotion.

 

Invariably, every product executive will encounter internal voices who insist on a particular feature or 'way of doing things' that is counter-productive to a good customer experience. Part of being a great product executive is to be prepared to counter these challenges with objective customer data.

 

These challenges often come from well-meaning places, but they represent internal opinions rather than the voice of the customer. They usually sound like this:

 

• From the C-Suite: "I just know the customer wants this," or "Our competition is adding this feature set, so let's add it in." This is a reactive stance based on opinion or fear, not user need.

• From the dev team: "That feature would take too much time to implement," or "Everyone knows how to use that, so we don't need to make it more clear." This is an assumption about user priorities and capabilities, often based on an expert's biased perspective.

• From the marketing team: "Our two biggest clients want that feature," or "Show the splash screen so they can see the branding." This confuses the needs of a few powerful customers with the needs of the entire market.

•  

Of course, you have to pick your battles. Sometimes poor design decisions from the C-suite make it into products because if they didn’t… well, politics. But setting that aside, your most powerful tool isn't persuasion, it's proof. Don't argue with emotion or opinion. Instead, present objective, undeniable customer data from previous customer studies and existing data.

 

And if you don't have that data on hand, great product executives know how to get it—fast. Here are two methods I’ve seen (and used) to get quick, but sound, user data:

 

• For public-facing apps and physical products: Go to a local coffee shop, offer to buy people a coffee in exchange for five minutes of their time using your app or prototype. You can get raw, unbiased feedback from a dozen people in an afternoon.

 

• For place-dependent products (desktop software, kitchen appliances, etc.): Build a small, on-call panel of users. One executive I know has a list of 20 customers who have agreed to participate in short feedback sessions. She offers a $20 gift card for 10 minutes of their time on a recorded webcam call. Her team can validate a feature or replicate a user-flow problem with a meaningful sample size in under 48 hours.

 

When you're challenged, use the data you have. And if you don't have good data for a particular question, use your rapid validation process to go get it. Let your customer's voice, backed by sound research, be the loudest and most respected voice in the room.

 

 

Tenet #5

Be intimately familiar with every stage of the product lifecycle.

 

Great product execs have to understand the product lifecycle soup-to-nuts. From the original research of the customer through to the end-of-life for a product. And much of this is as un-sexy as you might imagine. Getting all the devs to work together for a feature push or managing the bill of materials for a physical product are decidedly not exciting, but the best product leaders pay attention to every detail, every process.

 

But there’s no way to be an expert on the nitty-gritty details of every process in a product’s lifecycle. So product execs have to know just enough about each process to empathize with the people they manage while also knowing when to push to keep the product on track for a particular launch or sales date. The very best product execs I’ve worked with are what I call ‘Purposeful Generalists.’

 

These are the three things Purposeful Generalists do to be familiar with all the processes that impact their products:

 

• Know the first principles of every process.

• Spend time with each process.

• Be political on purpose.

 

One - Know the first principles of every process:

I’ve never met a great product exec who is a domain expert in every domain they manage. But they all have the first principles down. First principles are the fundamentals of a discipline or process. So if you are not a coder but are in charge of an app-build, you should know that writing code involves breaking down problems into fundamental parts, adhering to established patterns of design, and writing clean, maintainable, scalable code. This base layer of knowledge, and growing it over time, helps great product execs lead that process, even if they don’t know how to do the actual work.

 

Two - Spend time with each process:

The best of us spend time in each domain to get a feel for how that team gets things done. Great product execs sit in meetings, are not afraid to ask fundamental questions, and listen intently to the daily grind of engineering meetings, customer service huddles, sales trainings, etc. This makes them an ever-expanding domain generalist who after a while can hold their own in every department.

 

Three - Be political on purpose:

Great product execs are political animals, but in the best sense. Never sycophants, but always empathetic to the needs of their builders. It is important to find allies and identify naysayers in every department within an organization and look for opportunities to support teams when they need it; building mutual trust is critical when deadlines loom and they may need a favor themselves. - And while politics isn’t a frictionless game, I’ve never seen a great product exec who doesn’t play that game well.

 

Growing your familiarity with every process in your product’s lifecycle is key to being a great product exec. Know first principles, spend time with your teams, and be political on purpose. After a little bit of time, ‘Purposeful Generalists’ become more than generalists, they become experts in getting great products designed, built, and delivered.

 

 

 

I'm Brian. I’ve been a product executive for 20+ years. I have four startups under my belt, have worked with over 300 clients on the product side (digital and consumer tech), and I meet with at least 20 startup teams a year.

 

You can write to me here: hello@chiefofproduct.com, thanks for reading!

 

© 2025 ChiefofProduct.com