What's the one piece of advice you would give to someone starting in a VP of Product role for the first time?

Start by listening obsessively and aligning relentlessly. It’s tempting to jump into “fixing mode”—new VPs often feel pressure to prove their value fast. But the real superpower at this level isn’t doing more—it’s aligning more: the strategy, the team, the company, and the customer all into a coherent, focused direction. Spend your first weeks listening deeply: to customers, to execs, to your product team, to sales and support. Not just what they’re saying, but why they’re saying it. What do the ...Read More

Listen before you lead or change.   Resist the latter till the insights are developed. So, spending 30-60 days in listening mode: with customers, your team, engineering, design, sales, and your executive peers. Understand what’s working, what’s broken, and – crucially – why certain decisions were made the way they were. Gain more context behind the status quo than is visible at first.   Additionally, just doing that would earn trust and credibility. And its easier to infom the right to change di ...Read More

Find a way to ship new things quickly. Don't get too distracted by trying to address or fix everything at once - product processes, heavyweight discovery or roadmapping approaches, career ladders, everything from SVPG, etc. Where I went wrong early on was trying to create the "perfect" product approach, rather than focusing on the work itself. No one external to product cares about that. They just care that Product ships. Focus on doing that consistently, and worry less about everything around i ...Read More

First of all, congratulations on your new role! I am sure there will be no dearth of problems to solve here:) But if there is one advice I can share -that would be to make the most of your first 90 days to connect, learn & build the trust. Meet as many people as you can, Don’t jump into problem solving unless you have been hired with some guidance from your leadership. Build trust with your tribe, absorb all the information you can including understanding the product, people & process an ...Read More

One piece of advice: Understand your product, organization, and company and what each of these needs to succeed. Then do that thing (at your appropriate job scope: product/org/company). A bit more detail: Consider doing a listening tour of your peers and reports in your first 30 days: What are they most worried about/hopeful for with you coming in? What’s the one thing they’d like to see you change? Keep the same? Your job is always to:  Build the right product. Build the right team. But your pr ...Read More

I think this depends on whether you've been a people manager (e.g at the Director or Head level) previously.  If you're a fist time people manager, it can be a challenging transition. The biggest trap people fall into is not delegating aggressively enough. You got to where you were by being a rockstar PM. There will be many, many situations where one of your employees is struggling with something and you will be so tempted to do it yourself. It will way less work than coaching them through it an ...Read More