The Product Experience

What is your CEO thinking? - Joe Leech (Coach to CEOs)

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In our latest episode, Joe Leech, a seasoned coach with a background in tech, user experience, and product management, provides an insider's look at the unique challenges and transitions faced by different types of CEOs, and how product teams can work better with the C-suite.

Featured Links: Follow Joe on LinkedIn | Joe's website | 'Managing Change' - Joe's previous podcast episode with The Product Experience 

Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.

Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Randy Silver:

Hello, it's Randy here with another episode of the Product Experience. One of my favorite things about doing this podcast is that I sometimes get to do random follow-up chats with people we've had on the show, and a few weeks ago I was talking to one of them about his work coaching CEOs and I thought you know this, this should be an episode, because who amongst us has not wondered what the heck was going on in the head of their CEO? So this week, lily and I had an absolutely lovely and informative chat with returning champion Joe Leech, otherwise known as Mr Joe, and he shared some amazing things that are absolute gems, and we're going to share them with you right now.

Lily Smith:

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Randy Silver:

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Randy Silver:

There's probably one near you joe, welcome back to the product experience podcast.

Lily Smith:

It's very nice to see you again and we obviously know you very well. But for anyone who doesn't know you, could you give our listeners a real quick intro to who you are and what you do in product, and also just a tiny little bit about your origin story?

Joe Leech:

that would be amazing all right, let me start at the beginning. So my background's in tech it's been about 20 years I've been working technology now. I started out in user experience, user research and design. Following that I had a career briefly in and around product and most recently, what I do now is I'm a coach to CEOs. Most some of them are tech company CEOs, but many of them are not. Some of them are startups and many of them are larger organizations. A couple are publicly listed. So I work basically we coach CEOs from startups right through to large enterprises.

Lily Smith:

And we thought it'd be really interesting to chat to you today about your work, because obviously you have that really strong understanding of product with your background in product. But you now work with these. You know the top dogs, as it were, the CEOs and the founders of the world. So we wanted to pick your brains and find out what is going on in their brains and how can we work better with them. But before we get started, one of the things that you just touched on just there was, like you know, founders and ceos, and they're not always the same thing. So what's the? What's the difference, I guess, between a founder, founder, ceo and then, like a different type of CEO, I guess, a scaling CEO?

Joe Leech:

or a career. Yeah, let me explain how I got here. That might help as well, because some of your listeners may have heard me on here before when I used to work in product and design. One of the reasons I am a coach and I work with CEOs right now is one of the challenges I felt, certainly early on in my career. Ceos right now is one of the challenges I felt certainly early on in my career and I've always worked more at the strategic end of technology and business is in terms of working and planning towards strategy.

Joe Leech:

I was always unsure and looking for more and greater impact and wanted to chase and understand why what seemed to me logical decisions were not being made at the CEO level. I wanted to basically increase my impact, so I effectively followed my curiosity, which took me to the world of working with CEOs, basically because what I saw from down within the product world, within the design world, were decisions that I wouldn't have necessarily agreed with and that fascinated me to understand. Why is it that these folks don't seem to make good decisions or actually make what at the time, don't seem like good decisions but longer term, actually are great decisions? I was very, very curious and so I followed my nose to get to where I am now and, yeah, along the way I've met two types really of CEOs the founders and, I suppose, a more traditional career CEO, who's. Maybe they've made their way up through the organization, through product or through finance or through sales, to sit in the CEO chair, and they are different. And if you work in product, maybe you've worked with both types of leader, maybe just one, maybe you've had frustrations with one and maybe you've not had frustrations with the other, I'm not sure, but they do differ.

Joe Leech:

Founders quite typically they describe the business as being their baby, which is a little bit dangerous. Let's be, let's be clear, because it's not your child, right? You'd never in an exit or want to sell your child, but you'd happily sell your business, whereas many founders treat it kind of as an extension of them. The business is an extension of them and that's great, you know, early on in a founder's career, when it's nearly such startup, because all of their energy they're putting in is building a business which is all about them and the decisions and the choices that they make is that business grows, that business becomes less of an overlap with them. Their identity has to change away from being this is a business that I'm completely all over making all the decisions in to being a leader, and that requires quite a change in the individual to get there.

