Founder-Style Leadership
At this point, many people have heard about, and/or shared their thoughts on the “founder mode” discussion kicked off by the Paul Graham essay. I weighed in on this myself earlier in the article Coaching Founder Mode.
But after reading many of the subsequent pieces, and talking to many product teams and product leaders about this concept, I’m convinced that most people have been missing the real point of this critically important topic.
My theory is that there are some trigger words in that essay that once people see, their minds head off in a different direction, and the important points fail to land.
So let me start by summarizing why I think this is such a critical topic, at least for those companies that aspire to move to the product model.
The foundation of the product model is empowered product teams. Most people I meet understand this. But what they don’t always understand is that empowered teams require a specific type of leadership.
The real subject here is to understand more about just what makes this type of leadership different and critical, and why founders so often have the knowledge that this type of leadership requires.
So the purpose of this article is to discuss the question of “what is this specific type of better leadership, and why is it that founders so often have an advantage?”
Nomenclature
First, I’d like to tackle the nomenclature that’s been used for this conversation.
The word “mode” is not ideal. It implies it’s something that can be turned on or off, depending on the circumstances. But I think what we’re really talking about is a style of leadership, as practiced by the most effective founders and other product leaders.
While founder style leadership may not really be something you can switch on or off, I believe strongly that it is something you can earn through learning.
Second, the term “founder mode” implies that it only applies to founders. But as you’ll see, I argue that this founder-style leadership is absolutely critical not just to successful startups, but also to successful scaleups, and especially to enterprise scale success. And the top product model companies figured this out decades ago.
Third, startups often have two or more founders, but this entire discussion is especially relevant to the product founder – the founder that takes responsibility for defining the company’s products. For the purposes of this article, all my references below to the founder refer to the product founder.
The Problems of Professional Management
The problems of micro-management are well known, and have been known since forever.1
But the problems of so-called “professional management” (sometimes referred to as “delegation-based management” or “laissez-faire management”) are much less widely known, and continue to damage or even destroy promising product companies.
When Paul Graham shared the message from Brian Chesky’s talk, he characterized it this way:
“The conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as ‘hire good people and give them room to do their jobs.’ He followed this advice and the results were disastrous.”
Yet at strong product model companies, this issue has been understood – and feared – for a generation. As Steve Jobs shared decades ago:
“We went through that stage in Apple where we went out and thought, Oh, we’re gonna be a big company, let’s hire professional management. We went out and hired a bunch of professional management. It didn’t work at all….They knew how to manage, but they didn’t know how to do anything.”
Which is why strong product companies understand that it’s easier to train an expert to manage well, than to train a manager to be an expert.
At Apple, that learning turned into the foundational leadership principle: experts lead experts. You will find a very similar principle at all the top product model companies.
This is precisely why we say that empowered teams don’t need less leadership; they need better leadership.
But let’s double-click on what this really means in practice.
There are two different situations, and we need to talk about each.
The first is a true startup – where the company has not yet found product/market fit – and the second is once they have, and now the task is to build and scale the company to be able to get that product into the hands of as many customers as possible.
Founder-Style Leadership at Startups
I often refer to product founders as the ultimate product people. They live and breathe the product. Realize that they have been there since the very beginning.
They have created the product vision, and they articulate this as often as they can, in as many ways as they can – to investors, to customers, to partners, to potential employees, and to their product teams.
They have probably visited more customers than anyone else in the company (often more than everyone else in the company combined). They have been there for every single test or experiment. They were there for every single new technology that was tried.
They were likely the first one to implement and then see the analytics, and they are very likely the most anxious to see the very latest data.
They had a front row seat to every learning. The mistakes that were made were very likely theirs, but they benefited by learning from them.
The point is that they know more about the customers, the market, the industry, and the enabling technology than anyone else.
The result of all this learning is that they have developed what we call product sense.
This product sense is what makes this person arguably the single most valuable person in a startup. It is what makes their intuition trustworthy. It is what gives them such useful product judgement.
