Quo Vadis, Product Leadership?

Over the years, I’ve seen both inspiring and frustrating examples of product leadership. A few leaders shaped how I think, not through flashy frameworks, but by being clear, grounded, and present. Others made product feel less like a craft and more like a checklist to keep the engine running.

While building Beyond, I’ve had the chance to speak with hundreds of product leaders, CPOs, VPs, group leads, founders and ICs.

These conversations have given me a wider lens on what product leadership looks like across companies and contexts. No one approach stood out as universally right. But one recurring tension came up again and again.

The higher someone sits in the org, the more confident they often are about how they approach strategy and product management.

But when I talk to PMs in those same orgs, the tone was often more cautious. They describe direction that feels unclear, or decisions made far away without enough context. They don’t always feel led in the way that supports great product work.

The core disconnect

In many organizations I spoke to, the gap between product leadership and product reality is wider than it appears.

A common pattern I’ve seen and heard repeatedly from PMs and leaders is this: many senior product leaders haven’t actually been PMs themselves. They’ve come from adjacent roles like design, engineering, growth, or operations. They’ve worked closely with PMs, sometimes even led them. But proximity to the work is not the same as doing the work. It’s easy to underestimate how much context, judgment, and repetition real product work requires.

On the other side, I’ve talked to deeply capable PMs, staff, lead, principal, who have done the work. They’ve aligned teams, made tough calls without perfect data, held uncertainty under pressure. They’re ready to lead. But the path from IC to leadership is steep. Often, it’s not a question of skill, but of opportunity and whether the organization knows how to nurture that shift.

That’s not to say product leaders from adjacent backgrounds can’t thrive, many absolutely do. But the pattern I kept hearing was hard to ignore.

Here’s where things break down:

• Leaders who haven’t done the job themselves
• Practitioners who have, but can’t step up to lead
• And a middle layer slowly losing trust in both directions

How this manifests

A PM sits between a leader who talks about “customer love” and engineers who need answers about APIs for example. They end up translating all day up, down, across. They’re not shipping or working on product; they’re managing misalignment in multiple directions.

Shreyas Doshi put it well: Good PMs work hard and feel overwhelmed. Great PMs work hard and don’t. In my opinion, the difference is often the context in which they operate. When PMs have to bridge gaps that shouldn’t exist, they lose the space to do their actual job.

Instead of doing discovery for users, they’re doing discovery for leadership. Instead of learning about the market, they’re figuring out what their own execs really mean. They spend more time managing up than moving forward. It drains energy and kills momentum. In my conversations I could clearly see their frustration.

I’ve seen great PMs being burned out.

Not because product is too complex, but because they’re constantly interpreting unclear strategy, filling in the blanks left by leadership.

What often fills this gap? Process. More docs. More check-ins. More alignment theater. But process doesn’t fix a broken understanding of what product work actually takes.

Even industry veterans like Marty Cagan and Petra Wille, who mainly focused on the importance of empowered teams, have recently shifted emphasis toward better product leadership. That pivot says something. Maybe the real issue isn’t the PMs. It’s how we select and support the people leading them.

Paul Adams, Intercom’s CPO, also pointed to this in his writing several times: real product sense comes not from proximity to the work or formal process, but from deep customer understanding, rich context, and hands-on experience.

The industry doesn’t lack tools. I've learned this the hard way trying to build and selling a tool for product leadership. It lacks leaders who guide with context, not control. Who prioritize coherence over consensus. Who’ve done the real work and still remember how hard it is.

The root causes

• Underestimating the craft:
  Product management requires context, judgment, and repetition. You can’t shortcut those by watching from the sidelines. Leaders who’ve never held the role often lack the intuition needed to guide teams through messy trade-offs.
• Narrow promotion pipelines:
  Many orgs struggle to recognize leadership potential in ICs. Instead of supporting their growth, they look for ready-made leaders, often from outside the craft.
• Misplaced trust in process:
  When context is missing, companies try to fill the gap with process, docs, check-ins, alignment theater. But process doesn’t compensate for lack of real understanding.
• Oversimplifying the spectrum:
  Not all non-PM leaders are disconnected. Some make exceptional product leaders. And not all ex-PMs make good execs. It’s not about background, it’s about whether you truly understand and support the work.

So what does good product leadership look like?

In my opinion, it comes down to three core things:

• Clarity – Helping teams make sense of complexity and direction
• Judgment – Supporting sound decisions without micromanaging
• Product Thinking – Building a shared understanding of what good looks like

Simple. Good leaders stay micro-informed without being micro-managing. They show up to user interviews. They sit in team critiques. They follow the trade-offs behind decisions. They stay close enough to understand what’s happening, and far enough to let teams own it.

This isn’t about org charts or new titles. It’s about reconnecting product leadership with the actual work, the craft of product management.

In most sports, the best coaches and trainers are former players. People who’ve lived the game. They earn trust because they’ve felt the pressure, made the plays, and know what it takes to win. Product should be no different.

Leading well means understanding the work from the inside.

What you can do

• If you’re in leadership:
  Stay close. Not to micromanage, but to understand. Watch user interviews. Sit in team critiques. Follow the reasoning behind technical trade-offs. Know what your teams are navigating, not just what they’re delivering.
• If you’re a PM aiming to lead:
  Don’t wait for a title. Lead by how you work. Help others find clarity. My personal favorite: Visualize and create understanding. Build alignment where it’s missing. Influence without needing authority. In my opinion leadership is always a skill, not a fancy title or promotion.

Product management is a craft. When leaders forget that, the work gets harder for everyone. Support and advocate for the people doing it well. Build organizations where good product work can happen.

In the end, it doesn’t matter where you came from, what matters is your commitment to becoming a great product person, wherever you are in the journey.