Joe Leech:

And many founders really find that process hard to transition from being somebody who really deeply is invested and their identity is very much tied up with the business, to being more of a career CEO, which is you're leading it more from a business point of view than you're leading it from a very personal being all over decision-making and all elements of the business as a founder is, so your motivations are often slightly different and the way you operate is often very different.

Joe Leech:

And a big part of what I do, certainly with founders is to help them operate more as leaders, to kind of effectively step back from that very entwined identity element of it. And with career-focused CEOs I help them be more visionary because, again, founders typically have a large vision for where they want to take that business and for many CEOs, especially if they've worked their way up through their career to get to the point of being a CEO, that vision piece is often quite a challenge for them and that can seem quite intimidating if you've come from a finance or product or a sales world to create a vision of the business for the future so effectively what I do is learn from both types of CEOs and share those learnings on the other side.

Randy Silver:

Joe, we talked a couple of weeks ago and you were telling me a bit about your process and the work you do, and you described that when you start working with people, there's usually an arc or different phases that people go through and you have to recognize which phase they're in and guide them from one to the next. Can you just give us an overview? What are those phases?

Joe Leech:

Yeah, and if you're a leader or a manager right now, you're going to recognize these phases because these are very true for you. So the first one typically we work on is challenges challenges that you're facing right now. So things that are maybe not necessarily on fire, but maybe things where you've got a lot of plates spinning or lots of things are getting thrown at you. All of the time You're dealing with the urgent stuff, as it happens in a business. It's very typical for a leader to be spending often when I start working with them, a huge percentage of their time dealing with challenges as they present themselves. Maybe that's discord amongst their leadership team or challenges from competitors, or things not happening, product not launching, sales not selling. There's always a challenge there typically that we spend our first six months or so working towards. Now you'll probably recognize that if you're a leader right now yourself In any new job that you start, typically you've got to get your head around the challenges before you can really get to grips with the bigger picture style of stuff. So typically the first six months is dealing with challenge and a lot of the work that I do is help people with two sides of that. First there's a mindset shift to really understand, well, what do I need to change about myself to deal with this challenge. But then also a skill set shift to really look at what's going on here and again. If you're an experienced leader, you know that all business challenges are people challenges. So a lot of the work that I do is offer people a skill set from either background in neuroscience and psychology In essence, a skill set to really look at what's going on with the people dynamics in your organization. If you're the CEO, that's all levels, from your board of directors to your C-suite, to your senior leadership team, right down to maybe tens of thousands of employees you've got what's really going on with the people in your organization, because typically they're often the cause of some of your biggest challenges to the people. And then, following the challenge, we move on to kind of the next part, which is really, I suppose, looking up and looking at the wider direction that you want to take the organization into, the more strategic thinking. So where do you want to take the organization? Where does it need to go? What are more profound, bolder challenges that you need to make? So what are the big shifts that you need to make in your organization. Again for ceo, that's fairly obvious what those can be like acquisitions, divestitures, restructures, some of the bigger stuff. But assume if you're a product leader, you know six months into a job you can have a strong idea about what the strategic challenges you are, you know you are facing and you can start to free up a bit of your time to really focus on the longer term strategy of really where you need to take that organization that you're responsible for. And then part three really what we end up working with and that you know that strategic piece can take sort of six months or so to really put that into place is legacy what do you want to to kind of leave behind? How do you want things to be different when you have moved on?

Joe Leech:

Or again, for a CEO of an organization of tens of thousands of people, you can't be in the room with all the people all of the time. How are you known within that organization? What do people say about you when you're not in the room? How are you perceived? How do you act? How are you as an individual?

