The most critical role on a team is the "product visionary"—the person with a clear, customer-backed vision. This person can be an engineer, a designer, or a PM. Great leadership involves identifying and empowering this individual, no matter their function, rather than assuming it's the PM's job.

The core job of a Product Manager is not writing specs or talking to press; it's a leadership role. Success means getting a product to market that wins. This requires influencing engineering, marketing, and sales without any formal authority, making it the ultimate training ground for real leadership.

To lead effectively without authority, PMs must trust their teams by defining the desired outcome or the problem to be solved, then empowering engineers and designers to own the solution. Prescribing the "how" disempowers creative team members and leads to suboptimal results.

The popular analogy that a product manager is the 'CEO of the product' is destructive. It creates immense pressure, encouraging PMs to feel responsible for areas far beyond their control. A healthier mindset is to focus on your specific domain and trust the actual CEO and the broader team.

Product managers operate as internal ambassadors, responsible for outcomes like budget and sales but without direct authority. Success depends on building relationships and influencing functions like cost accounting, engineering, and other product teams to achieve shared goals.

The 'CEO of the product' metaphor is misleading because product managers lack direct authority. A better analogy is 'the glue.' The PM's role is to connect different functions—engineering, sales, marketing—with strategy, data, and user problems to ensure the team works cohesively towards a shared goal.

On the Codex team, the PM role is not seen as a traditional leadership position. Instead, it's a support function focused on doing whatever is necessary—bridging gaps, coordinating, and sometimes criticizing—to help the team succeed, rather than directing strategy from the top.

In an organization still running in project mode, the 'Product Manager' title is misleading. The role is often relegated to organizing work and scheduling tasks for engineering. A true product model requires empowering these roles with the mandate, skills, and market access to make strategic decisions.

Newly promoted leaders often revert to their individual contributor habits of writing briefs and solving escalations. True leadership is about leverage: building a system, team, and operating rhythms that produce great decisions without the leader's direct involvement, thus avoiding becoming a bottleneck.