Product managers are not 'CEOs of the product'
Dan Gill · Dan Gill, CPO @Carvana: The Most Wild Story in Public Markets | E1243 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jan 8, 2025 · at 7:56
Dan Gill is the Chief Product Officer at Carvana. He discusses why he disagrees with the tech industry's common framing of product managers as 'CEOs of the product'.
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“I don't. I think that being the PM, you need to be obsessed with every aspect of the experience, and I think that you need to really intimately understand the system. And what I mean by that is that any good experience has so many inputs and so many outputs, And you really should have a fingertip sense of the relationship between all of those inputs and outputs, where if you're going to make an improvement to one part of the funnel, you should have an intuitive understanding of what you think will happen as a result of that. And you should know how to prioritize as a result of that. But the CEO and saying, I own a P and L is so much less important, really of saying, what is my total payroll? And, you know, what are the payroll taxes associated with that and the total expenses? There's a lot of things that you need to do as a CEO that I certainly don't want product leaders to have to think too much about.”
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