The Four Archetypes of Product Leaders (And Why Most Companies Get This Wrong)
Last week I came across Shreyas Doshi's framework on product leadership archetypes from his interview with SVPG, and it crystallized something I've been thinking about for years. After building and scaling product teams across multiple companies, I've seen the same patterns repeat: great products come from teams that understand their leaders' strengths and compensate for their blind spots.
But here's the thing - while SVPG's original framework identifies three archetypes, I believe there's a fourth that's equally important. Let me walk you through all four, and more importantly, explain why getting this wrong can kill your product.
The Three Core Archetypes (According to SVPG)
The Visionary ("It's About the Future") This is the leader who sees around corners. They paint compelling pictures of what could be, inspire teams to chase ambitious goals, and excel at setting direction. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk - these are the visionaries everyone talks about.
Their superpower: Getting everyone aligned on a north star that's actually worth chasing. Their kryptonite: Often terrible at the "how." They can see the destination but struggle with the roadmap.
The Craftsman ("It's All About the Product") These are the product purists. They obsess over user experience, understand technology deeply, and can spot a poorly designed feature from a mile away. They're the ones who will spend three weeks perfecting an interaction that most users experience for two seconds.
Their superpower: Relentless focus on quality and user experience. Products built under craftsmen just feel better. Their kryptonite: Struggle with scaling. What works for a 10-person team often breaks at 100 people.
The Operator ("It's About Scale") The process builders, the efficiency maximizers, the people who can take a chaotic startup and turn it into a well-oiled machine. They live for organizational alignment and scalable systems.
But here's where it gets tricky - and why I think SVPG's framework, while brilliant, misses something crucial about operators.
The Two Faces of Operators (Why This Gets Dangerous)
Not all operators are created equal. I've seen two distinct subspecies:
The Useful Operator builds systems that amplify human intelligence. They understand that processes aren't bureaucracy - they're a way to give teams focus and predictability. These operators help products scale without losing their soul.
The Harmful Operator mistakes the process for progress. They turn nimble product teams into meeting factories, drowning innovation in approvals and reports. Steve Jobs called these "process people" - well-intentioned folks who try to use process as a substitute for thinking.
Here's the brutal truth: When you hire someone from a large, well-known company, you're often getting the harmful variety. Many big companies excel at pleasing stakeholders but struggle with actual product craft. That's the last thing you want to import into your organization.
I've learned to spot the difference during interviews. Useful operators talk about enabling teams and removing friction. Harmful operators talk about governance and standardization. The language tells you everything.
The Missing Fourth Archetype: The Coach
While SVPG focuses on three archetypes, I've consistently seen a fourth pattern that deserves recognition:
4. The Coach ("It's About People") These leaders develop talent, create psychological safety, and work through others rather than around them. They're builders of culture and capabilities, not just products.
Their superpower: Exponential impact through people development. Teams under great coaches consistently outperform their individual talent levels. Their kryptonite: Often struggle with tough decisions. When an idea isn't working, coaches sometimes lack the resolve to kill it quickly because they're overly invested in the team's feelings.
Why Most Companies Get This Wrong
Here's what I've learned after years of building product teams: almost no one can be great at all four archetypes simultaneously. Yet most companies hire as if they expect their product leader to be a visionary craftsman operator coach.
This creates two problems:
Unrealistic expectations: We set leaders up to fail by expecting superhuman versatility
Poor team composition: We don't deliberately build complementary skill sets
The most successful product organizations I've seen understand their leader's primary archetype and intentionally build around it. If your head of product is a visionary, pair them with strong craftsmen. If they're operators, make sure you have coaching elsewhere in the organization.
The Craft Foundation (Why SVPG Gets This Right)
Here's where I completely agree with SVPG's Marty Cagan: craft skills are table stakes.
I don't care how brilliant your vision is or how smooth your processes are - if you don't deeply understand product craft, you'll build the wrong thing beautifully or the right thing terribly.
Product craft isn't just about wireframes and user stories. It's about understanding technology constraints, user psychology, business models, and market dynamics well enough to make thousands of micro-decisions correctly. Teams absorb what their leaders care about, and if the leader doesn't obsess over craft, neither will the team.
My Personal Journey Through the Archetypes
For context, I'm primarily a Visionary. My strength is seeing technical possibilities others miss and turning ideas into working MVPs. I can spot opportunities in emerging technologies and paint compelling pictures of what we could build.
But I know my limitations. I'm not naturally gifted at the operational side - building scalable processes and managing complex organizations. That's why I have enormous respect for great operators (the useful kind). They solve problems I find genuinely difficult.
The best results in my career came when I found talented people internally and gave them challenges bigger than their current skills. There's something magical about someone who's emotionally invested in your mission taking on a role that stretches them. It almost always works better than hiring "proven" talent from outside.
Practical Implications for Builders
If you're building a product team:
First, identify your archetypes. Don't assume - actually map out where your leaders naturally excel and where they struggle.
Second, complement deliberately. If your product leader is a craftsman, make sure someone else is thinking about organizational scaling. If they're a visionary, pair them with operators who can execute.
Third, respect the craft foundation. Whatever other skills your product leader has, they must be genuinely excellent at product craft. Everything else is secondary.
Fourth, hire for growth potential over perfect fit. Some of my best hires were people who had 70% of the required skills but 130% of the motivation. Internal promotions often work better than external hires for this reason.
Final Thoughts
Building great products is messy and human and way more about people than we like to admit. There's no perfect product leader archetype - they all have blindspots, they all have bad days, and they all need help from people who are strong where they're weak.
The companies that figure this out stop wasting time looking for superhuman product leaders and start building teams where different strengths actually complement each other. They stop hiring for everything and start hiring for specific gaps.
Most importantly, they understand that sustainable product excellence doesn't come from one brilliant person - it comes from the interplay between vision, craft, operations, and coaching working together instead of against each other.
Your product is only as strong as your weakest archetype. But when all four work together and support each other instead of competing? That's when you build stuff that actually matters.
Which archetype describes you? And more importantly - who's got your back on the stuff you're terrible at? Drop a comment, I'm genuinely curious about other people's experiences with this.