The role starts to shift away from hands-on craft and you start to have new challenges like, how do I coach my Product Managers? How do I build alignment? and cultivate the right product culture for the product teams to succeed?

Coaching is a skill which most good Product Managers should already be honing, even though you don’t have any direct reports you should still be coaching your Product Team, peers and stakeholders on what good product practice looks like 

The best Heads of Product (and Product Managers) I’ve worked with are not only great at casting a wide net but also about considering the future — they aren’t fighting tomorrow’s battle they’re thinking about the next generation of leaders and trying to solve their problems.

To help build breadth I often advise going broad when it comes to knowledge and competencies — who’d guess! — This means becoming more of a generalist.

As for depth, a good trick is to break your thinking into horizons. Consider horizon one as now — what is the impact not? What the most important thing to do now? — then look at the next horizon, what about next year? — and then again with 5 and 10 years. Build up this reflex and you’ll start to build thinking in these different horizons as a habit. 

As I mentioned before these kinds of paradoxes are the day-to-day life of a Head of Product — do I take longer to keep morale up and retain people or do I go all-in and risk losing people?

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”

Building and maintaining culture will be perhaps the most difficult thing any leader will have to do.

So whether it’s your organization’s understanding of branding or whether your organization values output over outcomes and is stuck in what Melissa Perri would describe as ‘the build trap’, as a Head of Product you play a pivotal role in tackling these cultural issues.

as a Head of Product you actually move further away from the decision making, from the day-to-day. You start to be higher level, focused on capability uplifting, coaching and culture.