A (5:03)

Yes.

B (5:03)

And I argue that what Paul Graham is tapping into, what Brian Chesky is tapping into, is what does it really mean by better management. That's what we really need to talk about. And that's what I'm afraid people, when I say people are missing the point of the whole discussion. They're focused on basically the stylistic element of management and not really looking at the beef, which is what really enables and empowers teams to do great work.

A (5:36)

I love that. Matti, you Kind of said what it looks like in product companies. Are you specifically pointing out that this is only a style that works in product companies or really just a general approach to what better management is?

B (5:50)

I don't, I actually not don't feel competent to talk about all kinds of management in the world. If I was running a factory floor building cars, I don't know that these things are the same. I do believe though that it is necessary for product organizations at both small scale startups, low stage, more important, and then at large scale enterprise scale. I would argue it's extremely important. In fact, when that article came out, I went back because, you know, a lot of the companies that we consider the most consistently innovative products in the companies in the world at scale, whether it's Apple or Amazon or Google, they publish their leadership principles. And this is right at the top of the list. So this is not a secret. This is the oldest reference I could find. But in 1984, literally, I don't know if you were even born then, Christian, I'm not sure. But in 1984 I was working as an engineer and Steve Jobs in an interview said, we went through this stage at Apple where we went out and thought, oh, we're going to be a big company, so let's hire professional management. And they went out and hired a bunch of professional management. And his statement was, it didn't work at all. They knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything. If you're a great person, why do you want to work for somebody that you can't learn anything from? And he went on to say, you know what's interesting? You know who the best managers are? They're the great individual contributors that never ever wanted to be a manager, but decided they had to be because no one else is going to do as good a job. I mean, he said that in the mid-80s and in fact to this day Apple has a leadership principle which is experts, lead experts. And this idea that, or Google has their first principle, which is it starts with substance. You have to have that substance. Amazon has that principle of dive deep. These are people that know all about the product. In my opinion, what they're all describing is this founder style leadership. And maybe it's worth stepping back for a second, Christian, because there really are two meaningful cases here. One is startups where you basically don't have a product yet. Right, right. And you're just trying to get the product market fit. And then once you've got the product market fit, and I am oversimplifying here. A lot of people know that it's not a static thing, but once you get to product market fit, your focus kind of moves to building not the product, but building the company to be able to deliver that product at scale and to many, many customers. And those are kind of different things. The product needs never go away, but other needs move to the front.

A (8:58)

That's right.

B (8:59)

And so those are kind of two different situations. And I would argue founder style leadership is the necessary condition for both of those. But there's a difference.

A (9:13)

You know, you're establishing a couple of things that I want to kind of reemphasize as I'm thinking about you talking about this one. I think I want to say over and over again, this is all about better management and better leadership and founder style leadership or founder mood as he was described. What they are trying to describe is that in empowered teams in this environment, we don't want less leadership. We don't want fire and forget sit back or we don't also want micromanagement. What does better management look like? It means having some sense of being an expert, knowing the details. And now you're trying to describe two things, you know, because it makes sense when you hear the name founder mode or founder style leadership. Well, for a startup you're a founder, so you're trying to describe that's only for founders. But you're trying to describe there was something about what got that company good in the me core of better management and leadership that applies at scale.

B (10:12)

That's right.

A (10:13)

Okay, so I'm hearing you now. Founder style leadership in a startup, at the very core, you know, you're kind of the expert. But at scale there may be something else you now need to do because you're growing a company.