Joe Leech:

And that really is the first place of sort of looking at your legacy. You know we look at succession planning. Who's going to come after you Because, again, you know most CEOs, maybe the last five, 10 years in their role, they've got a certain length of stay that they're prepared to do. What does that legacy look like for them? And again, if you're the CEO of a large organization, what does legacy mean outside of that really, how do you want to be remembered in the world? How do you want to press to see you? You really look at your longer term, the perceptions of you and how you'll be remembered, or how you want to operate in the world afterwards as well. And again, that's very relevant for any manager, right? Because typically on your career you're going to be in the place you are for sort of between two and five years. How do you want to leave that place, in that position, after you've gone?

Lily Smith:

so the arc is very common for for most leaders as they move up the career ladder so, joe, just taking it all the way back to the, the beginning of that, when we were talking about firefighting and the, the kind of solving those initial challenges that probably catalyze, like bringing you into the business and the CEO going ah, I need some help. How much of that is related to product, or you know how? What can product people do when they notice a CEO in that sort of state, or or even not just a CEO, but like a senior leadership team? They're in this state of just like challenge constantly and not you know they don't as a product person, you might sense that they're not necessarily all over everything and on top of everything, like what, what can you do?

Joe Leech:

yes, it's worth thinking about the. I suppose the the symptoms that you can see from that. So I often get get CEOs will speak to me. They'll say things to me like I'm just too busy, I need to clone myself, I've got too many direct reports, I've got too much on my plate. I can't effectively enact a strategy. There's often something here that indicates that they're, in essence, really managing way too much, and that's the big challenge really. Here is often what you find is the folks who are new at CEOs and a big part of what I do is working with first-time CEOs is they're not quite prepared for the volume of stuff that they have to do when they hit that level.

Joe Leech:

So if you're moving up from product, for example, into CEO, you're managing way more and have to be. You can no longer rely on your expertise. You can no longer be a product expert and be a CEO because you have to be, in essence, an expert across a number of fields or really let go of the whole identity of being an expert at that level. So you can no longer know everything about all elements of your business, and so typically what you can see is for a CEO moving up from a CPO to a CEO and feeling that challenge is they stay in product because that's safe, they understand it, they know what they're doing and they'll stay in the place that they feel safe. So you may see that, as a CEO who's come from the commercial side or financial side, they'll go to their place of safety and what that can mean for you is it can feel a little like not necessarily that they they're ignoring you, but they don't quite engage with you as they do with other parts of the business, or they talk to you in a way that's more focused around the element of the business they've come from, so commercial or sales or something like that. So typically what you see is them going to a place of safety and not necessarily engaging with you as deeply as they could do in that situation and you might feel that as being something on your part that you've done wrong.

Joe Leech:

We're all humans.

Joe Leech:

We go to that place, but they will struggle to really engage and want to engage with you at that level. Right, they won't necessarily care too much about things like your roadmap or your structure or your strategy. They'll be wanting to get things done. I need to get things done right now, right, I need you just to get on with this thing that I've said, because I've got lots of other things over here that I need to sort out. So typically what you'll see is them telling you a lot more what to do right and again, all of us in our career have worked with senior leadership that tell us what to do right and it may be not something that we agree with in that situation, but typically that's because they've got a lot going on elsewhere and just kind of want to tell you to get on with something. They can go back and do the things that they are needed to do or you know the places that are needed within their business so is there anything you can do in that situation like what's your, what can you do?

Joe Leech:

and so what typically we do all of us do in that situation ourselves is we go back to our superpower. The way we talk and the way that I see it often and the CEOs I talk to, is product. People talk more about product, right, they get more obsessed with the roadmap. They get more obsessed with the strategy. They're like we need a better vision, we need a better strategy for the business. They almost project back frustrations that they're feeling that they're not getting what they need from the CEO.

Joe Leech:

It's not unlike the relationship you might have with your kids. So when your kids if you're not particularly ignoring them well, they start to play up slightly. I don't mean it's necessarily exactly what you're doing as a product person, but that's the temptation of what it can feel like when you're in that role. Right, you go back to type which is we used to talk about the roadmap. I need to walk you through the strategy, all these sorts of things. You go and you become over product in that situation and the reality, the thing you can do, the one thing you can do is number one say you know, what can I do for you? What do you need me to do?

