Lead on Purpose

Promoting Leadership Principles in Product Management

Category Archives: Leadership


by 2 Comments

Leading product strategy and execution

Building software platforms and applications that customers love, and will recommend to their peers, takes extreme focus and hard work. There are many moving parts to product success, including understanding your market and the problems customers in the market face, and building solutions that solve those problems.

Successful product leaders understand the value of both strategy and execution: Strategynecessary for building products that perform well into the future. Execution requires the focus and discipline to do things now for near-term product releases.

How do you succeed in both of these two seemingly dissimilar aspects of product management?

Continue reading →


by Leave a comment

Leadership strategies to improve workplace culture

Guest post by Gabe Nelson

Great leaders inspire. Great leaders don’t dominate a room, they motivate it. Whether you are an executive manager of a large corporation or the IT guy who has no subordinates, you need to step into leadership roles with conviction and consideration.

When you believe in the work you do unwaveringly, it will inspire people. When you come from a place of understanding and care, it will motivate people. Simply being present and demanding top performance from your workforce isn’t the way things are done anymore. It’s important to know and be considerate of your employees’ feedback.

Here we’ll go over a few useful leadership strategies and practices anyone can implement that will help improve the workplace culture.

Continue reading →


by 3 Comments

An Effective Leader Leads by Influence, not Authority

Guest Post by Ken Sandy

The earliest mistakes you make in your career are often the most memorable and where you learn the most. In one of my first product management roles, I was delighted when a C-level executive tasked me to lead an important and urgent project and assemble a team for it.

I called a meeting together with people from the marketing, engineering, and design teams. I gave what I thought was a rousing speech, in which I asked that they drop whatever they were doing and commit themselves to this new project — it was of great importance to the c-suite, so it should be our top priority.

Continue reading →


by 4 Comments

Patience – A Leadership Principle

During the last few weeks and months so much has changed for all of us. With the recent pandemic we’ve seen many things change that we heretofore took for granted, things we’d become so accustomed to were transformed within days. It’s left us wondering how long it will take to get back to normal or ask whether ‘normal’ will ever be the same. It’s been a trial of endurance to say the least.

My intention is not to cover recent global events, but instead to focus on how we react to what’s happening in our lives; to take a deeper look at ways we can survive hardships and come out stronger as a result.

Patience Continue reading →


by 4 Comments

The power of pause in leadership

The most effective leaders know there’s only one thing they have complete control over: “the way in which I respond and react to another human.” They know their success depends on the unity and determination of their team members. They also know the best work comes from individuals who are motivated and excited about the work they’re doing.

How do leaders improve the performance of their teams and create a culture of productivity?

Power of Pause Continue reading →


by 1 Comment

Why it’s important to think bigger, and play bigger

Creating great products and building successful companies takes a tremendous amount of work, insatiable initiative and a penchant for perseverance. It requires thinking differently than others think, and even differently than you have thought in the past.

To make big changes requires a whole new way of thinking, yet few college programs or study courses sow the seeds of innovation and creative thinking. You need to see the world differently, to think differently. To create winning products and companies you need to play bigger.

Play Bigger Continue reading →


by 3 Comments

Rules for amazing team formation

Guest post by Daniela McVicker

People make companies successful. Without effective team formation, a business can’t succeed. Carefully choosing and assigning roles and tasks is a crucial element in business management.

Building a strong team with a healthy work relationship is a demanding task. That is why carefully selected and strictly established rules can be life savers. These critical rules for team formation can help you create an amazing team.

Amazing-Team-Formation Continue reading →


by Leave a comment

Three steps toward creating market-leading products

The goal of every company and product leader is to invent products (or services) that become recognized market leaders. Creating a new product category is icing on the cake, but also rare and extremely difficult.

We all know about companies and products like VMware, Google, and Uber that have not only developed cool products, but also fashioned new life-changing industries. Thinking about it from that perspective might cause us to shrink and say, “I could never do that.” However, there are many lesser-known companies and products that lead their markets; and done right, creating new markets and categories is well within our grasp.

Three steps-leading products Continue reading →


by Leave a comment

Leadership styles for directing small teams

Leadership differs depending on the size of the group you’re leading. For most product managers, the people they lead work on different teams and the individuals they need to influence don’t report to them. Regardless of whether the people you lead (or should be leading) report to you, the need to lead soundly is important.

Understanding more deeply your style of leadership will help you lead more effectively. The work will go better, and you’ll enjoy it more.

Leadership styles Continue reading →


by 3 Comments

Developing high-performance product teams

It’s difficult (if not impossible) to quantify what it takes to develop a productive and successful product team. Every product is unique, and every company does things differently. From a distance it may seem that there’s no process or methodology to create a high-performing product team.

Developing great products entails teams of people working together. With the proliferation of product roles in recent years it has become more important for product teams to function well together and collaborate effectively with other teams and individuals in the organization. Increased focus on building great teams is desperately needed in today’s fast-evolving technology world, yet for too many companies it’s not a high priority.

What does it take to develop a group of disparate individuals into a high-performing product team?

High-performance Continue reading →