B (10:26)

So let's back up to the startup. First of all, which is the more straightforward case, I'm going to admit a bias right up front. And you know this, Christian, because this is really what first attracted me so much to you as a product leader, which is I love founders. I have a very strong bias to founders, founders to me. And we're talking about product founders, right? Founders to me are sort of the ultimate product people. And what makes a founder. Now not all founders, some of them are total jerks. We know that that's not what we're talking about here. But a successful, strong founder, what's amazing about them is that you have to realize from day one they were there learning every single experiment. They might not have even called it an experiment, but there Was countless going on every single customer interaction, every single mistake, every single decision that had to be made about, like, is that our most important segment? Is that the most important capability? What are the real risks? They were there from T0, right? They were there from the very beginning. Pretty much by definition, nobody else in the company knows as much about the product, the market, the customers, the technology as those founders. They were right there working with the team. Sometimes early on, it was just them, maybe a few more, but they were there. And this develops the superpower that we're talking about, which I refer to as product sense. That's a separate conversation. I don't remember if we've actually done a topic that was one of our.

A (12:15)

Very first ones we ever did.

B (12:17)

So I would encourage people to look at that because to me, the essential ingredient for founder style leadership is product sense. When we say that a good founder should trust their intuition, I only say that to founders where I know they have very strong product sense. And in fact, if they don't have product sense, because maybe they think they never had to talk to customers, they never learned it. And I'm like, the last thing you want to do is trust your intuition. It's going to be way off. But strong product sense, it's something that in my experience, everybody can learn. You can learn it, you can earn it, but you have to earn it now. Once you've developed that strong product sense, that's what makes the founder so valuable on a product team. That's also why we say for a startup, you don't need product managers, you just need that founder, which is the product manager. Right? They have the product sense. Because if you've got somebody with that much knowledge of the product and it's a, you know, it's a relatively small team, typically in a startup, it's one product, one product team and one product leader that is the person. Extra product managers at that stage are probably getting in the way. And honestly, if they are hired, they're being used as project managers.

A (13:43)

That's right.

B (13:44)

So that's fine, but that's different, right? So for a startup, it's really about that product sense. But here's the thing, how do you scale that? That's what happens in, for a lot of startups, that's when I first met them is the founder was trying to figure out how they scale their product role, because look what happens now. They got to worry about fundraising, they've got to worry about financials, they've got to worry about hiring or are basically identifying and Then nurturing a board, they have to worry about building out other capabilities in an organization, many of which they don't understand. So they've got a lot on their plate and they're figuring like, how do I scale? Because the product, even once you've hit product market fit, the product needs don't go away. You just immediately you're working on adjacent markets, adjacent products, you're working on developing the capabilities of your original product. It's constant product work and product needs. So that begs the question then, how do you scale? Now, of course, if you understand really what got the company to that level of success, the founder product sense we were talking about then, the worst thing you could possibly tell that founder is to back off. And the worst thing, because now what do you have, you have a bunch of people that are trying to, you know, they're way behind and they probably will never actually achieve the level that that founder had. But they're, they're thrashing. They may consider themselves empowered, but really they feel set up to fail. The last point I really wanted to make on this sort of foundation was as you scale every one of those big companies, Apple, Amazon, Google, you could look at their principles. They start by saying you must have that product sense. But then the second thing they all emphasize is your need to develop others through coaching. So to me, founder style leadership at scale is product sense plus coaching.

A (15:51)

All right, let's, let's break this down because, you know, I work with many executives and even when I'm coaching founders that are scaling their company and they are growing, some of them grow fast and they're in there and I start to describe what a good product manager is. And I talk about a deep knowledge of the customer, the data, the business, the industry. And they understand the interact how. And they're like, that's me. You're describing me. The founder is like, this is exactly why I have been telling the team what to do. And I said, you know, when you are a startup that is absolutely 100% really the value of what you're bringing. But I say to them, when you start to scale your company, if you are doing all of that every day, nobody does the coaching, nobody does the context, the strategy. And I say, who is doing CEO at this point? Who is doing leadership at this point? But I want to kind of ask this point a question because on one end, there are so many founders that might not understand in a startup that the fundamental definition of what you're describing founder mood to be is this product sense, this deep Expertise. What do you call a founder? Driving things in the ways, pushing things, without the product sense. What does that look like when they are trying to make those decisions jump in, but they don't have that requisite product sense that actually provides this foundation for founder style leadership?

