In Most Mid-Sized Companies, the Most Important Product Decision Is Made by One Person: The CEO

In almost every mid-sized company we see, the most important product decision is made by a single person: the CEO. And almost always from the gut.

That is not an accusation. This CEO’s gut built the company. Most mid-sized technology companies grew out of a founder’s idea, and his instinct for the product was spot-on for years. That is precisely why he trusts it.

The problem begins with scaling

What was brilliant with one product and one market is no longer enough with ten products, several markets and growing complexity. The CEO can no longer feel every decision personally. And then almost always the same thing happens: he retreats into the technical decision, because that is his origin, and mistakes technical depth for product leadership.

So he decides deep, but narrow. Deep on the one axis he masters, and blind on all the others that belong together: market, competition, customer, quality, service, sales. The decision is technically well-founded and strategically a blind flight. That is exactly where the expensive misses come from: products that are technically right and miss the market.

What is missing is not expertise

What is missing is strategic product management as an integrator across all these dimensions. Not as an authority that overrules the CEO, but as a co-pilot extending his instinct to the breadth he alone no longer oversees. Interestingly, large corporations have largely defused this issue; they went through scaling long ago. It is the typical growth crisis of the technical mid-market, almost independent of industry.

The honest question: who makes the decisive product decision in your company, and on how many of these dimensions does it actually rest?

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