Tag: product discovery

  • Mastering the Balance: Proven Ways to Elevate Agency and Ambition in Product Teams

    Mastering the Balance: Proven Ways to Elevate Agency and Ambition in Product Teams

    I want to believe that all product people are both ambitious and have high agency. But recently I’ve come to realize that this is not always the case. It pains me to admit that, and my first instinct was that these are not people that I can help. But I’m not quite ready to give up.

    Over the years in product management leadership, I’ve learned that ambition and agency are related but distinct. Ambition is the drive for impact, scope, and growth. Agency is the willingness and ability to take ownership, make decisions, and move without waiting for permission. High-performing product cultures cultivate both; when one is missing, impact stalls.

    I often see four patterns. High ambition and high agency PMs compound value—they run robust product discovery, shape strategy, and ship meaningful outcomes. High ambition but low agency PMs talk big but stall on execution. High agency but low ambition PMs deliver steadily but rarely move the needle. Low on both signals a deeper mismatch with the product creator mindset.

    When I coach for agency, I remove ambiguity and increase ownership. I align the team on clear, outcome-based goals, define decision rights, and increase proximity to customers. I expect PMs to run weekly product discovery—interviews, prototypes, and experiments—so they can act decisively from evidence rather than wait for direction.

    When I coach for ambition, I connect work to a compelling mission and measurable business impact. I set expectations for strategic thinking, encourage bigger bets alongside incremental wins, and recognize impact—not just activity. I find that ambition grows when PMs see a direct line from their choices to customer and business outcomes.

    A practical routine that works: every week, PMs identify one “agency rep” (a decision they will make without escalation, within agreed guardrails) and one “ambition rep” (a scope-expanding action, like validating a bolder hypothesis or challenging a constraint). These reps build confidence and consistency.

    For hiring and development, I look for evidence of both. In interviews, I probe for moments where candidates created momentum from ambiguity (agency) and where they set or raised the bar for impact (ambition). Inside the team, I measure both with simple narratives: how did you reduce uncertainty this week, and how did you expand potential impact? The answers reveal whether we are trending toward a healthier product culture.

    If you recognize a gap in yourself or your team, don’t label it as fixed. Treat it as a capability to build. Start small, ship learning weekly, and let those compounding “reps” shift the default from hesitation to action. Ambition focuses our aim; agency pulls the trigger.

    I haven’t given up—far from it. With deliberate practice and the right environment, we can nurture product people who dream big and act boldly. That’s the standard I hold for myself, my team, and every product creator committed to meaningful outcomes.

    Inspired by this post on SVPG.

  • Mastering Pilot Teams: Proven Strategies to Navigate Product Model Politics and Win

    Mastering Pilot Teams: Proven Strategies to Navigate Product Model Politics and Win

    I’m seeing more companies than ever commit to the product model, and the shift is unmistakable. Boards are leaning in, CEOs are being pushed, and the subtext is clear: valuation. That pressure can be a powerful accelerant, but it also introduces a very real dynamic—when pilot teams become the vehicle for transformation, the politics around them can either unlock momentum or quietly poison the well.

    In my experience, the politics of pilot teams surface fast: who gets on the team, which domain gets picked, how success is framed, and whether the rest of the organization views the pilots as an elitist “special ops” unit or a path for everyone to follow. If I don’t address these dynamics head-on, I watch pilot teams deliver isolated wins that never translate into a durable product operating model.

    Here’s how I approach it. I start by being explicit about purpose: pilot teams exist to de-risk the transformation by proving that empowered product teams, operating on clear outcomes, can deliver business impact in weeks—not quarters. I select problems that are meaningful enough to matter (activation, retention, expansion, cost-to-serve) and bounded enough to win. I staff a cross-functional triad—product manager, product designer, and a senior engineering lead—augmented with forward deployed engineers so the team can learn with customers in real contexts and rapidly ship. The language is deliberate: these are product teams, not projects, and discovery is not optional.

    To neutralize the politics, I make the rules visible and fair. Team selection is transparent, criteria-based, and time-boxed. Success measures are defined up front and mapped to valuation drivers—retention, net revenue retention, conversion, and CAC payback—so the board and CEO see line of sight from product outcomes to enterprise value. I secure executive air cover for autonomy and decision rights, and I hold the same governance bar every two weeks: discovery evidence, shipped increments, customer signals, and outcome movement.

    Execution-wise, I emphasize product discovery as the engine of speed and learning. The team commits to a tight loop: frame the problem, explore multiple solutions, test with real users, instrument everything, and ship small but frequent increments. We visualize the bets, we narrate the learnings, and we make trade-offs explicit. This cadence builds credibility quickly and reduces the urge to micromanage—because the evidence is always on the table.

    The most consequential decision comes after the first 6–12 weeks: what do we scale? I codify the ways of working that made the pilot succeed—team topology, discovery practices, decision rights, metrics, and tooling—and then distribute them through enablement, not edict. I avoid the trap of permanent “hero teams.” Instead, we use the pilots to seed a repeatable product operating model that any team can adopt.

    When I present progress, I speak in outcomes and learning, not activity. I show how the pilot teams shortened time-to-insight, increased the pace of value delivery, and built the muscles we’ll rely on at scale. I’m candid about what didn’t work and why; that honesty reduces organizational resistance and builds trust with leadership.

