Understanding the Role of a VP of Product in Modern Organizations

Published 2014-11-15 · Updated 2026-06-23 · By Alan Wizemann

Topics: Product Strategy & Development, Consumer Goods, Enterprise, Retail, Startup

The Vice President of Product, and the positions that go by other names like Head of Product or Global Head of Product, is responsible for the strategy, the direction, and the execution of a company's products for the people who actually use them. It is not a role you do alone. It sits alongside several peers who matter just as much to the product's success as you do, in engineering, in design and user experience, in the operations work that keeps the trains running, and in finance, and the whole thing only works when those relationships do.

In smaller companies and startups, where there is usually one product, the product leader ends up responsible for nearly everything a user touches. In larger companies the shape changes completely. There you are responsible for multiple products and teams at once, orchestrating a strategy across all of them so the larger business goals get met, while still leaving each individual product's manager real autonomy to run their own corner. Picture a company with several product groups (I am deliberately not laying out the exact makeup of any one company here), each holding a handful of teams that cover web, the consumer apps, the internal tools, the data and analytics work, and the infrastructure underneath all of it. Those managers report up into the VP of Product. From there it becomes your job, with your peers and a product operations team, to make sure the vision and roadmap you set is genuinely on track and supporting where the company is trying to go. Part of that work, and people underestimate it, is running each product as if it were its own business, with its own metrics and real P&L accountability, so every team knows exactly what it needs to deliver.

When I was thinking through how to describe this role, I reached out to a few product managers I respect, and one of them sent back something that struck a nerve. He wrote that being in product is like practicing medicine; it is a practice, and there is no one formula. I have repeated it ever since, because I do not think there is a better description of the job. A great product leader teaches and coaches other leaders and teams through examples, through the strange one-off situations that come up, and through the ordinary day-to-day troubles of running a product that is doing well, and sometimes one that is not. That instinct to teach might be the single most important trait the role asks for.

The job also comes with a lot of people. At one point I had 17 direct reports with well over 75 indirect reports underneath them, and I know leaders carrying far more across multiple teams. Structures like that are exactly why you see product leaders reaching for lean thinking, collaborative tools, daily standups, and open-door habits – the alternative is drowning in meetings and losing the thread of what each team is actually building. There is one more piece that makes the job genuinely exciting, which is that the VP of Product, working with the rest of a company's executives, often gets to define the new initiatives worth testing, including the products and even the acquisitions that might open a new direction for the business. I may be biased, but I think it is one of the most exciting roles you can hold in a large company. The work is always hard and the teams are always changing, and you have to be relentless about your direction, but at the end of it you and your team are responsible for the success or failure of a product, and by extension a real part of the company, more directly than almost anyone else in the building.