B (17:19)

Well, in truth, I don't see that scenario much because those people don't seem to get the product market fit because they don't have that product sense. They haven't. You know, I'm not saying it's all skill. There's some luck involved in all this stuff too. But regardless, they haven't really earned that product sense yet. And that product sense is, I would argue, the key to getting to that success. Now here's what I do see a lot. They hire somebody, even somebody super smart, and then that person is trying to take over from them, or at least a significant part, but they lack the product sense. This is the problem the industry is highlighting, is that we have many people, many of them are smart people, but they're failing as product leaders. And I argue it's because they lack that product sense. Now it's also possible that they lack the product sense, but they're also born micromanagers. Well, we've seen that, yes. That's kind of the worst of all worlds. You don't know what you're talking about and you're micromanaging. But honestly, I see much more somebody with deep product sense that has never learned how to develop others through coaching. And the only tool they know is to basically do what they did when they were effectively the product manager. And so that looks a lot like micromanagement at scale. Right. So that's not helpful. I love to share with them. And you know, it's not an accident that Apple, Amazon and Google, the founders, were all coached by Bill Campbell. It's not a coincidence in my opinion. He understood these dynamics. One of my favorite quotes of his is, you cannot be a good manager without being a good coach. And he drills that, drilled that into people. I drill it into people. You do too. And what does that really mean? It means that I know here, let's make this real, Christian. Let's say I'm a CEO of a growth stage or even a larger company, and I have leaders at this point under me in my organization. I know what it takes to do product discovery well. I know what it takes to do product strategy well, product vision well. I don't know if all my leaders know that. They might have come from different areas. So what I'm doing, I could Just say, look, this is too important, move over, I'll drive. I could do that. That's not very scalable and we've definitely seen leaders revert to that. What I could do though is actually say, look, I believe in this leader. I hired this person. I'm going to help them become excellent. I'm going to help them develop founder style leadership, I'm going to help them develop their product sense and I'm going to help them develop their coaching skills. I would argue this is the first order of business is you build that product sense. And of course, getting out there, talking to customers as a leader, I'm like, tell me what customers you met with this week. Well, what are you, what are your conclusions? What you're really helping somebody do with product sense is distill the signal through the noise. Right? To understand what's really going on with our product, with our customers, with our business. I am also, let's say back to that scenario. I'm helping my leader get through product strategy for the first time. I know what's required for that. So I'm asking that person, so what's your plan? What's your, what's your goal in this product strategy? Hopefully they say something like, well, we need to, we need to identify the most critical problems we need to solve this quarter. Okay, great, how are you going to do that? Now here's the thing. In every good founder style leader, they are asking hard questions and they are demanding good answers. Now notice if I didn't have product sense myself, that would be very hard because most people that are smart enough to get hired for that position, they can bluff their way through that. Yes. They can say, oh yeah, I'm going to talk to a bunch of customers. I'm going to. But the difference is I know what they need to do. I know if they've really answered the hard questions. For example, I probably do more coaching of product discovery than anything else. I want to know like, well, what do you think the risks are? How are you going to mitigate those risks? What is your approach to that? How are you going to get over the compliance issue there? I'm not telling them the answer. I'm making sure they are doing the work so that they can successfully come up with that answer.

A (22:10)

Mari, let's talk about this because I'm, I'm struggling mentally to kind of say, to understand if this is more founder style leadership helping you do this or if this is you just being a good coach. Because I have seen many great, good founders, great founders that will say, well, I told them to go get better at discovery. I told them they need to do strategy. I told them they need to have a deep understanding. And they believe that, you know, they are smart people, you know, they can figure this out. And what you're doing is you're describing what actually gets the results is you're not just understanding what they need to be successful. You're asking the hard questions, you're validating and guiding them to actually be successful. This is very different from how most managers see management in that sense. And I'm trying to kind of break down in my head, you know, is that founder style leadership or is that really the good coaching aspect of founder style leadership?

