The Mini-CEO Fantasy: A Title That Flatters Everyone Except Reality
The "PM as CEO of the product" metaphor has been floating around for twenty years. It's done more damage to the profession than any other single idea.
I remember the exact moment I realised the Mini-CEO thing was nonsense. I was three months into my first PM role, full of Ben Horowitz quotes and misplaced confidence, and I walked into a sprint planning meeting ready to “drive the product forward.”
The tech lead looked at me like I’d suggested we rewrite the backend in COBOL. “That’s not how we’re building it,” she said. And that was that. No debate. No negotiation. Just a polite but unmistakable reminder that I had precisely zero authority over how anything got done.
Nobody had warned me. The job descriptions said “own the product vision.” The Medium posts said “CEOs of the product.” What they failed to mention was that owning the vision and making anyone do anything about it are entirely different things.
The Seductive Logic
Look, I understand why the metaphor caught on. There’s a certain elegance to it.
A CEO sets direction for a company. A PM sets direction for a product. A CEO balances competing stakeholder interests. A PM balances customers, business, and technology. A CEO is accountable for outcomes. A PM is accountable for... well, this is where it starts to fall apart, actually.
The comparison flatters everyone involved. It makes PMs feel important. It gives hiring managers a shorthand for explaining the role to candidates. It provides a mental model that sounds coherent in interviews.
Ben Horowitz wrote the original “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager” memo at Netscape in the late 1990s, and variations of the CEO framing have been circulating ever since. The intent was probably to emphasise ownership and accountability. What it actually created was a generation of PMs who thought they had authority they don’t have, working with engineers and designers who resented the implication that they reported to someone who couldn’t write code or push pixels.
What CEOs Actually Have
Let’s be specific about what the CEO comparison implies and why it’s wrong.
CEOs have hiring and firing authority. They can remove people who aren’t performing and bring in people who will. PMs work with whatever team they’re assigned, often for years, regardless of fit or capability.
CEOs control budgets. They decide how resources get allocated across the organisation. PMs typically have no direct budget authority. They can request. They can influence. They can make compelling cases. But the actual decision sits elsewhere.
CEOs have positional power. When a CEO says “this is the direction,” people follow it because the CEO said so. When a PM says “this is the direction,” the response is often “let me check with my manager” or “I’ll need to see the data” or simply “no.”
Most importantly, CEOs are accountable for the overall profitability of the entire company. They answer to boards about revenue, margins, market position, shareholder value. PMs are accountable for product outcomes that may or may not translate into company success, through attribution chains that are often fuzzy at best.
A quote that has been shared by Casey Winters said:
“I’m ‘accountable’ for retention in my product area. But I don’t control pricing, I don’t control the sales motion, I don’t control what competitors do, and I don’t control the support experience after someone buys. I’m accountable for an outcome I can influence maybe 30% of.”
That’s not CEO accountability. That’s something else entirely.
The Strategy-Execution Chasm
Here’s where the Mini-CEO myth does its most insidious damage: it creates a fundamental disconnect between strategy and execution that most organisations never properly diagnose.
When you tell PMs they’re responsible for product strategy, they take that seriously. They build roadmaps. They identify market opportunities. They craft positioning. They think in quarters and years, not sprints. All of that is good. That’s the job.
But a strategy without execution authority is just a wish list with better formatting.
I watched this play out at a niche travel tech company last year. The PM had a genuinely sharp strategy for repositioning their mobile app toward business travellers. Clear target segment. Differentiated value proposition. Compelling customer research to back it up. The kind of strategy deck that gets head nods in leadership reviews.
Six months later, almost none of it had shipped. The engineering team had been pulled onto technical debt work by their own leadership. The design team was understaffed and prioritising a different product line. Marketing had committed to a campaign calendar that didn’t align with the new positioning.
The PM had “owned” the strategy. She just couldn’t make any of it happen.
“I felt like I was holding a map to somewhere nobody else was going. I knew where we should be heading. I just couldn’t get anyone to walk in that direction.”
This is the strategy-execution gap in its purest form. And the Mini-CEO metaphor makes it worse by implying that PMs can close that gap through sheer force of ownership. Real CEOs can say “this is the strategy, now everyone align.” PMs can only ask nicely and hope the stars align.
The Damage It Does
The Mini-CEO label wouldn’t matter if it were just inaccurate. Lots of job titles are inaccurate. But this one actively harms how PMs work with their teams.
I’ve seen fellow PMs walk into rooms assuming they’re the decision-maker, only to discover that engineers have strong opinions about technical approach, designers have strong opinions about user experience, and nobody agreed to be “managed” by someone with no formal authority over them.
