If you’d been there: Michael Cerdá
This week we hosted Michael Cerdá, Enrich member and author of Build Something for a conversation on lessons from the trenches of product leadership. Michael has worked as a product leader at Facebook, Goldman Sachs, and Disney+ among others.
If you’d been there, here’s what you’d still be thinking about today:
More so than being a brilliant product thinker or being amazing at ops, Michael believes the most important thing for a leader to do is build the right culture. “Culture is at the center of everything.” Across every company he’s worked at, he believes that building the right culture is what actually makes teams come together to deliver great results. He didn’t realize that earlier in his career and it’s at the heart of what he does now.
When moving from a more tech-focused startup to building product at a larger organization, focus on communication. When the company doesn’t have a deep tech bench, or history, Michael says the communications piece of the PM leadership role needs to “stand even taller.” Make sure that the communication is tuned to the audience — engineers, marketers, analysts — everyone needs to what’s going on in a language they understand. Focus on that over the traditional product frameworks or models, and the buy-in will come.
The product manager should not be a mini CEO. Many product managers act as a CEO but that gets in the way of the collaboration needed to successfully build something. Instead of acting as CEO, PM leaders should lead the charge on "what to build for whom over what period of time with everybody's input." The only place he’s worked where he felt the PM was supposed to act as CEO was at Facebook, where there was a ton of pressure put on the PM but no real guidance how to be successful or get a greenlight. Michael does believe that PMs make great CEOs… eventually.
We also covered what its like to push back against Zuck, what really happened on Disney+’s launch day crash, and more. To get access to the rest of our notes and attend future panels like this one… join Enrich.
