The Product Function Is the Air Traffic Controller. Lead It Like One.

In a project-based technology business, everyone can see the engineers and everyone can see the sales team. The function that quietly decides whether either of them succeeds is often the least visible one: product.

Product managers and product owners sit at the intersection of everything. They listen to what the client needs, translate it into something engineers can build and make sure the people selling the work understand what actually matters to the customer. Without them, engineers don’t know what to build and salespeople don’t know what they’re selling.

The product function works like the air traffic controller of the entire delivery process. Like air traffic control, it tends to be judged on one thing: whether anything crashes.

A translation job that turns into a power struggle

Most organizations hire product leaders for their domain expertise, and for good reason. A product owner who understands the client’s industry can ask clients the right questions and earn their trust quickly.

But translation is a people job as much as a knowledge job. The moment a product lead carries the client’s requirements back to the team, they are negotiating: with engineers who see technical constraints, with designers building mockups, with project managers watching the timeline and with sales leaders protecting the relationship.

In many firms, that negotiation becomes a power struggle. Requirements come down as instructions. When someone raises a concern about time or feasibility, the answer is “it’s your job.” People either comply and quietly burn out, or push back and stall progress. The product lead ends up herding cats, shuttling between people to find out what’s really wrong.

None of this shows up when you evaluate a product leader’s domain knowledge. All of it shows up in the timeline.

The skill nobody trained them for

Most product leaders reached their roles because they were exceptional at the work: sharp in discovery, fluent in the client’s business and able to write requirements engineers trust. Very few were ever taught how to lead the people on the other side of the translation. So each one improvises. Some are naturally gifted at it. Others lean on authority, deadlines and long hours, because that is what they saw modeled when they were coming up.

The stakes are rising. As AI tools speed up how quickly code, reports and prototypes can be produced, the bottleneck in delivery moves toward the human work around them: understanding what the client really needs, aligning a team on it and catching misunderstandings before they turn into rework. That is product’s territory. A firm whose product leaders do that work well will outdeliver competitors with equal technical talent.

Why strengthening this one function pays off everywhere

If you’re looking for the best place to start improving delivery, look at product.

Because product sits in the middle of every project, its leadership habits spread. When product leads build relationships before they need them, engineers raise concerns earlier. When product leads bring builders into client conversations, fewer requirements get misread. When product leads treat a problem as something to triage together instead of a demand to push down, the whole team learns a different way of working.

The reverse is also true. When product leadership is inconsistent, every other function feels it. Engineering absorbs the confusion, sales absorbs the client’s frustration and project management absorbs the delays.

That makes product one of the highest-leverage places to invest in leadership development. Improve how a relatively small group of product leaders leads, and you change how everyone on their projects experiences the work.

Three questions for the people who lead your translators

Do your product leads know the people they translate for? Not only their roles, but how they think, what they need to do their best work and where they’re likely to clash. Good translation depends on knowing both audiences.

Who hears the client firsthand? Every layer of interpretation between the client and the builder is a chance for meaning to drift. The strongest teams bring engineers and designers into the room early, so the product lead is aligning understanding rather than relaying orders.

What happens when someone says, “This won’t work”? If the honest answer is that they’re told to make it work, you’ve found a leak in your delivery model. A healthy product function welcomes that sentence, because it’s the earliest warning a project will ever get. I wrote about the cost of cultures that discourage that kind of honesty in Why People Wait Until They Leave to Tell the Truth.

Lead the controllers

The best air traffic controllers aren’t prized for knowing the most about airplanes. They’re prized for keeping everyone moving safely in the same direction under pressure.

Your product function plays that role on every project you deliver. Give its leaders the development you would give any critical function: a shared way of leading, real investment in how they understand people and the expectation that they make everyone around them better. The landings will get smoother, and your clients will notice.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.