Leadership Skills for Product Owners

Why Leadership Matters

An entrepreneur comes up with an idea, and tries to get funding for it. They prepare the best “deck” or “stack” of slides, and armed with business knowledge, data, sales skills, storytelling and more, they try to convince venture capitalists that their ideas are worth the investors’ money. If they succeed, they may just create something of value to the world and to their nascent company. If they fail, they don’t. 

When they get funding, they’ll build, measure and learn, and decide whether to persevere or to pivot. Their leadership will be responsible for the success, or failure, of the company, perhaps with partners, but that’s a very small group of people, who are already onboard. We’ve all heard of these pivotal founders and the organization structures they create, to shape companies in their image, e.g. Steve Jobs. This funny illustration below shows just how much the leadership, and the character of the leader/s of a company, affects its structure (notice Apple under the late Steve Jobs, for example).