Certainly some people develop this product sense faster than others, and some never develop it.
But in my more than 40 years of experience with product leaders, if you show me a startup that has achieved product/market fit, I’ll show you a product founder that has developed this product sense.
So can you imagine what happens to a company if this person leaves? Or if this person thinks that in order to grow and scale they have to back off and let people figure things out for themselves?
But then what does that strong founder do when the company grows to the point where a single product person is not able to play the necessary role the product teams need?
Founder-Style Leadership at Scale
Of course, growing a company involves more than just product work. The product work continues to power the business by providing customers with real value, but funding, finance, marketing, sales, operations, and more also make very real demands on the founder’s time.
The product founder can sometimes buy some time by hiring a COO style operating partner – think Steve Jobs with Tim Cook, or Mark Zuckerberg with Sheryl Sandberg, or Bill Gates with Steve Ballmer.
But even with a great partner to handle many of the other functions involved in building the company, it doesn’t take long before there’s just no way to provide the necessary product sense-based experience required for the number of product teams.
And this is why for product founders to truly scale, they need to learn a critical skill: coaching.
As Bill Campbell emphasized, “you cannot be a good manager without being a good coach.”
The product sense expertise is still essential – but now it’s all about scaling that expertise. Which is done through coaching and teaching. And this is why at the top product model companies, you’ll find both product sense and coaching emphasized in their leadership principles.
Consider Amazon, Apple and Google. I would argue that in all three companies, they strive for founder-style leadership, and this is not an accident:
Amazon’s Leadership Principles: Dive deep; Hire and develop the best; Customer obsession; Sense of ownership; Bias for action; Earn trust; Deliver results
Apple’s Leadership Principles: Deep expertise; Immerse in the details; Scaling through teaching and coaching; Innovation through collaboration
Google’s Leadership Principles: Substance first; Develop others through coaching; Empower your team; Focus on outcomes; Provide a compelling vision
I’d encourage you to read each company’s full set of leadership principles, but pay particular attention to the importance of product sense, and how they make it an explicit responsibility for leaders to work to coach and develop that product sense in the people they lead.
Then contrast this with the idea of a “professional manager” coming in to lead a team or an organization but without the foundation of actual product sense.
Realize also that product sense is the foundation for the coaching skills. Many well-intentioned people try to coach without the necessary foundation of expertise. But without the expertise, the leader will be extremely limited in the help they can truly provide to their people.
Imagine trying to coach someone on effective product discovery if you’re not experienced with this work yourself. Or on creating an effective product strategy. Or a product vision. Or a team topology.
Developing Product Sense and Coaching Skills
So what to do if you’re new to a company, or you’re coming from a role or part of the company where you do not have the expertise of the people that work for you?
The good news is that in most cases this can be learned. It won’t be easy and it won’t be fast, but you can be successful if you are willing to put in the time and effort.
Your goal is to develop real product sense, and to develop your coaching skills.
The most difficult and time-consuming work is to tackle the goal of developing the necessary product sense.
Get out of the office and meet with users and customers. Spend time with your most talented individual contributor engineers and designers (even and especially if those people are several layers below you in the organization). Seek out and consume the best content from the top industry analysts.
If you have the opportunity to spend real time with the original product founder, by all means take advantage of every minute you can get. Use them to help distinguish what is essential from what is incidental.
Once you have a solid foundation of expertise, so long as you understand your goal is to help develop others, rather than to micro-manage them, or try to do all of the work yourself, you will most likely find good results.
Founder-Style Leadership = Product Sense + Coaching
It is this powerful combination of product sense and commitment to spreading this knowledge through coaching that provides empowered product teams with the context and support they need to solve hard problems for their customers in ways that customers love, yet work for the business.
Note: There is an episode of the Product Therapy podcast coming out soon in which I discuss this important topic in more depth with podcast host Christian Idiodi.
- As Steve Jobs famously said: “We don’t hire all these smart engineers in order to tell them what to build; we hire them to show us what’s possible.” ↩︎