Randy Silver:

How can I help you, you really go into the world of trying to support them with their needs in terms of their leadership role, but trying to support them with the things that they need, rather than doing lots more product style stuff to kind of support and fill that vacuum that CEOs may be left. There's going to be a big difference between working with someone who's coming in, who's new to the job, or even if they're an old hand at this, coming into a new organization and they've been brought in usually because there's a big challenge and something has to change. Between that and then the second phase that you talked about of you know, now they've got feel a little more comfortable. They're trying to put their strategy into place. Well, I'm going to ask you two questions about this one how do you, as a product person, who isn't necessarily that close to the CEO, how do you recognize which phase they're in? And then, how do you deal with them in this next phase, when they're putting their strategy in place?

Joe Leech:

It's a really good question. It depends really on the point in their career. So, for new first-time CEOs, typically they come into a world of challenge, right? If you're taking over as a CEO, maybe it's been left well behind, left in a good state, by the previous occupant of that role, or almost certainly you're going to want to make change and stamp your own mark on it anyway. So there's going to be challenge for the first six months anyway, regardless, because you're the number one person at the top Maybe the C-suite team or the board is not exactly what you want it to be there's going to be a world of challenge you need to get through to get some of the short-term things done that you need to do. So typically it can be time-based as well.

Joe Leech:

But the second part of that is knowing which phase they're in really is. It depends really in terms of their experience and where they've come from. So if they are maybe a second or third time CEO and they've been brought into the company, they're going to come in with a lot of experience in terms of challenge. They're going to be able to know what the challenges are and want to get started very quickly on the strategy, right, it's exactly what they want to do. So you can often identify, based on their previous experience, which they're going to come into. That's certainly how I do it, but the reality is you can just watch them operate to understand, right, the way they talk. If they're talking more strategically, you know which phase they're in, right? If they're talking more about challenges and getting things done and things that seem a lot more urgent, then they're almost certainly in that challenge phase. You can understand by the way they talk as to which of those two phases they're in.

Joe Leech:

And, let's be honest, all of us leaders are like that and it's not a simple cut and dry. It's like on friday I finished my challenge phase and monday I start my strategy phase. These things come and they go at their ebbs and flows, right, there's always going to be fires and challenges and stuff that happens. It's your attitude towards them as they do happen that really sets you apart as a leader in these sorts of situations. Right, if they absolutely rock your boat and phase you, then hey, maybe you need some more skill set and mindset shifts to be able to adapt to them. If there's like, okay, another day I've got another set of challenges, I can just deal with them. The challenges rarely go away. The ability to manage them and to prioritize them is the thing that really ultimately changes.

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Lily Smith:

And one of the things I find with CEOs kind of in that strategy you know they're thinking quite strategically and they're not firefighting, they've got headspace to think about things and think things through what I often find is that they'll come with an idea of this business is doing this thing, or I've heard this from someone, or this is what, how, we, how I did it last time, and so there's a lot of preconceptions or there's a lot of outside influence. Quite often, I find with people in that sort of situation, because they're spending a lot of time checking that what we're doing in the business is, you know it aligns with like experiences of other people and stuff which can be like a really helpful gauge of like what you're doing, but can also be like really, really annoying as a product person, where you want to be led by data and customers. And you know, do you see that as well with the ceos that you talk to and and product people that you talk to and and what's the solution there? Are we allowed to just ignore them?

Joe Leech:

the thing that seems to be going on here is it's a lonely position to be in leadership, right. Often it's just you. The higher you get in the organization, the less peers you have, and when you hit the ceo role, yes, it's the most lonely job in the organization. You don't have somebody necessarily that you can use to test your ideas upon, and in reality, that should be your senior leadership team. You should be able to do that with them, right? You should have that ability to trust them and they should be able to compliment you in the way that they work, so that you can test ideas with them before you get to it.

