At a recent Product Weekend gathering of CPOs, we talked about product leadership values and what lifts our hearts. That turned into a conversation about what we fight for: broad principles and concrete actions that earn us our place as product leaders. Here was my take:

We fight for the users
We fight for our (extended) teams
We fight for the business's overall health

I've written/spoken about this in terms of love and emotional energy: how we bring our hearts to such an unbounded, underappreciated, complex job. Here, I reframe that in more organizational terms.

1. We Fight For The Users

IMO, great product managers show up every day for our end users – the people at the other end of the phone, keyboard, microphone, agent or kiosk from what we're building. We should have an obligation to ship products that are of real value to them. BTW, that's different (in the B2B world) from buyers. We certainly must respond to buyers, provide economic benefit to purchasing organizations, and help Sales close deals. But buyers often invest in shelfware, may be too distant from actual users to prioritize demands, and can have objectives that conflict with end users.

We (as product managers) are fighting for the users when we:

Dig deep, continuously, to understand what's really happening and how (if) our end users are succeeding. Interview, empathize, intuit, test our hypotheses with the people who matter. We should know our users better than anyone else in the company (other than first-line support).
Measure success in end user metrics as well as our own corporate profitability. Customers don't buy (and users don't use our stuff) in order to boost our top-line revenue. They might measure success in once-in-a-lifetime tours (travel software) or saving on groceries (price comparison software) or more reliable cars (auto maintenance software). How do our users measure success and value, and are we delivering that?
Think about product changes and upgrades outside-in. Are there fallbacks or test groups? How fast can the installed base absorb new features? Are we explaining in end user language?

And as product leaders, we should be fighting to give our product managers (and designers and engineers and researchers and customer support groups and sales engineers...) the organizational support and goal clarity to fight for end users:

Create reward systems (OKRs, metrics, etc.) that keep users front and center, alongside revenue and delivery.
Push (push, push, push) to enable teams to do real, frequent, direct, personal discovery and interactions between live users and everyone on the maker side. We reject the outsourcing of deep interpretive learning to algorithms.
Put on our Teflon suits and be executive champions for the good user solutions that our product teams conceive. Take the heat. Walk the talk. Be umbrellas rather than funnels.
Avoid knowingly inflicting damage to users, veto dark patterns, gather only the data we need. I've seen hundreds of products over the years that are deceptive, harmful, or useless. I'm now referring to these products and companies as ethics-divergent. (Is our insurance claims system designed to deny legitimate reimbursement requests? Are we tuning social media algorithms in ways that we know are bad for kids or undermines democracy? Does our "improve your credit score" app inevitably recommend additional credit cards from the bank who funds us? Primum non nocere… First do no harm.)

2. We Fight For Our (Extended) Teams

In the software game, most of what we do in our maker teams (development, design, quality, architecture, supportability, security…) is mostly invisible and of very limited interest to the company's market-facing organizations. So it's easy to be graded on delivery dates, lines of code, and NPS. To solely focus on the dollars and subscribers and transactions (which really are important, see below). To ignores what serves end users best. But teams with great talent and enthusiasm and dedication and camaraderie are essential to building products that matter. And product managers are often closest to the coalface – able to see what's working and push for progress.

We (as product managers) fight for our extended teams when we:

Work shoulder-to-shoulder with our engineering and design counterparts.
Identify and visibly appreciate good work. Advertise the wins. Kick off stand-ups with applause, get t-shirts for important milestones, expense occasional all-team lunches, speak up on behalf of our introverts (with permission).
Share business results with the team so they can understand the larger market/revenue context and celebrate our contributions. Model the language of money. Show them they are important. Connect "what we do" with "why the company cares."
Escalate team needs when other members may lack the organizational access, business lingo, extroverted voices, or budget to get things. Help paint the disastrous downside of under-investing in security and stability and extensibility and scalability. Force-fit a business case around improving workflows. GSD for the group.
Remember that our GTM co-employees are not customers (unless we're building internal-use-only systems.) They are partners, stakeholders, allies, blockers, decision-makers… but we reserve "user" and "customer" for outsiders who pay us money and use our stuff.