B (23:11)

Well, I'm arguing that's they're the same. What I'm kind of arguing is there's a spectrum that most people see the two ends of the spectrum. They see micromanagement at one end and they see professional managers at the other end. And I say professional manager. There's a lot of terms out there. I don't mean that as an insult. I'm just saying a general manager manager that thinks they could lead pretty much anything. And maybe they can outside of the product domain, maybe they can. I don't know enough to say that, but I do believe strongly in the product space. People need more. All right, Christian, there's one other big element that has made me very interested in this topic lately, and that is I see a trend, especially, you know, the trend was highlighted in Silicon Valley, but I see this trend bigger in Europe where the belief that professional managers, also known as people only managers, Right. That that's a growing trend. And I see that as absolutely toxic to the goal of moving to the product model, to doing successful innovation. And don't get me wrong, these people, I don't think I've ever met an exception. They are very well intentioned, right? They think that the best way they can help their people is to give them all the space they need. And by the way, this is not an accident, I think not a coincidence. But in Europe, when we say coaching in Europe, it's got a different meaning. Coaching is like, yeah, I don't have to know anything about the subject. I can just ask you a, a very thoughtful question and you'll come up with the answer yourself, which in the product space is just not true. If somebody has never done product discovery before, never done it for this kind of product or these kinds of risks, the chances of them on their own figuring out what they need to do are near zero. So they need much more active. Deep dive coaching. These are literally phrases from Amazon, Apple and Google's leadership principles. I already mentioned at Amazon, dive deep but obsess over customers, develop sense of ownership, earn trust, deliver results. Apple's principles. I already said deep expertise. That's this philosophy of experts, leading experts, immerse in the details. There it is again, right? Immersing in the details, not staying above the fray. Innovation through collaboration, scaling through teaching and coaching. Google's principles. Substance first. I mentioned that. Develop others through coaching. Empower your team, focus on outcomes, provide a compelling vision. All of these are hands on, deep things. They are not hands off. They're the opposite, I would argue, of laissez faire management. The opposite of professional management. I would argue they are not the hands off and they are not micromanaging. They are in between in that scale. But then they're deeper, they're hands on, deeper.

A (26:38)

Okay, let's calibrate. When we say you're not looking for less management, you're looking for better management, you're describing what these elements of what better management mean and how it's not micromanagement. But you can kind of see I was on a coaching call earlier this week where, you know, somebody was really just jumping at people and treating them poorly and kind of invoked founder mode. Like I'm just kind of. And I had to call him afterwards and say there's nothing about that. That was founder style leadership. That was just you being a terrible human to that person. And he's like, well, you know, I have to be in the details. I was like, the how you were in the details was nothing that got them better, improved their product sense or could actually empower a team. How do you coach drawing that line? Like, when do you say someone says I'm diving deep versus I am now doing, I am going down and asking you what you ate for breakfast. And you can't leave here today if you don't tell me how do you calibrate where you know, in coaching somebody, where you go deep, where you bring deep expertise, where you ask the hard questions without getting to micromanagement.

B (27:50)

Well, first of all, I always, I've learned this especially with my time in Europe. You cannot take this for granted. You have to remind them that everything we're about to talk about is predicated on that deep product sense. So you have to have the knowledge first, you have to have that subject expertise. But then it's now a conversation on how do you become a good coach. And by the way, it's ironic that we're chatting because I literally have never met anybody better at this than you. So it's funny for me to be telling this to you, but still we explain that once you're a leader, your product is not the product. Your product is now the people. And your goal is to develop their skills. And so it means like, yeah, I'm thinking hard. You know, you and I have a mutual friend, Mike Fisher. He's a CEO today of MyFitnessPal. And Mike was telling me recently, we were talking, I love his writing. I think he's fantastic. He's truly a deep thinker on product and leadership. And he's a great example of what we're talking about. And he was sharing that. He was preparing for a one on one and he was crafting his questions. He was sharing with me that he had just been diving deep on crafting the question. He was putting real thought into, how am I going to inspire, initiate, instigate the person to really think about the things they need to think about deeply. He was crafting his question. He knew where they needed to go. He knew that. But he needed them to get there. He needed them to be able to realize the work that they had to do, to really believe it. The last thing a good CEO wants is people to do it. Just because you say do it, you want that same thing. We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries. So even the best CEOs, they don't want people to just do it because they're told. They want them to be true believers. That's why I love seeing in those principles, the need for leaders to provide that compelling vision. That's what gets people so fired up about this. But the point was he was crafting his questions. That's what a good leader does. That's how good coaching works. They are thinking about, all right, I know the state this person is in. I know how far along they are. Maybe they're just starting on a product strategy or just struggling with an obstacle in discovery they can't find a way around. I know where they're at. What can I talk about with them that will get them realizing they have other paths and that they can pursue those paths and we can talk about like, there's nothing wrong with me as a leader sharing a technique. If the person says, I don't know how to do that, no problem, then I move. Because coaching and teaching are very intertwined.

