One of the challenges that emerge in companies doing long-term 0-1 projects (true new to the world stuff, not “new to that company”) is that it is very hard to get accurate signal on product/market fit. The only true test of PMF is contact with the market followed by feedback and iteration. However, this is often not possible in deep tech projects that take many years to complete and launch.
In organizations doing multi-year projects without market contact, it becomes very difficult to determine whether the product is headed in the right direction. Often times your only guides are intuition, deductive reasoning, and prototypes with dogfooding and UXR studies to get directional signal.
In organizations beyond early stage startups, the product manager / product leader is not the same person as the CEO. When the product direction is being determined by intuition and opinions, the CEO’s opinion wins out. This means that the PM’s job involves a lot of “influencing” (convincing) the CEO of the “right” course of action.
This in turn sometimes becomes a measure of impact in of itself. In some organizations, “landing strategy” is one of the requirements of the PM job, and at senior levels, convincing the CEO (and the rest of the organization) of a particular strategy is an activity and outcome for which the PM is rightfully rewarded.
However, this becomes a problem when the organization culture starts to conflate such influence for actual product success. There are certainly CEOs who have an incredibly strong product sense and intuition about what will succeed in the market. At the same time, a single individual, no matter how accomplished and successful, is not the same as an actual market of paying customers.
PMs should be recognized and rewarded for convincing leaders and the overall organization of their vision, strategy, and roadmap. At the same time, such an outcome is not evidence of product success. It is just one step along the path to building the product and getting contact with the market. Remember, the market is the only true discriminator of product success.