And as product leaders, we fight to support and reward our product managers alongside their strong, creative, inspiring teams when we:

Truly care about the people in our org. Provide political air cover. Mentor and reward and promote good work. Pull the next generation up the ladder behind us.
Highlight the value and contribution of R&D to the rest of the company. Merchandize product-driven revenue and account wins; talk up architectures that support more users at lower costs; tell stories about how an upgraded UX is reducing our support burden; point out when our brilliant engineers find a solution 3x better and 30x cheaper than what a customer spec'd. Identify cross-functional contributors and thank their managers. Sell good product work internally.
Advocate for supportive, humane office behaviors. Push back on force-ranked job cuts and simplistic productivity metrics and "developers are outsourceable widgets" thinking. Be mensches. Build the department we'd want to work in.
Remember that product management is a narrow, ambiguous, finicky, specialized role that is a poor choice for most folks. And that we have an obligation to every person who reports to us… to help them find a way to succeed and contribute to the larger organization (if possible) or out in the world.
In my 15 gigs as an interim CPO, I've typically found that 30%+ of my just-inherited PMs/POs are badly suited to the product job. But they have a wide range of talents, experience, ambitions, potential value. So I take an internal recruiter/mentor approach: "My first impression is that Product isn't the best fit for you. Thoughts? Is there a role or function within the company that you feel would be a better match? What do you want to be next? How can I help make that happen?"

3. We Fight For The Business's Overall Health

I see many functional groups act primarily on their departmental needs and short-term reward systems. (Where you stand depends on where you sit.) But Product (should) bring a longer-term, humbly realistic view to C-level decisions. Less magical thinking, more hard-nosed analysis, less fear of being wrong. We (should) think like investors as well as product people. After all, if buyers and users run away in droves, we are all out of job. (We either hang together or hang separately.)

We (as product managers) fight for the overall business when we:

Understand the basics of how our company makes money. Are we a product business or a services business? Is this product a cash cow, a big bet, a harvesting opportunity, or a drag on earnings? Can we afford to invest for the long term?
Consider proposals (to raise prices or replatform or accelerate partial features or white label or outsource core development) based on its company-wide impact – as well as our specific product. If we do X, what are the broad implications for R&D and Support and Sales…? How do things fit together?
Appreciate what's "in scope" for us as product managers. What can we change (organizationally or financially), what can we influence, and what's baked into the DNA of this company? We conserve our energy for our important fights and kick the hard ones up to our CPOs.

And as product leaders, we see how all of the pieces fit together. We:

Deeply understand how our company actually behaves – in marketing, sales, operations – especially at the executive level. We build C-level coalitions around key issues (e.g. single-deal requirements) rather than letting ourselves be ignored. We learn to play with the big kids, instead of dismissing that as politics. We figure out how to get the right things done.
Speak the language of money, as well as the language of R&D. We recognize that most of our peers are focused on the top (or bottom) line, denominated in currency, and are not very interested in the details of building products. We meet other execs where they are, not where we wished they would be.
Make trade-offs explicit, and painful. Instead of "we might have to postpone some unnamed thing off the roadmap for your new pet project," we paint the future more clearly as "yes, we could do that, but we'd need to push back Release v12.1 – which Finance has forecasted to earn $8M-12M per month – and delay our $3M commitment to JPMC by a couple of quarters. And risk another compliance audit. Will this deal fill a $15M revenue hole?"
We tell the truth, and try to be honest advisors to the CEO. We rally support for other groups/departments when they need help (especially outside R&D). We demonstrate good leadership by being the best leaders we can.

Sound Byte

Product management is not for the faint of heart. And product leadership dramatically expands the problem. Knowing what we fight for is as important as knowing what brings us joy. Let’s pick our battles, and win them for our users (and our teams and our companies).