Empowering Product Teams: Insights from Air Focus CEO on Effective Leadership and Tool Building

Introduction

Product management is an ever-evolving field, with new challenges and opportunities arising as companies grow and technologies advance. To gain insights into effective product leadership and tool development, we spoke with the CEO and co-founder of Air Focus, a product management platform specializing in prioritization and roadmapping.

The Founder's Perspective

The Air Focus CEO brings a unique perspective as both a founder and product leader. He emphasizes the importance of building a low-hierarchy organization where smart people can come together to discuss and make decisions collaboratively. This approach aims to minimize the impact of ego and ensure that the best arguments win.

Balancing Founder Involvement

One of the key challenges for founders is knowing when and how to be involved in product decisions. The CEO acknowledges the strong instinct founders have to be deeply involved, given their comprehensive understanding of the product, market, and company vision. However, he stresses the importance of controlling this impulse:

"There's nobody more incentivized to make this whole thing - the whole product, the whole company - work than the founders. That's where this instinct and this reflex comes from. There's also usually nobody that has more experience with the product, the market, everything."

While this deep knowledge is valuable, it's crucial to find a balance. Micromanaging every aspect of the product can lead to burnout, frustration, and missed opportunities for innovation from the team.

Empowering the Team

The CEO advocates for giving team members the autonomy to make decisions and create solutions:

"I have seen countless times when you give people the keys that they create things that are much better than the stuff that you could ever create."

This approach not only leads to better outcomes but also helps motivate and retain talented team members.

Building for Real-World Product Management

Air Focus aims to address the gap between textbook product management and the realities of the field. The platform is designed as a flexible toolbox that allows companies to build a product management system tailored to their needs.

Balancing Different Types of Work

The CEO outlines a general approach to allocating product work:

1. 20% for maintenance and obvious improvements
2. A large portion for strategic, complex problems
3. A small portion for customer-specific requests (ideally minimized)

This breakdown allows teams to address immediate needs while still focusing on long-term, strategic initiatives that shape the product's future.

Empowering Engineers

An interesting approach at Air Focus is allowing engineers to choose from a "quick win" backlog:

"We have this quick fix, quick win backlog, and they're literally allowed to pick any of these items. They're usually not big items, and that's an unbelievable motivational aspect if you allow them to pick and solve on their own."

This strategy not only boosts motivation but also leverages the problem-solving skills of engineers, freeing up product managers to focus on more complex challenges.

The Future of Product Management Tools

The conversation touched on the limitations of traditional project management tools like Jira when used for product management. The CEO highlighted the need for a dedicated product management platform that can serve as a single source of truth for product information.

Integration and Accessibility

One key insight is the need for product management tools to be accessible and useful across different functions in a company. This includes sales and customer success teams, who often lack visibility into product usage and roadmaps.

The Impact of AI

The potential impact of AI on product management tools was discussed, with both participants agreeing that AI could dramatically change how certain tasks are performed:

"I don't think any product manager will write user stories in two years. It makes no sense."

The ability to quickly generate insights and explore data using natural language queries could revolutionize how product decisions are made and communicated.

Challenges in Product Management

Unshipping Features

One area where many companies struggle is removing features from their product. The CEO admitted that Air Focus could improve in this area:

"We're not doing it enough at all. We have really taken out stuff... I haven't taken stuff out of the product."

Regularly evaluating and removing underperforming features can help keep products focused and maintainable.

Communicating the Roadmap

Balancing the need to communicate future plans with the flexibility to change direction based on new information is a common challenge. The CEO suggested a multi-layered approach:

"There's one roadmap, not five different versions of the same roadmap. It's one roadmap, one database, and certain of these roadmap initiatives are flagged to go to the public roadmap or to a customer roadmap."

This approach allows for controlled communication of plans while maintaining the ability to adapt as needed.

Conclusion

Effective product management requires a delicate balance of leadership, empowerment, and tool utilization. By fostering a collaborative environment, empowering team members, and leveraging flexible, AI-enhanced tools, product leaders can navigate the complexities of modern product development.

As the field continues to evolve, staying open to new approaches and technologies will be crucial for success. The insights shared by the Air Focus CEO provide valuable guidance for product leaders looking to improve their processes and outcomes in an increasingly competitive landscape.

Article created from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjqPRkI3pEw