A (31:01)

That's right.

B (31:01)

Right. I mean, what are we? We're often teaching. I love that Apple calls Them out as two pillars, teaching and coaching. They're part of the same thing. A lot of coaching is teaching is saying like this is how you address this kind of an issue. Now you have to go do it. I want you to do it. And I'm here for you. I'm here to answer questions. If you run into obstacles, we'll talk about them. But I want you to work through this. I want you to bring your knowledge to the table.

A (31:30)

You know, I'm kind of reflecting on this idea of what makes this founder style leadership very effective. And you're calling out the dimension of kind of product sense, this deep sense. But there's something about a care to it. You know, like for many founders, mentally, you know, if you don't get to product market fit, you don't survive, you don't feed or they care deeply about the problem they are trying to solve. So you know, they are in the details not because they want to micromanage things, but because they genuinely care about better outcomes and they want to get the best out of people. And that's often a mindset I think that gets lost when companies scale down the level. And I love you're using Mike's example of a CEO demonstrating I care about asking the right questions to get the best out of people and to ensure context has been passed on. Now talk about companies with layers down. In some ways, I've always kind of said most people struggle to provide good management and leadership if they haven't experienced good management and leadership at a big company at scale, where your leaders have not taken the time to provide good coaching to align leader and you are somewhere in the third or fourth layer in this ecosystem of less management or delegation management or micromanagement. How do you bust out of a bubble in this way? How do you succeed versus just survive?

B (33:04)

Well, of course you just summarize why it's difficult at scale to transform. One of the real challenges are those middle managers. We can usually get the senior managers on board because they are the ones more motivated than anyone else to do these things. But there's a whole layer of middle managers and that were often hired for very different goals. Especially if say you're a European company and you had hired them under a very different model as say a people only manager. And now you have a need for a very different thing. This is why essentially what we're talking about is a cultural change. Now the technique that I strongly advocate, I know you do too, is the best way to succeed with that is to pick an example Pick a pilot team. Okay, Pick a pilot team. And when we pick a pilot team, we're implicitly picking the managers of those people. And together we're showing them this new way of working. Now, it's pretty straightforward. The coaching that's necessary for the individual contributors on the team. It's a little less obvious but at least as important how we coach the leaders of those people because they're the ones ultimately that will be responsible for the success or failure of this. Once we've got success there, we now have something we can replicate, something that the rest of the company can observe and see. Okay, that's a different style of management. And maybe it was a different style like you said, that they've ever seen before. Maybe it's a different style than what they learned in business school or who knows, from wherever. But I would argue founder style leadership, you can teach most people, you can teach most people. Now the caveat is they have to put in the work.

A (34:57)

Yes.

B (34:58)

And they have to care. Yes. You know, if you say there were the two things I was describing for founder style leadership, product sense and coaching skills. Product sense is putting in the work that is the equivalent of doing your homework for a product leader. Just like we say for a product manager, they are not an effective product manager until they put in that work. For a product leader, they have to build those skills. They have to have that depth. However, the second thing, coaching, that coaching mindset, as you know, that's based on caring and trust and building a relationship with your people. In my experience, most people want that. The challenge that you is what you described. They want it, but they've never seen it.

