Should product leaders hired by founder-CEOs expect full autonomy, or should founders remain deeply involved in product details?

Casey Winters · Sep 22, 2021

Product and growth leaders often wrongly believe they get to create the company's vision and strategy; their actual job is to execute the founders' vision better

It isn't your company — you work at the pleasure of the CEO, so you need to get clear on what is handed down as a directive versus what you genuinely get to develop bottoms-up

Scope: it's never 100% either way; there are parts of the founder's vision you may not like

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David Meyer · Nov 1, 2023

The biggest mistake founders make hiring product leaders is not being clear about how much agency the role has — good founder CEOs will be in the details, and product leaders who expect to call the shots autonomously will fail

Founders have far more context, so they should be deeply involved in the sausage making; his own first six months at Databricks of 'I've got it' and showing Ali finished work wasn't what Ali wanted and wasted time

Scope: he is describing good founders, not absentee ones

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David Lieb · Sep 21, 2022

It is dangerous for a company when the founder or CEO is not personally working on the single most important problem for the company's success

After handing product to a new hire he realized his company's success or failure depended on what that person figured out, and it was his own responsibility to solve it

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David Lieb · Feb 3, 2023

It is dangerous for a company when the founder/CEO is not personally working on the most important problem for the company's success

After hiring a product lead he realized the company's fate rested on a problem he had just delegated, and two people then both wanted to be top on product

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Aparna Chennapragada · Feb 3, 2023

Founders should abstract themselves out of almost every function except the one that is their superpower, and if product is that superpower they should keep doing it as long as humanly possible rather than hiring a product leader.

Many founders at huge scale are still effectively head of product because product is what differentiated them in creating the company, and they didn't want to hand over the reins on it.

41:42 Founder should keep owning product if it is their superpower rather than hiring a cpo