Joe Leech:

Any of us who've been in leadership before can identify that point where it feels very, very lonely, right, where you feel the weight of the organization on your shoulders or the job on your shoulders At that point. That's the point where you need to have somebody in the organization where you can share these challenges with right. And that sounds to me like what I'm hearing here is a little bit of a reach out from a CEO for that, to a certain extent, the reality of what a CEO should be doing in those sorts of situations, and it's quite funny one of the questions I get quite a lot with the CEOs that I work with. In fact, pretty much all of them at some point ask me, is they ask me the question am I doing this right? Is this the right way to do this Right? And that's a really interesting place to be. If you're that leader, right, who can you ask that question to? So I think that that's a healthy sign that they're coming to you and asking you what you're working on, what you're doing, what your priorities are, what you think the organization should be. Is there really coming to you to look for input for them to be able to set the vision for what the organization needs to be?

Joe Leech:

So, ultimately, for a CEO to be successful, they need a crispness of vision, right? They need the ability to be able to say exactly what it is that they want that organization to do, or to be or to become, and that crispness of vision should then be able to drive the rest of the organization. And we've all worked with organizations that don't have that right, like they want to be the best or they want to be number one or something like that. But then you have the visionary leaders, like you know, like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, love them or hate them. They both had a very, very strong vision for where they wanted the organization to be.

Joe Leech:

And the best CEOs out there will speak and work to you, especially people who are closest to customers and who are especially a technology organization and teams like Product, who are, in essence, delivering the business value. They're going to look to you for the inputs for that particular vision. So always be open to have those sorts of conversations, because really what they're asking at that point is what do you think the organization should be doing? What can you input to that? Because once they have that Christmas of vision and everybody's aligned around that vision, then things start to happen and things start to change.

Randy Silver:

I totally get what you mean about it, the leadership roles being lonely. It's one of the reasons I started a community for CPOs, and it's fascinating when I get people together. What they talk about is am I doing this right? It's, why aren't people giving me what I need or what do I need to give to other people? So I'm curious. I mean, obviously all CEOs are different and we're not going to ask you to tell us the secret to dealing with all of them, but is there something common you see from the people you deal with, the people you coach, the people you talk to in terms of the way they talk about their product teams? Is there something they need from them, or they expect or they want that they're just not getting? What is it we're missing? Because we expect, then, leadership to have a vision and a mission and objectives, or for us to co -create that with them, and so many times it's either misunderstood or missing. So how do we do this better?

Joe Leech:

I mean, it's a really good question. It's the $64,000 question, really. Is it linking that up? Oh, it's way more than that. I think what's interesting about that question is that question comes from all other parts of the organization as well, right? So if you're you're feeling that in product as a product leader, almost certainly your, your colleagues in sales are feeling the same thing as well. Right, it's easy in sales to set targets like we just need you to sell more. Right, that's all we need you to do. And often you can hear the same thing in products we just need you to build more. You know, you can start to hear the same things that there as well.

Joe Leech:

So in a leadership role in an organization, especially if you're, for example, a CPO, my advice to you in that situation is to become friends with the other senior leaders in the organization. How can you complement the work of the sales team, how can you work with the commercial team better? How can you become friends with them? Because the reality is is that the best place to find a good friend or a common friend with the same challenges as you is in another part of the organization but at the same level as you. And so in creating those bonds between you and other senior leaders. That's really where your strength can come from, because, again, one of the things that I work with and why I work with my CEOs now, I don't work with all CEOs, right, I can't work with all of them and I have a very certain fit criteria of the CEOs that I want to work with, and that's really twofold Number one, they want to change and number two, they really want to do the best possible job they can do. Really. That's my criteria, and so the CEOs that I want to work with are coming into it looking for ways that they can be better in terms of what they do. So, as a product leader, you can help them by understanding how they can work better with you. Maybe they'll ask you that. Maybe you can tell them. Here's what would be really helpful for me to be able to work better for you. It's about to have that crisp message yourself about how you want to work with the CEO. What do you want it to be like in the relationship you have with that CEO? If you can project back to them and they can do the same back to you at some point, there's going to be a fit there where you can start to create a lot better. You know work together. You can sort of start to work a lot better.

