The Quiet Work of Product Leadership

Most of product leadership happens in rooms where no one’s taking notes.

At Qantas, we discovered a major security vulnerability: thousands of travel agents were all logging in under the same shared account. The risk was obvious. We needed to migrate every single user to a unique account.

The customer didn’t want it. It would break their workflow. And the stakes were high. Shut everyone off in one big bang and we’d paralyse the entire network overnight.

So we went quiet. No flashy launch, no “moment.”
Just a deliberate, staggered rollout: a few thousand accounts one week, a few thousand the next. No headlines. No champagne. Just slow, careful progress. After a month, we’d rebuilt the entire foundation: 10,000 new accounts, a closed security gap, and a platform we could finally learn from with real usage data.

It wasn’t sexy. It didn’t make the deck.
But that’s the truth of product leadership: most of the real work is invisible. It’s not the roadmap reveal. It’s the trade-offs, the pacing, the tiny decisions that stack up to a system that holds.

The roadmap is just the shadow.
The work is the light.