What is it really like to be a Product Leader?

Product Management is a uniquely modern job. Compared to traditional trades that have been around for multiple decades, Product Management has only taken its current shape over the last 15-20 years. 

My liberal arts college didn’t have a single “Product Management” course, let alone a dedicated major. Over the course of my decade-plus career leading product teams at big companies like Spotify and Netflix and early stage startups, I pieced together my own education from blog posts, books, online courses and interviews from expert product people who came before me.

While there’s a ton of great knowledge on topics like product strategy and UX/UI design on the internet, there’s less content about the day-to-day experience of Product Leaders: the challenging interpersonal dynamics, frustrating cross-functional stalemates, and emotional ups-and-downs that define the role.

In our quest to become true customer experts about Product Leaders, the team at HEARD wanted to go beyond understanding functional tasks and goals to gain a deeper understanding of the social and emotional layers of Product. We partnered with the Product Leadership Summit to field a research study called Off the Record: An Unfiltered Look into Product Leadership.

Imagine sitting down for drinks with a few fellow Product Leaders. What kind of stories would be shared, what complaints would be aired, and what advice would be swapped? That's the spirit we aimed to capture in Off the Record. 

HEARD is an ideal tool to use to replicate that type of intimate conversation at scale. We used HEARD to interview 200 senior Product Leaders in the PLS community and presented a preview of the results at the live at the summit last month. Now, we're excited to share the full findings from the report.

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