The Four Types of Product Leaders

I believe there are four types of product leaders in high-tech companies that build products for enterprises and developers.

Starter, Scaler, Steward, and Sage.

Each type has a very different set of traits and predispositions. While the same person can perform many of these roles over a career, people tend to have a natural sweet spot by dint of their personalities and experiences.

A CEO or a hiring manager can benefit from being attuned to these types and thinking about the type they need at a given point in time.

Type 1 — “Starter”: The Nothing to Something Guy

The Starter starts from a blank sheet of paper and fills it up rapidly through constant search and iteration.

The Starter is very customer-focused, understands how to do customer development, and how best to iterate with the first customers.

The Starter works with engineers to build things that may not necessarily scale, but will meet the needs of early adopters. The Starter knows how to find and build something a specific group of people really need and want.

The Starter is street smart, breaks rules, hates the process, but gets things done.

The Starter has an intuitive sense for creating a great product experience from scratch.

The Starter thinks outside of traditional boxes, and possesses a natural and integrated understanding of how it all works together: from the UX in the front-end, to the business logic and data in the back-end; from the expectations of the user when he opens the application to understanding what creates delight while using it.

Starters are often very cool people with eclectic interests, insane talent, and diverse interests. They typically tend to not enjoy management, planning, and structure, and most have a healthy disregard for organizational BS.

The Starter is the best fit for early stage products and new ventures. In many cases, it is one of the founders, though not always. The Starter represents the very heart of the product and the company in its early days.

Starter talent is hard to find. These are truly unique and creative people who can navigate the path from zilch to product-market fit with great finesse.

Type 2 — “Scaler”: The Something to Big Thing Guy

The Scaler knows how to “productize” capabilities that exist across multiple early customer deployments and build a robust product that can work at scale.

The Scaler exhibits a natural disposition to create products that lend themselves to deployments that are “model-based” and repeatable vs. “code-based” and custom. Model based products lead to faster time to value and higher gross margins, while not compromising on meeting unique customer needs.

The Scaler viscerally understands the difference between application platform and business applications, and constantly strives to create reusable, platform-level abstractions. He/She collaborates with engineering to re-imagine, re-architect, and re-factor the components of the product stack as necessary in pursuit of larger goals such as repeatability, extensibility, open APIs, scalability, upgradeability and ease of use/admin.

The Scaler thinks about the entire life cycle of deployment and takes care to ensure a delightful experience for all parties including end business users, administrators, customer success personnel, and developers.

The Scaler knows how to work with the different stakeholders within the company to maximize impact. She works with sales and growth teams to create better sales enablement and customer facing content. She works with customer success teams to provide best practices for implementation and value measurement. She also creates compelling product marketing collateral that can articulate value in customer terms.

It is also at this stage that the company may need to form separate teams for UX and data science. The Scaler plays a key part in hiring, nurturing, and enabling people in these individual disciplines while also binding them tightly together in pursuit of a superior customer experience.

Scalers operate at the intersection of innovation and structure. They want to do the right things the right way for long-term impact. They are nowhere near as intuitive and creative as Starters, but are long-term thinkers, and have a holistic view of the product and its ecosystem. While they do not enjoy it either, they tend to be more tolerant than Starters of process, structure and traditional management functions.

In contrast to Starters, who are typically a part of the core founding team (or) one of the early employees, Scalers are often external hires. Some Starters are also Scalers, but not very often.

Companies transitioning from product-market fit to growth need to consider creating composite product teams that bring to bear the best attributes of both Starter and Scaler types of product leaders. The arrangement will be different in each case depending on the specific individuals, but when done right, this can be a real force multiplier.

Type 3 — “Steward”: The Custodian

The steward manages and executes a product roadmap on a steady drum beat for an already successful product line. The steward delivers incremental features on an ongoing basis.

Incremental must not be confused with less. It means adding more features on top of a solid foundation vs. building (or) rebuilding the base.

The Steward is most comfortable with structure, process and organized work. With the product serving large numbers of customers, the Steward takes great care in ensuring that new features and releases do not break current deployments.

Stewards are great planners and are excellent at executing their plans. They are also very good at building consensus and collaborating with multiple stakeholders. However, Stewards also tend to be more bureaucratic in their approach to innovation and may be predisposed towards extending the status quo than challenging it.

Starter/Scaler to Steward is an awkward transition that usually does not work well. People often end up leaving the company or hiring someone else to be the Steward.

Circa 2017, no product can afford to be only “stewarded” in a traditional sense, and some might even call it a sure recipe for getting disrupted. Dealing with this dichotomy at the scale and scope of big companies is a real challenge. M&A and spinning up internal startups can help, but only if they are really well targeted, managed and nurtured.

This is where the Sage steps in.

Type 4 — “Sage”: The Versatile Portfolio Manager

The sage is wise and has the scars to show for it.

The sage typically operates in the role of a “Chief Product Officer” or equivalent, and has the dexterity and wisdom to manage a diverse portfolio of products that may include a mix of early stage, growing, and mature product lines.

The Sage is a rare versatile product leader who has been through several starter, scaler, and steward gigs. The Sage has been there, done it, and has lived to tell the tale.

The Sage is likely to manage a motley mix of starters, scalers and stewards as a part of his/her leadership team and is constantly pushing them all to learn from each other. The Sage understands how to hire, train and rotate product talent across multiple disciplines.

Sages embody and evangelize a product culture. They think hard about how to encourage risk-taking and experimentation in one part of their organization while driving process and optimization in another.They fully own the delivery of each product’s experience, the platform that ties them all together, and the constituent teams (design, UX, data science, etc.).

Sages are paranoid about if/how the flagship products can be disrupted by asymmetric business models based on new technology advances. They are incredibly curious about emerging startups and technologies.

In some organizations, Sages even run additional functions adjacent to product management, ranging from product marketing and sales consulting, to engineering and architecture.

Steward-only experiences do not translate well to becoming a Sage unless they are supplemented with Starter or Scaler gigs. Many of the great Sages of Silicon Valley were Starters first and there is some evidence that being a successful Starter is a very critical rite of passage for developing into a great Sage or even CEO.

All companies at a certain threshold of revenue and success need a product sage with the smarts and wisdom to carry the twin torches of new product innovation and managing incremental innovation on legacy product lines.

It is important to note that the four product leader types do not map to types of organizations (startup, mid-sized, big company, etc.). They are instead mostly correlated to the stage of the product life cycle. After all, even big companies like GE begin new ventures and startup products like Slack acquire thousands of enterprise customers in 2–3 years.

Nevertheless, people still make the mistake of using an “one-size-fits-all” template to hire product leaders.

For example, when big companies initiate new product development projects, they often appoint a Steward, not realizing that they actually need a Starter who can search and iterate. Similarly, it is not uncommon to see growth-stage startups hire a Steward or a Starter vs. a Scaler.

Before you decide to hire a product person, ask who you really need?

Is it a Starter, Scaler, Steward or a Sage?