Operator’s Guides

The Operator’s Guide to Product Leadership

Four decisions make up the product job: which problems you solve, what evidence justifies them, what you decline, and what outcome you expect. Find out who makes each one in your company today, and how to make it deliberately. Twelve videos, 3.4 hours of teaching, and a written article for every module. Free, no login, no gate.

Papercraft desk with four cream decision cards, one teal card set apart, a roadmap strip with flags, a thirteen-column calendar, a compass, and a chair

Every company that ships anything decides which problems it will solve, what evidence justifies solving them, what it will decline, and what outcome it expects. When nobody makes those calls deliberately, the loudest customer, the open deal and whatever fits in the quarter make them by default. This course is for the person making them without the head-of-product title or any training for the job: a founder still holding product, a first-time head of product, a senior PM moving into leadership, or an engineering or commercial leader who inherited product because nobody else had it.

Every module follows one company: Meridian, a composite forty-person business that sells shift scheduling to logistics operators. You’ll see its roadmap, what it declines, its scoreboard and its first product hire. Watch the modules in order, or start with the decision you’re stuck on today. The full playlist is on YouTube, and each module page here pairs the video with its article.

The companion guide

It puts every worksheet and chart from the course on its own page, with instructions: the audit, the one-page strategy, the escalation rule, the scoreboard and thirty-eight more. Fifty-nine pages, made to print out and complete for your own company.

Download the companion guide (PDF, 4 MB)
01 What the Head of Product Job Is: Four Decisions The product job is four decisions, and every company answers all four already. The only variable is whether anybody does it on purpose. 20:43 02 Who Makes Product Decisions When There's No Head of Product? The four product decisions never wait for an owner. When nobody has them, they get answered by whichever constraint pushes hardest and soonest. 20:25 03 Executive or Execution: Which Product Leadership Role You Need Which decisions a seat is allowed to make and have stand, which turns out to be a question about your company rather than about the person you hired. 19:00 04 The Product Operating Model, Assessed for a Forty-Person Company There is a real system for the product job, and it is good. Most of what has been written about it, including the warnings, assumes an organization that already exists. 18:15 05 Product Strategy Is a Decision About What You Won't Do A roadmap is a list of things you control, which is why everyone agrees to it and why it can't be your strategy. The line that makes it one is the line nobody writes. 18:44 06 The Roadmap That Survives Your Biggest Customer Score your biggest customer's request with the most popular prioritization framework and it comes out on top, fairly. What holds is a decline you decided before the call, with a rule for who can enforce it and what would change it. 18:00 07 Knowing a Problem Is Real Before You Fund It Your biggest customer's request looks like the best evidence a small company ever gets. Before engineering months go into it, write down what would change your answer, then count the customers who are already doing something about the problem. 16:01 08 Write the Scoreboard Before the Build: Knowing Whether It Worked The Done column records that the work shipped and nothing about whether it worked. Medicine has measured what happens when the measure gets chosen after the results, and a small company can avoid it with one page written before the build, as long as it's willing to read that page when it says you missed. 12:40 09 Coaching a New Product Hire, One Decision at a Time Asking whether a new product manager is ready has no answer. Medicine asks a better question, ready to do what and with how much supervision, and a head of product can put the answer on one page. 16:00 10 Product Leadership With the CEO, Sales, Engineering and the Board When your head of sales blames product for a lost deal, the fix starts before the meeting. Give sales, the founder, engineering and the board what each needs from product, with the reason attached, before they need it. 14:10 11 The Operating Cadence: Your Quarter on One Page The new quarter starts Monday, and nobody checked how this one went. Each decision a head of product owns needs a date when it gets looked at again, on the calendar the whole leadership team already reads. 12:49 12 When the Founder Should Stop Holding Product, and What to Hire The hiring advice answers with the size of your company. A page with four lines and three questions tells you which of your product decisions should move to someone else. 14:51

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The course is free. If you want help doing the product job, that’s the work I do.

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Dave Saunders

Dave Saunders is the founder of Base Reality Group and a Fractional CPO for product companies. He was a founder and operator at Galen Robotics, where the surgical-robotics platform earned FDA De Novo authorization in 2023, and he managed a 35-patent portfolio licensed from Johns Hopkins. He wrote Founders Who Finish and publishes The Build. More about Dave →