Joe Leech:

What I find where the mismatch comes is where folks are not very clear on what they want and what they need and are expecting the other side to kind of fill in the gaps. Right, they've got expectations of the ceo right. When they meet with the ceo, they're going to tell me exactly what they want here. No, the reality is this is a two-way street. You need to say what you want and they'll respond to that by saying what they want and they need as well. It's absolutely the way to do it.

Joe Leech:

So asking for support and help from your CEO and asking for what you need is possibly the best way to be. And the question you've got about how to get better. The biggest challenge I see and I'll be honest, working with the CEOs that I work with about product and product teams generally is they are too disconnected from the commercial side of the organization. They are too focused on roadmap, on shipping, on features, and I know how that's going to sound to a certain extent, but what? What I hear from the ceos is they don't have the commercial understanding or acumen to work closely enough with the commercial organization to really deliver what the commercial side of the organization needs.

Lily Smith:

So that's often the biggest complaint that I see is they are slightly disconnected from the commercial realities of the business and of the organization as a whole I think that's really interesting and I've seen it come up quite a few times recently on like linkedin chats or whatsapp groups and stuff, with people are saying there's still like a real gap in the commercial acumen of product managers, like currently and where they should be, and that's a really I think it's quite a difficult skill to develop as a product manager because it's not necessarily also where people expect you to have experience. So what can you know? What can product people do in order to level up their, their commercial awareness and understanding?

Joe Leech:

so the first thing they can do is really follow their curiosity about the commercial side of the organization to really truly understand how the organization makes money. Now that you can translate as being things like, well, how much is the pricing on the pricing page? But it's much deeper than that. The reality is is you understanding at a deep level how the commercial team operates? So if you're working in the SaaS world, absolutely right, you need to know how the salespeople sell. Okay, Because the way that they sell is not necessarily how people use the product.

Joe Leech:

I know that's a very straightforward thing that we all kind of know, but the reality is you have to have a deep understanding of how salespeople operate and how they work and that's what's going to drive you forward in any product organization is really truly understanding the economics of the organization. In the more B2C world, that's again understanding the economics at scale. Really, that's really understanding how marketing and top of funnel and that element of lead generation works or customer generation works. So really understanding where your customers are coming from and what your customers' needs are, but with a commercial focus on, Because the reality of most customers when they're choosing or selecting a product or something to deliver something for them that's very, very different often from when they're using the product. There they're wearing a different hat and have got a different set of criteria when they're choosing something from when they're using something. So the reality is understanding those two important differences and really following your deep curiosity with the folks in the commercial side of the organization, and that means building strong links with them.

Lily Smith:

I guess in that sense it's very similar to just developing any other skill or knowledge in any other area of tech or marketing or customer service or whatever it is. It's just like you say that that curiosity, asking questions, wanting to understand things not at the surface level, but at that next level, down that deeper level. One of the things I always do when I go and work in a new business is speak to the CFO or the finance director and go show me the financial model. Like I want to understand all the inputs and and the levers and and all the assumptions that you're making, and I think it does like just gives you such a sort of clear perspective of like that, the commercial side of the business and I think what people are really great at is abstracting layers up from that.

Joe Leech:

so often what you find with with product people is that you're amazing at taking, you know, understanding and abstracting it 10 layers up to be you know, a feature on a roadmap, for example, and the reality is is in doing that abstraction you can lose touch with the reality of what the actual situation is. So it's regrounding yourself in that commercial element of the business is really going to drive you forward and from a career point of view, you know, which do you think is going to make you more successful as a product person understanding how your organization operates commercially, or getting really great at roadmaps right? Which one's going to which one's going to serve you better longer term? It's an obvious answer when you think about it like that. But the reality is is we tend to choose more products, safer product skills for us to come up with? Because embedding ourselves or getting you know, understanding the sales team is quite a scary prospect for us, because often you know, we speak in very different ways. If you look at the commercial organization, they'll often say the same thing quite a few times in a conversation. They'll even change it. They'll even contradict themselves. Salespeople will contradict themselves. In a whole conversation I've been with tech people who find that deeply frustrating. Right, they'll say things to me like I told the sales team six months ago that feature wasn't happening and they've forgotten about it.

