How often do strategy meetings end with a confident roadmap slide — and then nothing measurable changes in customer behaviour? Organisations can be full of brilliant strategies and poor execution because the people signing off on strategy don’t speak the language of products. That gap is not just cultural friction; it’s a systemic risk. If executives can’t read a product metric or judge an experiment, they will either demand vanity activity or suffocate teams with directives. Both outcomes destroy value.
What I mean by product literacy
Product literacy is more than knowing what a product roadmap looks like. It’s a mix of:
- Customer-centred judgement — understanding who the user is, the problem being solved, and the actual outcome you should be measuring.
- Experiment fluency — recognising the difference between a validated learning and a cosmetic A/B test.
- Technical empathy — appreciating constraints and opportunities of engineering without becoming a tech dictator.
- Outcome metrics — focusing on behaviour and value (activation, retention, revenue per user), not just output (stories closed).
When these capabilities live in the C‑suite, decisions move from opinions to informed trade‑offs.
Why leaders must learn this language
CEOs and boards are navigating faster waves of change — from platform economics to generative AI — and the cost of poor decisions is rising. Recent executive surveys underline that leaders must evolve their skills to orchestrate technology-driven growth; read the IBM CEO study for a concise summary of shifting C‑suite priorities.
Without product literacy, investment decisions are either over‑optimistic (fund a feature factory) or risk‑averse (centralise everything in IT). A more constructive path is to equip leaders to ask the right questions: What user behaviour validates this? How will we learn fast? What capability must exist in the organisation to sustain it?
Real world proof — product thinking at scale
There are practical precedents. Financial services such as ING have shown how executive sponsorship of agile product ways of working can rewire organisational decision-making. HBR’s write‑ups of agile at scale highlight the role of leadership in creating guardrails and enabling autonomous teams (Harvard Business Review).
In digital consumer markets, Duolingo’s launch of Duolingo Max is a useful case: product teams rapidly tested AI-driven features and then built a clear, product-led monetisation tier around validated user value. That combination of fast learning and commercial clarity is what happens when product thinking is present across the leadership stack.
How to build product literacy in the C‑suite — practical steps
Building this capability is not an HR course. It’s practical, repeatable work. Start with these actions:
- Run an executive product sprint. Pick one product hypothesis, run a two‑week discovery with a tiny cross‑functional team, and have executives sit in the sprint review. Seeing experiments and customer interviews changes mental models faster than any slide deck.
- Adopt shared outcome metrics. Replace report-and-approve meetings with a short dashboard of 3–5 outcome metrics (behaviour, retention, unit economics) and make them the centrepiece of discussion.
- Rotate executives through product roles. A month embedded with product teams — be it observing discovery sessions or owning a small hypothesis — builds empathy and credibility.
- Create a product council for trade-offs. This isn’t a steering committee of features; it’s a forum that arbitrates investments based on evidence and strategic impact, with product people presenting learning, not status updates.
- Teach experiment literacy. Short workshops for execs about hypothesis framing, power calculations for experiments, and how to interpret signals prevent misreadings that ruin good tests.
Common pitfalls — and how to avoid them
There are traps. Executives who learn product language can quickly slip into micromanagement. Counter that by creating clear boundaries: leadership defines strategy and constraints; teams design the experiments and delivery. Another danger is mistaking activity for progress — lots of feature releases do not equal better outcomes. Keep the conversation firmly tied to user behaviour.
Measuring success
Early indicators that product literacy is taking hold include faster validated learning cycles, fewer large mid‑project pivots, clearer prioritisation debates, and improved unit economics on new initiatives. But the simplest sign is cultural: meetings become shorter and more evidence-driven.
Make product thinking a leadership habit
Product literacy is not a technical nicety; it’s a leadership capability. When executives can read experiments, judge trade‑offs and prioritise outcomes, the organisation becomes better at creating value for customers — and that creates sustainable value for the business.
If you are a CEO, CPO or CTO: run a tiny experiment this quarter. Convene a two‑week executive sprint, agree three outcome metrics, and commit to learning. You’ll be surprised how quickly habits change when leaders stop treating product as a delivery problem and start treating it as a strategic conversation.
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