Product Leadership Misunderstood, Everything Slows Down

May 20, 2025

I’ve built products.

Led the teams who shaped them.

Mentored product leaders. Partnered with them.

Fought for Product. Fought with Product.

And I’ve seen again and again what happens when the role is misunderstood — or worse, derailed by those who don’t understand it.

This isn’t theory. It’s experience.

Here’s a candid, strategic breakdown of why not everything should be treated as a ‘product‘ – and why true product leadership requires space, creativity, trust, and strategic clarity.

If you’re a product leader who’s ever felt boxed in or misunderstood, these 5 topics will hit home.

1. Everything is Not a Product!

Seeing the Surface… Mislabelling the Model

From my time working across both product and service environments, I’ve seen a troubling trend emerge: leadership teams increasingly label every business function as a “product.”

While product- oriented thinking can bring value, calling everything a product blurs essential distinction. A service, fundamentally, is different. It thrives on responsiveness, adaptability, and process discipline.

Why is this so hard to grasp? Maybe it’s because ‘product’ sounds cooler, more strategic. But when you repackage everything under that label, you blur what things are actually for. You confuse purpose, function, and role. That doesn’t strengthen the work – it strips it of its intent.

If everything becomes a product, then the word itself loses power. And teams get caught trying to deliver long- term product strategy in short- term service rhythms.

That mismatch burns people out, muddies accountability, and derails momentum.

2. The Strategic Difference: Product vs Service

Two Disciplines, Two Purposes

• Products align with long- term vision. They’re shaped through intentional design, iteration, and value discovery.
• Services, on the other hand, are about excellence in delivery- high quality, consistency, and responsiveness.

Product design is both art and engineering. Services are choreography and timing. They demand different thinking, different leadership behaviours, and different tools.

I’ve worked in organisations where brilliant product thinkers slowly lose that spark when forced to operate like service managers. It’s like asking a sculptor to paint walls.

And as a leader, it’s not strategic (or visionary), to rebrand or relabel well- established disciplines just to make them sound shiny or new. Reinventing the vocabulary of roles that have existed for decades doesn’t make you modern- it makes you misaligned. You’re not redefining the work; you’re eroding the very foundation built by highly trained, deeply experienced professionals who chose this craft, studied it, and lived it.

You’re not innovating– you’re dismantling!

The wheel’s been around for a while. It doesn’t need rebranding. Everyone still knows it’s a wheel. Rename it, and you don’t look clever. You look confused.

3. What Product Leadership Really Looks Like

It’s Not Features. It’s Focus.

Product leadership isn’t about delivering on demand – it’s about pushing toward purpose. It’s the grit to say no, the insight to know what matters, and the process to get there.

Product leaders need space. They need to question, reframe, reimagine. And that doesn’t happen in reactive environments where speed is prized over significance.

Too often, product roles become execution engines. But product leaders aren’t feature factories. They’re navigators. Translators. Architects of impact. Disruptors of thinking.

This is why true product leadership must be trusted – not just tolerated. And why product design must follow strategy – not ego.

But here’s the bit people don’t always see: product leaders carry weight. They need grit, real grit. Because they are often the ones tasked with stitching together siloed thinking. They’re the ones pulling tech directors, ops directors, and learning leads out of their comfort zones and saying, “Here’s where we need to go.”

They have to paint the bigger picture – not just once, but repeatedly, patiently, and persuasively. They hold the line when shortcuts tempt others. They carry the vision when it’s inconvenient. They fight for coherence when compromise would be easier…. they fight hard or at least need to.

I’ve come to learn as a CTO you’re only as strong as the product leader standing beside you– the one who can face down competing demands, protect the why, and shape a future others, and sometimes you, can’t yet see.

4. Beyond Product- Designing Services, Experiences, and Ecosystems

Product Leaders Are Service Designers Too

One of the biggest shifts I’ve seen in mature product leaders, and experienced myself working alongside them, is how often they operate beyond ‘the product’. Their thinking spans wider- across journeys, across systems, and across the end-to-end, full lived experience.

They’re not just shaping what gets built. They’re shaping how it’s delivered, how it’s adopted, how it fits into people’s lives or workflows- otherwise what’s the point of another siloed tool.

They are, in effect, service designers– but not in the operational sense.

Not “customer service.”

We’re talking about service design in its truest form: the choreography of multiple touchpoints, experiences, and interactions across the full journey.

One service may contain many products.

And one product may exist within many services.

Good product leaders understand this interdependence. They lead the thinking that brings coherence to the lot.

If you think a product leader just builds apps or screens, you’ve missed the point entirely. They’re solving for experience, value, trust, usability, longevity. That’s not feature work – that’s system work. And if you’re the boss of that product leader and still don’t get this? You’re not just failing to support them – you’re holding back someone capable of leading real transformation. You’re draining momentum, misdirecting energy, and forcing leaders to defend common sense in rooms that should already understand the basics. That’s not just short-sighted – it’s a slow erosion of value and trust.

This is why product leadership needs room to think wider than just backlogs. It’s about connecting dots across silos. And asking: how does this whole thing actually land for the person at the end of it?

5. Behind the Curtain: The Cost of Mismatch

When Vision Is Misunderstood, Talent Suffers

I’ve seen this first-hand. Gifted, capable leaders, people close to me, operating within frameworks that don’t fit their discipline. Their clarity becomes clouded. Their influence stifled. Their joy… muted.

When leadership can’t distinguish between product and service, the result isn’t just operational confusion – it’s cultural erosion. People lose faith.

You don’t measure a product leader by speed of delivery alone. You measure them by their ability to spot what’s changed, understand what it means, and decide what to do next, shape direction, and defend the space where meaningful solutions are born.

And because of this – they need to be trusted.

Trusted not just to deliver, but to lead.

Trusted even when others don’t quite understand how. Product leaders often see things others can’t yet. They think across time, across function, across systems. That clarity can feel uncomfortable to those focused only on now, or live in a binary ‘how to’ world.

To follow them also takes courage. But the rewards for doing so:

• Strategic alignment.
• Purposeful delivery.
• Products, and services – that actually land.

To lead them well- means clearing roadblocks, not adding them. Listening, not policing. Backing their process, even when the outcome isn’t instantly visible to you or others.

When you lead through trust, real trust…. you give that product leader permission to be bold… and when they are bold, the business moves.

Letting product people flourish isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between output and outcome. Between chit chat motion – and true progress with pace.

Final Thought: Product Isn’t Everything… But It Changes Everything

Let Product Be Product

If you’ve read this far, you already know: product is more than a thing. It’s a mindset. A method. A movement.

And while not everything should be treated as a product – those things that are? They deserve to be led properly.

True product leadership is rare. It’s not just about roadmaps or delivery cycles. It’s about seeing what others can’t yet see – and building the confidence to get there anyway.

If you’ve got a strong product leader in your business – back them. Not because it’s fashionable, but because they’re the ones holding the throughline that connects purpose to outcome.

More importantly, if you do have a strong product leader in your business- allow them to be just that. Not everyone is built to lead Product. Maybe not even you as a Director or CTO- and that’s ok. Know you strengths, and surround yourself with trusted leaders of your weaknesses (which may be Product).

Trust their process. Trust their fight. And if you don’t understand what they see – ask. Because the very act of following them might take your business somewhere you could never have gone without them.

Product isn’t everything, but it could just be the thing that pulls everything else forward if allowed.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on Product as a key pillar in the CTO building. As I mentioned last week its one of the most enjoyable, creative parts of my role- how is it for you?

Thanks for reading

#BeyondTheTitle #ProductLeadership #TechThatLands #DesignForImpact #StrategicLeadership