Joe Leech:

The reality is the two sides of the organization operate differently. Sales people are all about conversation, relationships, empathy, repeating conversations, talking to people. The tech folks were all about making something tangible, real, with levels of abstraction, taking away context. We have different skill sets that make us suit and work in very, very different ways and when those two skill sets meet, challenges can come up, because salespeople like to talk a lot and tech people like to write things down and make proper lists about process right, very black and white, and those things don't go very well together.

Joe Leech:

If you've worked in organizations, you know that sales folks are not great at running processes because they're not wired that way. That's not the way they work, that's not the skill set that's going to make them successful, and the same is true. So you've got to have a deep understanding and appreciation for how the other folks operate, because the big challenge I see about certainly from CPOs or product people trying to make that leap up from a CPO into the leadership CEO role. That's the big thing that holds them back is that deep commercial understanding of the organization and how it works.

Lily Smith:

So for those people that are thinking, you know the CEO is the role that they're ultimately aiming for. Obviously, you've just talked about commercial awareness, but what else can help you get ready for that step from product leader into CEO?

Joe Leech:

I think the biggest thing you can do is let go of your subject matter experience. So often in any element of the organization financial, sales, product marketing you kind of you know you hold on tightly to that subject matter experience that you've got and that can be really great to get you where you are. But the reality is to make that next step. You need to move beyond that and that actual subject matter experience can hold you back because that's somewhere that's safe for you and you'll always want to go to. The reality is to be at that top level.

Joe Leech:

You have to have a strong understanding of all elements of the business, right, all all parts of how the business operates, not just a pure focus on one, because the challenge you're going to face when you get to that level is you'll go to your safe place which is like, for example, just working in product and that's not going to help you or the organization to push your career forward anyway and it will actually hold you back, you know during the interview process all the way through.

Joe Leech:

So the reality of if you want to prepare yourself for the top is you need to get broader in your skillset and that's much more in the world of leadership than it is to be a subject matter expert, and many of us, certainly in product, pride ourselves on the fact that we are subject matter experts or have been subject matter experts in the past, and the reality is that can count against you when you make that step up do you think it's fair to say that you'll never be like fully ready or you'll never know how ready you are and you kind of actually just need to do the job?

Joe Leech:

yeah, I mean, that's a really great way to talk about it. It's's like being a parent. If any of you have been a parent, right, none of us are ever ready to be a parent. You can't comprehend the complexity of the world that you're entering, and reality is the same as true of being a CEO right. The level of complexity at that level is never going to. You know, you're never going to be wholly prepared for it. Any way you can really do it is by doing it right. There's no sort of CEO school you can go to. It's going to get you to that point when you're there.

Joe Leech:

There are certain jobs at the C-suite that will get you closer to that. Typically, that's in and around the world of being a CFO, but the reality is there's very little that can before you, in essence, get there, which is why, looping back to the first question that we talked about around founders, which is why founders find it particularly challenging, because often they're in an earlier place in their career or they've, you know, they've excelled in other parts of the stuff they've done before, and then they are thrust into that world of being a leader, maybe way earlier in their career than a career based CEO would be. So, yeah, it can be a real shock for you at that point when you get there, because you can't really comprehend the challenge of what you're undertaking. And that can be an amazing challenge at the same time, but it can equally be quite scary and intimidating when you you know the first few weeks in that particular role.

Randy Silver:

Joe, that is fantastic. I will say this give the same advice to potential podcast guests. You won't know that you're a good podcast guest until you try it. So if you've got something in, you, get in touch, let us know. We love getting pitches from people, Joe. Thank you again. So much.

Lily Smith:

This has been absolutely brilliant, thank you, thanks, joe. The product experience hosts are me, lily Smith, host by night and chief product officer by day.

Randy Silver:

And me Randy Silver also host by night, and I spend my days working with product and leadership teams, helping their teams to do amazing work.

Lily Smith:

Luran Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.

Randy Silver:

And our theme music is from product community legend Arnie Kittler's band Pow. Thanks to them for letting us use their track.