    If you’re standing up pilot teams now, start by aligning the board and CEO on the outcomes that matter, pick one or two high-impact domains, staff a truly cross-functional team without hoarding all-star talent, and time-box the effort to about 90 days. Publish a one-page charter, instrument the metrics, and pre-commit to decisions based on thresholds: scale, iterate, or stop. Do this well, and the politics fade into the background while the product model—and your product management leadership—speaks for itself.

    Inspired by this post on SVPG.

  • Discover and Master Product Leadership Archetypes: Proven Lessons I Apply Every Day

    Discover and Master Product Leadership Archetypes: Proven Lessons I Apply Every Day

    As a VP of Product Management at HighLevel, Inc., I’m constantly refining how I lead product teams to deliver better outcomes and build healthier product cultures. Just recently SVPG Partner Christian Idiodi hosted Shreyas Doshi on his Product Therapy podcast, where they discussed the role of product leadership. That conversation landed squarely on themes I live every day—how we show up as product leaders influences everything from product discovery quality to execution speed.

    If you haven’t yet listened to this interview, I would strongly encourage it, as I loved hearing Shreyas’ thoughts on this critically important topic. You can find the full episode here. Shreyas described… Rather than recap, I want to share how I translate leadership archetypes into day-to-day practices that help teams ship meaningful value faster.

    In my experience, effective product leadership is situational. I flex between discovery facilitation, outcome-driven decision making, and talent development depending on the problem space, team maturity, and risk profile. This balance is at the heart of product leadership and product management leadership—holding a high bar for product outcomes while creating the conditions for PMs, design, and engineering to do their best work.

    Practically, I anchor on a few habits. First, I make outcomes explicit—clear customer value, success metrics, and non-negotiable constraints—so product discovery has guardrails without being micromanaged. Second, I coach PMs to be true product creators: own the problem, test assumptions early, and communicate trade-offs crisply. Third, I ensure cross-functional alignment by pairing product discovery with lightweight decision cadences that keep momentum without sacrificing learning.

    There are predictable traps I try to avoid. Over-indexing on process can stall product discovery; over-indexing on vision can create ambiguity that erodes execution. Another common trap is conflating management with leadership—staffing and status updates are necessary, but modeling product judgment and customer obsession is what actually shifts outcomes.

    A quick illustration: when we’re pursuing a high-ambiguity 0→1 opportunity, I lean heavily into discovery-led facilitation—focus the team on hypotheses, fast signals, and qualitative insight. When the problem is well-characterized and the risk is primarily execution, I switch to crisp decision-making, scope control, and sequencing. The art of product leadership is knowing when to change posture and communicating that shift so the team stays confident and aligned.

    If product leadership is on your mind, this conversation is worth your time and reflection. It reaffirmed practices I rely on and challenged me to sharpen a few edges of my own approach. I encourage you to listen, take notes, and then translate one nugget into a concrete ritual with your team this week.

    Inspired by this post on SVPG.

  • Forward Deployed Engineers: My Proven Playbook to Transform Product Discovery and Outcomes

    Forward Deployed Engineers: My Proven Playbook to Transform Product Discovery and Outcomes

    As VP of Product Management at HighLevel, Inc., I’ve seen firsthand how forward deployed engineers can transform product discovery, speed up learning, and deliver outcomes that matter. When engineers sit with customers, observe real workflows, and prototype in the moment, we turn assumptions into evidence and reduce the time from insight to impact.

    “Note: This is part of the product creator series of articles, based on the overview article, The Era of the Product Creator.  This series is intended for anyone that wants to create a successful product, whether or not the person has had professional training or experience in product management, product design, or engineering. In the…”

    When I talk about Forward Deployed Engineers, I’m describing highly capable product engineers embedded directly with customers and the product discovery team. They partner closely with product management and design to run focused, time-boxed experiments, build rapid prototypes, and validate riskiest assumptions early. This approach is especially powerful in product discovery and gen ai initiatives where fast iteration and tight feedback loops are essential.

    In practice, I’ve found that a forward deployed engineer becomes the bridge between what customers say and what the team can test today. For example, while exploring a gen ai workflow concept with a key customer, we co-created an interactive prototype in a single working session. That prototype turned abstract requirements into something concrete the customer could react to, which gave us high-quality signal and accelerated our decision-making without overcommitting to a full build.

    My playbook is simple and disciplined: pair the forward deployed engineer with a product manager and designer, define the learning objective for each discovery sprint, and instrument prototypes to collect actionable data. We keep the scope small, the cycles short, and the bar high for code hygiene so that successful experiments can graduate into production safely. Most importantly, we measure learning velocity—how quickly we answer the critical questions that de-risk value, usability, feasibility, and viability.

    There are guardrails. Forward deployed engineers are not on-call firefighters or ad hoc professional services. They are discovery accelerators. To avoid thrash, I time-box engagements, maintain a clear discovery backlog, and capture decisions and learnings so the broader team benefits. Rotating engineers through these assignments also builds stronger product instincts across engineering, which pays dividends well beyond a single initiative.

    Ultimately, this is the product creator mindset in action: empowering cross-functional teams to discover what works before scaling what doesn’t. Forward deployed engineers help us validate real customer value quickly, particularly in fast-moving spaces like gen ai, and they elevate the entire product discovery practice.

    The post Forward Deployed Engineers appeared first on Silicon Valley Product Group.

    Inspired by this post on SVPG.