Being the CEO of your Product

One definition of the Product Manager role is that of a person being the "CEO" of his product or products. In my experience, that is a good definition of the role, but maybe not for the reasons you would think.

Junior product managers sometimes make the mistake of thinking this means they have unilateral or say-so authority about all issues having to do with their product, and get into relationship problems with others in the extended product team when they play the authority card too hard or too often. I have seen this happen many times, and will admit I made that mistake early in my career.

That behavior is a reflection of managerial immaturity or perhaps political naivete, but more importantly a misunderstanding of the CEO role.

CEOs don't have unilateral authority - they have to answer to their board of directors. As a PM, your board of directors includes your direct manager plus other senior people throughout your company - in Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Support and probably  other functions - who can help guide you. Make sure you treat them as your product's "board".

CEOs don't spend a lot of time telling people what to do - instead they set an inspiring vision for the company, get the right people in the right jobs, then establish a management protocol to allocate the work and track the results. PMs generally can't control who is in what job, but they can influence that decision, can strongly influence the management protocol and "own" the product-level vision.

The CEO's role is properly understood as a balanced combination of several difficult tasks -- what I listed above plus being a good example for managerial behavior; advancing important relationships with executives at other companies; motivating and inspiring people throughout the organization ... the list goes on and on, and includes anything you can imagine that contributes to (a) creating and maintaining the company's culture, (b) enabling employees to organize in a way that makes it possible to do meaningful work, or (c) entrepreneurial opportunities for the company as a whole.

Those are the same behaviors product managers should aspire to for their products. Each of those activities has a direct parallel at the product level.

Outright directives should be rare. Any time you find yourself tempted to tell someone what to do, ask yourself which of the above things you haven't been doing that makes it necessary to issue directives.