How integrated is your leadership stack?

Essential building blocks of the operating context your teams need

One of the core jobs of a product leader is to create, evangelize, and maintain the strategic context in which the teams operate.

This context is what shapes all the work and decisions that your teams make, and is some of the most essential work any leader does.

The ideas are simple, but not easy. Your leadership stack has 7 pieces:

(1) **Purpose**: why are we doing this? (often called "mission" but I use that term differently, see below.)

(2) **Vision**: what does the world look like in success? (hint: visions should have some kind of visual asset)

(3) **Mission**: what's the concrete company goal in 3-5 years? (Longer for hardware. This is often called a BHAG.)

(4) **Values**: what do we believe is important, and what's that look like as we pursue the above? Take a stance and map them into behavior.

(5) **Strategy**: at a high level, how will we achieve that mission? If this was a cross-country road trip, what's our high-level route?

(6) **Objectives**: what are the specific customer/business problems we need to solve e.g. next quarter?

(7) **Product Principles**: what are our guiding principles and rules for hard product decisions? Try to extract one from every solid debate to speed up future decisions.

These ideas aren't new. All are essential.

Think hard to ensure all the pieces fit together from top to bottom, and bottom to top.