No Bystanders on Product Strategy
Get the CFO, the head of people and sales fingerprinted on product strategy before growth goes negative.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 86%
An executive team rarely does project work together — the CFO, head of people, sales and engineering leads run parallel functions with few natural collaboration surfaces. That is survivable until a crisis, at which point the group's ability to tackle hard things together becomes decisive and there is no muscle for it. Lovinsky's fix is to make product strategy a whole-leadership-team activity in advance, so that in the bad quarter everyone is pulling levers rather than asking product what it has done for them lately.
Origin
Noam Lovinsky's leadership-level takeaway from Thumbtack, when growth went negative and the executive team had to turn the business around together.
Core principles
- 01Having 'product' in your title doesn't make you the only person responsible for product strategy.
- 02Executive teams have few natural project surfaces — the collaboration muscle must be built deliberately.
- 03When a crisis hits, a leadership team without shared ownership degrades into 'what have you done for me lately.'
- 04PMs are the connective tissue across functions — but at the exec level, everyone should be.
- 05You only get a company out of a hole when every function pulls the levers in its own area.
How to run it
- 1
Notice the missing surface
Recognise that the CEO's direct reports — CFO, head of sales, head of people, engineering, product — rarely have a natural reason to do project work together. Nothing in the calendar produces the muscle you'll need in a downturn.
Watch out The absence of conflict in good times is not evidence the team works together. It's evidence they haven't had to.
- 2
Bring strategy to the group in a form they can engage with
It is incumbent on product and engineering leaders to present strategy so that every function can internalize it and understand what it means for their area — not to present it as a finished product artifact for approval.
Pro tip Test it: can the head of people say what the strategy implies for hiring, and the CFO say what it implies for the model? If not, you haven't brought it in an engageable form.
Watch out Presenting strategy as a done deal produces polite nods and zero ownership.
- 3
Give every function a fingerprint on it
They are the leadership team — they should have real say, and should feel their fingerprint is on the company strategy. The goal is that no one on the exec team can be a bystander on product strategy.
Pro tip This runs both ways: product leaders should be equally engaged in what's happening in sales and marketing. The connective-tissue obligation is mutual.
Watch out The moment it becomes 'that's their world, that's our world' for any function, you've lost it — and Lovinsky says that dynamic is equally corrosive in every direction.
- 4
Cash it in when things go wrong
In a downturn, run it as all-hands-on-deck: every leader pulling the levers available in their own area against a shared strategy. Lovinsky's view is that a company cannot get out of that kind of situation any other way.
Watch out If you only try to build the shared ownership at the moment growth goes negative, you're building trust and the turnaround simultaneously — which is exactly when neither has time to succeed.
In the wild
When Thumbtack's growth went negative for the first time in company history — SEO collapsing, product being rebuilt, monetization model changing all at once — the CEO's leadership team suddenly had to tackle a hard problem jointly, despite having had few natural opportunities to do project work together.
→ Lovinsky's conclusion: no one could be a bystander on product strategy, and every function had to be all hands on deck pulling its own levers. He is explicit that Thumbtack did not necessarily have this dynamic right, which is precisely why it stands out as the lesson.
When a leadership team has not shared ownership of product strategy, a downturn turns the conversation into functions holding each other to account for results they had no hand in shaping — a blame dynamic rather than a turnaround dynamic.
→ Lovinsky names this explicitly as the wrong dynamic for an executive team and the reason the ownership has to be built before the crisis.
Common mistakes
Product hoarding product strategy
Owning the artifact feels like power and is actually isolation. When the plan is only product's plan, its failures are only product's failures, and no other function pulls its levers.
Building exec relationships only when they're needed
The leadership team's capacity to tackle hard things together is built in normal times. Trying to establish it during a negative-growth quarter means doing the hardest work with a team that has never worked together.
Treating the connective-tissue job as product-only
PMs do naturally serve as connective tissue, but at the executive level every function should. Product leaders who don't engage with sales and marketing strategy are running the same 'that's their world' failure they complain about.
Is it for you?
Best for
CPOs and product leaders joining or sitting on an executive team, particularly at companies where growth has been easy and the exec group has never faced a joint crisis.
Not ideal for
Small startups where the leadership team already does everything together, or organizations where the CEO deliberately runs functions as silos and will not back shared ownership.
From the transcript
“no one had no one can be a bystander on product strategy.”
“the CFO, the the head of people, everyone needs to have a seat at the table when it comes to product strategy”
“And as soon as it starts to feel like that's their world, that's our world, and I think that's true for for any of any…”
“as product managers, we naturally need to be that the connective tissue”
From the episode
The happiness and pain of product management
Noam Lovinsky (Grammarly, Facebook, YouTube, Thumbtack)