Product Leadership
You steward vision and strategy. You build teams and develop people. Your people are your product. You lead through love, compassion, kindness, service, and invitation.
Executive coaching and advisory for product leaders
Lead Product at the Level Your Business Now Requires.
I coach CPOs, Heads of Product, and the VPs and Directors who want to be one. I led product at Adobe, Ancestry, Vivint, and Lucid. Now the people who do product are my product.
START HERE: Assess Your Product LeadershipTwenty-five questions. Five dimensions. A clearer view of how you lead today. See your profile before you share an email.
Already know you want to work together? Talk with me.
The job changes as you rise
Nobody warns you that the job changes.
You got here by knowing customers, making good calls, and shipping things people use. Then the scope grew.
Now you decide where product creates value for the business. You make trade-offs when every initiative has a good argument. You align executives who see the world differently. You build leaders who make sound calls without you in the room. You show the CEO and the board the investment is working.
Here’s the test. If you build an amazing product and your sellers won’t sell it, whose fault is that? Yours. If marketing isn’t ready to launch it, whose fault is that? Yours. Your job is to align the business, not just run product.
The skills that earned the seat still matter. They’re not enough.
It rarely announces itself as a leadership problem.
- You just stepped into a bigger role. You inherited a team, a roadmap, and a CEO with expectations. You have a few months to show a point of view.
- A board review or budget cycle is coming. A polished deck won’t carry it. You need clear outcomes, clear tradeoffs, and a team that can act on them.
- The roadmap keeps changing, and nothing improves. Another process won’t fix it. The problem usually sits higher up.
- You’re succeeding, and it’s costing you. The next level shouldn’t mean giving up everything outside of work.
The useful question isn’t how to get more done. It’s what the business needs from product leadership now.
The Leading Product Excellence Index
How are you actually leading product today?
Most senior leaders can tell you where they need to improve. The harder question is whether they’re looking in the right place.
The Leading Product Excellence Index is twenty-five questions across five dimensions of product leadership. It takes about six or seven minutes. You won’t get one score that pretends leadership fits in a number. You’ll get a profile: where you’re strong, where you’re stretched, and where a different decision would help most.
- 01Steward Vision & Strategy
Can your organization say where product is going, why, and what it won’t do?
- 02Invest in People
Are you building leaders who make good calls without you?
- 03Align the Business
Do customer value and business value connect, and do your executives agree on the tradeoffs?
- 04Deliver Results
Is product accountable for outcomes, and learning fast enough to change course?
- 05Experience Fulfillment
Is the role sustainable, or is it eating everything else?
Twenty-five questions won’t tell you everything about yourself as a leader. They’ll give you a better place to start.
A different place to start
When product struggles, I don’t start with the roadmap.
I start with the leadership decisions underneath it.
- If every member of your executive team were asked to state the company priorities, would you get the same list?
- Do they agree on the customer and business outcomes, and have the hard tradeoffs been made out loud?
- Do teams know which decisions are theirs to make?
- Are people learning fast enough to drop a bad assumption before it becomes an expensive commitment?
If any of these make you uncomfortable, you have work to do on alignment. A better roadmap just makes the disagreement look organized.
Fix the decisions. The roadmap gets useful after that.
Read: I Hate RoadmapsLeading Product Excellence
Better leaders build better organizations. Better organizations create better outcomes.
Three frameworks. Each one starts with the leader.
Product Excellence
The job of product is to find the intersection of customer value and business value. Rapid learning gets you there. Customer delight and moving the metrics that matter are the outcome.
Life Fulfillment
You are more than a product leader. Your life is more. Know your why. Show up for the people you love before you show up for work. Set and honor boundaries. You can win at work and at home.
You don’t need to fix all three at once. You need to know which one the situation in front of you is asking for.
Explore the frameworksBuilt from experience, not a textbook
I was better at product than at leading people.
Three years into my first product job, I was running product managers and a $300 million business. I hated managing people. I loved strategy and building, so I strategized my way out of people management and stayed out for six more years.
Then my boss, after praising me up and down in a review, said there was just one thing. Why did I start every conversation with a bazooka to the chest? That comment sent me on a six-year effort to learn influence, stop dodging the hard conversations, stay aggressive, and do it kindly.
Since then I’ve led product at Adobe, Ancestry, Vivint, and Lucid, on products that have reached nearly a billion people.
I also learned that a demanding career takes as much of your life as you let it.
If you’re strong at the work and still figuring out the leading, I’ve been there. I won’t hand you a textbook. We’ll work on the decisions in front of you now.
Meet Dan
What product leaders say about working with me.
“Coaching sessions with Dan set me up to be a successful SVP of Product. His insights into strategy, people, execution, product, and life have been transformative.”
Dr. Jarom ChungSenior Vice President of Product
“Dan helped me find the intersection of customer value and business value. His frameworks helped me de-risk ideas, move faster, and drive real business impact.”
Allen LiaoCo-Founder and Head of Product
“Dan’s coaching and mentorship helped accelerate my career on both the manager and IC tracks.”
Anthony MorelliSenior Director of Product
Different problems need different levels of help.
For the product leader
The challenge is yours to own. You’re stepping into more responsibility, facing a big call, or sensing the organization needs something different from you. I’m an experienced product executive outside your system. I’ll challenge your assumptions, work the real tradeoffs with you, and stay with you until decisions turn into action.
Explore private coachingFor the CEO or executive sponsor
The organization needs product to operate differently. Sometimes the problem is bigger than one leader. Strategy is unclear, executives aren’t aligned, or product spend isn’t tied to results. I work with your product leader, the leadership team, and you to find what’s in the way and build a practical path.
Explore team and organizational work| Engagement | Who it is for | What it is | Starting at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Private Coaching | CPOs, VPs, Directors, and emerging product executives | Four 60-minute sessions a month, async access between sessions, and an initial leadership assessment. Six-month minimum. | $5,000/month |
| Product Leadership Workshop | Senior product leadership teams | A facilitated full day built on the Product Excellence Framework. | $15,000 |
| Product Transformation | CEOs, CPOs, and Heads of Product | Work across the sponsor, the product leader, and the leadership team. | $35,000/quarter |
Not sure which one fits? Don’t start by choosing an engagement. Start with the Leading Product Excellence Index.
From Leading Product Excellence
Thinking for product leaders who have real decisions to make.
I Hate Roadmaps
Life is too short for another two-hour feature roadmap review.
Read the essayThe Demise of the AI Product Manager
The future doesn’t belong to AI Product Managers. It belongs to exceptional Product Managers who are great at using AI.
Read the essayWhen Building Becomes Cheap, Learning Becomes the Advantage
Build teams that learn faster. Because ultimately, the fastest-building product team doesn't win. The fastest-learning product team does.
Read the essayStart here
Know where you stand before you decide what to change.
Take the Leading Product Excellence Index. Twenty-five questions, about six or seven minutes, five dimensions. Then decide what deserves your attention.