When I was young I was a professional swimmer. I was at the pool for two hours every day, 6 times a week, and often attended competitions on the weekends. I worked hard and ranked #15 in Israel for my age group. I was very proud of this achievement but also knew that it was the best I could do. Realizing that I have no future in swimming, I decided to quit.

But I did continue to practice and turned into what was originally supposed to be my default sport (since I am very – very – tall): Basketball. I worked hard again, but this time with very little success. I played for 6 years, but I wasn’t good at all. Actually, ‘played’ might not be the right word to describe my basketball tenure. I practiced like crazy, but in the games themselves, I got to play very rarely and was mostly watching the game from the bench. 

I knew I wasn’t a very good basketball player. For many years I thought it was because I started late and didn’t build the proper fundamentals. It was only 30 years later, when my daughter started playing, that I realized that the problem lay elsewhere. 

You see, as a professional swimmer, I needed to be the best that I could be. I improved my skills, and that had a direct impact on my results. But that’s the nature of an individual sport. With team sports, it’s a completely different ball game (pun intended). 

So it’s true that I was lacking the fundamentals, but they weren’t the fundamentals that I thought I was lacking. In fact, my individual capabilities as a player weren’t that bad. After all, I knew how to work on my personal skills to the best extent: I have quite a good hand, and I’m a great defensive player, for example. But the fundamentals that I was lacking were the ones related to playing with a team: knowing exactly where each player was when I was holding the ball, understanding who needed my help at any given moment, communicating without words, and initiating great team plays.

These were all things that not only I didn’t improve at, I didn’t even know that I had to. I came with the mindset of an individual athlete: understand where are your strengths and weaknesses, work on both, and you’ll be the best you can be. But a team sport requires a completely different approach. You win and lose as a team, and your ability to shine doesn’t depend only on your individual capabilities. To have succeeded as a basketball player as much as I have succeeded as a swimmer, I needed to completely change my mindset. If only I knew it back then. 

Many product leaders who were formerly product managers, or even product group leaders in large organizations, suffer from the same issue. Their view of their responsibility as well as the skills they need to hone in order to succeed are a manifestation of what had gotten them so far. But product management at the lower levels is still an individual sport, while product leadership at the highest levels is a team sport. Like me, you have to change your mindset if you want to succeed. In the last CPO Bootcamp graduation, this was exactly what the participants said they have gotten from the program. They learned how to play the team sport called product leadership.

Here are a few areas you need to master too if you want to play it the right way.

Redefine Success

As a product leader, your end game is different than the one you had as a product manager or even as a group leader in larger organizations. You can no longer define success as having a good product, or as satisfying sales’ or users’ needs. Your success is now measured by the business success of the product. 

Once you understand that, it goes without saying that your responsibility spans beyond the product team itself. This is a mistake that I see many product leaders do – they think about building the best product they can. But that’s an individual athlete’s mindset. It’s limiting your impact to the areas that you have direct control over. 

As a product leader, you can no longer afford that view of your role. You need to win as a team, and just by being the best shooter you can be, for example, you are not helping the team as much as you can and as much as you should.

Redefine the Team

Many product leaders, when they speak about “their team”, refer to the product team. The team that they manage. While technically this is true, as a product leader you no longer have the luxury to think about the people you manage as your (only) team. 

Going back to the basketball metaphor, the team you manage is your arms and legs, or an extension of them. But the team you play with is the other leaders in the company. You need all of them in order to achieve business success, and you all need to play together to succeed.

The product strategy plays a critical role here. The definition of a product strategy is not the strategy of the product department. It’s a strategy that explains how the company is going to succeed based on the product. It’s much close to a company or division strategy, and that’s why your role as the leader creating it is much wider than any role you had before.

Understand the Game

In order to build a great product strategy – one that serves all departments well – you must understand their own point of view as if it was yours. You must understand their goals, and understand why they are what they are. You need to know how they fit together with everyone else’s goals, and how all departments work together to achieve the success you are looking for.

Can you imagine a basketball player, say a center, who doesn’t understand the role of the point guard? They would never be able to play well together, and the team wouldn’t be able to get their desired results – no matter how individually great each of them was.

Make the business game your own game. Make sure you care about the business outcomes related to your product and make sure you understand how they are achieved. Make it a point to understand how marketing and sales processes work, and don’t be afraid to contribute ideas in these areas as well.

Initiate Great Team Plays

Product leaders sometimes see themselves as inferior to other leaders in the company since they are not as close to the business as other leaders. So any move related to the business is sometimes expected to come from those closest to the money – the CEO, CRO, CMO, or CFO. But this is again the individual athlete mindset: I will do my part well, and let others do theirs.

Since you win as a team and lose as a team, great individual plays are not necessarily going to get you to where you wanted to be. In fact, some individual plays might interfere with the ability to get the great results you are all looking for. Think about selling non-existing features just to win a large deal. If this is an individual play, it turns your roadmap into a mess and forces you to deal with after-the-fact consequences. If this was a team play, where you all understand what are the tradeoffs you are making here, you are in a slightly better position and able to lend a hand for everyone to achieve their own results.

But what if there was another play that would not detract the company from its strategic direction and give you great results still? If you don’t suggest an alternative, no one will. In most cases, they have neither the skills nor the incentives to do so. If you see yourself as an individual athlete, you might give up and focus on your own stuff. But that’s when it often feels like swimming upstream: You are constantly fighting other directions that people want to take you in.

If you truly want to play as a team, you must take a leadership position – not just by leading the product area, but by leading the company to success altogether.

Not everyone might be happy with this initially, you have to build trust and be humble. But once they see you have valuable insights and ideas, your leadership will rock. Are you ready to make the shift?