PRODUCT LEADERSHIP IS EMERGING BUT STILL IN THE EARLY STAGES

So, where are businesses on their product leadership journey? And how mature are efforts to implement product leadership?

Many businesses are already on their product leadership journey

To date, too few senior leaders benefit from having a fully operationalised product leadership approach across their business. That said, our research reveals that most businesses are on a product leadership journey, albeit in the early stages, with 46% saying that one of the main drivers for embarking on it is customers expecting more.

The pandemic has changed customer expectations, particularly in the digital space, with e-commerce expected to account for 23.5% of retail sales by 2025 – just over double the figure seen in 2019.⁴Customers are also becoming agnostic across different products and services, no longer simply comparing their brand experiences between different companies in the same sector.²Speed and convenience are what’s important to them now and businesses that can offer this have a major competitive advantage.⁴43% of business leaders see customer experience as a key value driver for success, so having strong product leadership in place is imperative to delivering this.²

_{^{4 Forbes,}}_{^{Top 5 Customer Experience Trends for 2022}}_{^{, December 2021}}

^{Less than one-third (31%) of the businesses we spoke to said that they had already achieved a fully developed approach.}

^{For the remainder (69%), this concept of product leadership is still a work in progress and has some way to go before reaching full maturity.}

In the early stages, many of the implementation challenges facing business leaders are likely to be definitional. Being able to pinpoint what product leadership involves, and how it should be implemented, remains a key barrier for many business leaders. This highlights a particular challenge for businesses when adopting a new approach, namely, accessing and retaining the right skills and talent to make implementation successful.

In its most basic sense, product leadership can, and indeed should, be defined very broadly. Naturally, it helps companies to better serve their end-users (clients or customers), but it also provides businesses with the business-critical digital platforms and systems which help to serve those in operational roles, in turn enabling frontline staff to fulfil the company’s objectives.

Developing an end-to-end approach to business systems which supports collaboration

Collaboration and co-working across different teams sits at the heart of good product leadership. This helps to unlock hidden potential and enables the business to meet its strategic objectives by operating more seamlessly and removing any friction points across the enterprise value chain. More than two-thirds (69%) of business leaders identify an end-to-end approach incorporating product, technology, sales, marketing and customer service as a core element of a product leadership strategy. This requires businesses to think critically about how they align ways of working, decision-making and outcomes across the business in a way that complements the overall strategy.

Historically, because GoCardless has grown so quickly, it has been up to individual product managers to recruit customers to interview, using their own approach to develop insight. However, we are getting too large for that to be scalable now. So, we are now looking to form a product insights sort of division, internally, which centralises the insight function within our product team that helps build that user research muscle and allows our product team to spend time gaining insight rather than managing processes.

ANDY WIGGAN, VP PRODUCT MANAGEMENT, GOCARDLESS

WHAT DO YOU SEE AS BEING THE
CORE ELEMENTS OF PRODUCT LEADERSHIP STRATEGY?

^{END-TO-END APPROACH}
^{INCORPORATING PRODUCT,}
^{TECHNOLOGY,, SALES, MARKETING}
^{AND CUSTOMER SERVICE}

^{STRONG TRACK RECORD IN INNOVATION}
^{AND RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT}

^{CEO VISION}^{AND BUY-IN}

^{ACCESS TO}^{SKILLED TEAMS}

^{ACCESS TO MARKET RESEARCH,}
^{DATA AND CUSTOMER INSIGHTS}

^{WORLD-LEADING TECHNOLOGY}
^{PLATFORMS TO ENSURE EXECUTION}

^{AGREED KPIS}^{AND MEASURABILITY}

^{ALIGNMENT WITH BROADER}^{CORPORATE STRATEGY}