A (35:45)

I always kind of say, you know, moving to outcomes is hard, but better leadership, it's hard. Mati, you know, like you're describing the two dynamics at scale. And I love, you know, if I'm kind of summarizing our talk today, first of all, it's not the mood because people, someone asked me before, like, if this is a mood, how do you not get burnt out? You know, you just turn it on and it's cranking and you're going. And so I kind of like the idea of, we're trying to describe what better leadership and better management looks like. You know, in a startup that's that strong product sense. In a scale up or bigger company, it is that product sense plus coaching. And so on one end you kind of see both dynamics. You see people with strong product sense that are not very good at coaching or caring about getting people and that can Turn into some of those other behaviors or people that are just traditional people, managers that are delegators in chief and not very good at the expertise and the deep knowledge. And so this is very hard. You're kind of redefining what better management and better leadership in a product organization looks like. And I think that's a great way to summarize our time today because it's very helpful, particularly for me. I'm trying to get away from the poor definitions that have become dangerous when people took that from this article. Are there pointed examples, Mari, to wrap up our time of people that have done this? Well, kind of founder style leadership that you can kind of reference some attributes there that reinforce what models or behaviors you liked.

B (37:23)

Of course it's much easier to talk about startups because then it's just an individual that's much harder at large scale because you know, now we're talking about do you have 50amazing leaders? Right? That's, that's founder style leadership. At scale. I would argue the two best I've seen are Apple and Amazon and their leaders are, I mean the truth is like any of their leaders could be incredibly successful founders, true founders of startups. And many of them have gone on to do that. But the point is they are developing these leaders and they do believe that experts develop experts, experts, lead experts. And so the expertise is the foundation of everything. At Apple, it's literally the CEO before different functions come together, right? It's the CEO. So they believe so strongly in that idea of experts, leading experts. But it's not a, not a coincidence that Apple products have that holistic performance. And I would argue Amazon is optimizing a little different. Apple is optimizing for a small number of highly integrated devices. Amazon is basically optimizing for an innovation machine, right? In many different businesses. So the details are different. But what they look for and develop in their leadership, I find the same, that same. They're so inspiring. The leaders. You want to work for them, you believe in what they're trying to do. You can learn so much from them. They have different styles of course, but they're all great examples of real founder style leaders.

A (39:09)

And Manny, you kind of just said like 50 leaders. Like this is founder style at scale. I mean you're not even saying every part of an engine has to operate this way. Are you just suggesting like if this is more of what your organization is like, like at scale is more people with founder style leadership.

B (39:28)

I am, I am, but I'm specifically, again, I was sort of saying at the beginning. I don't know enough to say how critical this is outside of the product domain, but I do believe engineering and engineering leaders, design and design leaders, product and product leaders, those areas that's clear. And I do think there's some real differences for those of us that build the products our company sells. But you know, running a large sales organization is very, you know, it's a different thing and there's a different culture, there's different incentive structures. So I'm not comfortable saying you should do this everywhere, but I am. I do believe strongly that to succeed at scale in creation of products, discovery, delivery of products, you need these.

A (40:17)

I love it. I love it. This was a fantastic conversation. Helpful for me. It's been meaningful even in my career and my ability to coach people. Thank you so much again, Mari, for the gift of your time again. What a great conversation. I look forward to having you on the next episode to have some more conversations about these topics. Until next time, Mari. My very big thanks.

B (40:39)

Thank you Christian. I enjoy the discussion.

A (40:41)

Want to learn more? Until next time, Please check out svpg.com Sign up for our newsletter that Mary Kagan puts out. Join us for one of our workshops near you and get access to all of the articles and content we put out. And thank you to everyone for joining us. Until next time, have a good day. A Quick Disclaimer While this podcast is named Product Therapy, it is not hosted by licensed therapists or mental health professionals and it is in no way a substitute for professional mental health services. We recognize the importance of mental well being and encourage anyone facing personal difficulties to seek support from qualified professionals. See www.findahelpline.com.