The result is usually one of two failure modes. Either the PM tries to assert authority they don’t have, creating conflict and resentment. Or they retreat entirely, becoming glorified note-takers who facilitate meetings but never actually drive outcomes.
Neither is good. And both stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of what the PM role actually is.
The best framing I’ve heard comes from a principal PM at a logistics company:
“I’m not the CEO of anything. I’m the person who makes it easier for talented people to build the right thing. I’m in service to the team, not in charge of it.”
That’s a completely different orientation. It’s influence through facilitation. It’s leadership through alignment. It’s making yourself useful rather than making yourself important.
Why The Gap Persists
The strategy-execution gap isn’t just a PM problem. It’s an organisational design problem that the Mini-CEO myth helps obscure.
When a strategy fails to execute, companies have a convenient scapegoat: the PM who “owned” it. But in most cases, the failure sits in the system, not the individual. Engineering capacity was allocated by engineering leadership. Design priorities were set by design leadership. Marketing timelines were locked in before the PM’s strategy even existed.
The PM is positioned as the integrator of all these functions but given no actual integration authority. They’re expected to align cross-functional teams through persuasion alone, in organisations that have built incentive structures, reporting lines, and resource allocation processes that actively work against alignment.
I’ve started noticing a pattern: the companies where PMs struggle most with execution are usually the ones where functional silos are strongest. The companies where PMs thrive tend to have genuinely cross-functional teams with shared goals and joint accountability.
The difference isn’t PM skill. It’s organisational architecture. But hiring a PM and calling them a Mini-CEO is easier than restructuring how the company actually works.
The Authority You Actually Have
Here’s what’s interesting, though. PMs do have authority. Just not the kind the Mini-CEO metaphor implies.
You have authority over the problem definition. You can say “this is the customer problem we’re solving” and, if you’ve done your research, people will generally believe you.
You have authority over prioritisation logic. You can say “here’s why we’re doing X before Y” and, if your reasoning is sound, the team will typically accept it.
You have authority over the narrative. You can shape how the product is understood internally and externally, how success is defined, how tradeoffs are framed.
These are real forms of power. They’re just not executive power. They’re persuasive power. Earned power. Power that comes from being right more often than you’re wrong, from having context others don’t have, from building relationships that give your perspective weight.
Rich Mironov, who’s been writing about product management longer than most of us have been doing it, consistently emphasises that a product manager isn’t writing code, testing products, creating marketing pitches, buying advertising, or actively selling their product. ProductPlan All of that happens downstream. The PM role is upstream: figuring out what to build and why. But “figuring out” is different from “commanding.”
Closing The Gap Without The Title
The PMs who actually get strategy executed tend to operate very differently from the Mini-CEO archetype.
They build relationships before they need them. They understand what engineering leadership cares about and frame their strategies in those terms. They find the places where their product goals and other teams’ goals overlap, then exploit those overlaps relentlessly.
They make the work easier to execute, not just easier to understand. Instead of handing over a strategy deck and expecting alignment, they break the strategy into pieces that fit how the organisation actually delivers. They sequence work to match resource availability, not just logical priority.
They create accountability structures that don’t depend on their authority. Shared OKRs. Joint roadmap reviews. Regular cross-functional syncs where execution gaps become visible to everyone, not just the PM quietly fuming in the corner.
None of this requires being a CEO. It requires being useful, being credible, and being relentless about removing friction from the path between strategy and shipped product.
The Part I’m Still Working Through
I don’t think the Mini-CEO metaphor is entirely without value. There’s something useful in encouraging PMs to think holistically, to take ownership rather than waiting for direction, to feel accountable for outcomes even when the path to those outcomes runs through other people’s work.
The problem is that metaphors shape behaviour. And this particular metaphor shapes behaviour in ways that make PMs worse at their jobs, not better. It encourages command when influence is required. It suggests authority where there is only accountability. It sets up expectations that reality will inevitably disappoint.
Worse, it lets organisations off the hook for structural problems. When strategy doesn’t execute, blame the PM who “owned” it. Never mind that the PM had no actual mechanism to make execution happen. Never mind that the company designed an impossible role and then acted surprised when people couldn’t do it.
Maybe the answer is just to retire the metaphor entirely. Call PMs what they actually are: the people responsible for making sure the right product gets built, working through teams they don’t control, toward outcomes they can’t fully attribute, closing the strategy-execution gap through influence rather than authority.
It’s less flattering. It’s also more honest.
And honestly, the job is hard enough without pretending you’re something you’re not.