Great article. While it's great to have a CEO who stays engaged with the product even as the company scales up, it's awful when they continue to micro-manage it the way they did when the company was 10 people. You hired product managers (and perhaps product manager managers). So let them do their jobs and create great products!
When you're running a 500+ person company, you're not going to go into the code and start optimizing the graph traversal algorithm--you hired smart engineers to do this. You're not going to fire up Illustrator and start drawing buttons--you have artists for this. You're not going to write the company blog yourself, or fix the automated test systems yourself, or design the marketing materials yourself. So why do you feel the need to over-ride your product managers on product direction, feature set, user acquisition plans, retention strategy, etc? Doing so de-motivates the professionals you have whose job is to do these awesomely.
Unified vision matters. Peer commentator already noted Steve Jobs, but I wanted to focus on this.
Steve didn't draw the buttons, design the hardware, or write the code -- but he sure as shit told the relevant teams exactly what he wanted -- often directly, with a very shallow management hierarchy -- and told them to try again if they didn't pull it off.
At the same time, he did have SVP-level and VP-level people writing serious, core OS-level code themselves. They were better managers by virtue of actually understanding and having a coherent vision for what it was they were managing.
If the management chain doesn't set product and marketing direction at a company whose purpose is to sell products, then what the hell are they doing in charge?
I had a CEO like that once. He was very good at giving them impression that he could do the job of anyone in the company better than that person and the only reason anyone else was hired was cause he couldn't be in 200 places at once.
Could he not do other people's jobs, not do them as well?
If he was correct in his assessment, was the issue that it affected morale?
Right now, I feel I could do maybe 15 peoples jobs. Not as well, certainly unless I were full time, and so I cede control to them as long as they can explain their decisions.
But often I feel like that statement, even if true, bodes poorly for the company. Is that because of how employees respond to that attitude?
> Right now, I feel I could do maybe 15 peoples jobs.
I don't know you, so I'm not sure, but in my experience you are wrong. I understand where you came from, being a co-founder myself I know at the beginning you have to do the jobs of 15 or more people so you still believe you are as good as them.
But there are two problems:
- You should hire someone that is better than you. Even if you are the best in your field, you should hire someone that could possibly replace you.
- In almost every non menial job, you need to keep your skills updated. You cannot keep up with 15 different jobs and still run a company with 15 people. So after few months you are no more as good as them.
Be aware, you should understand the job of the people you manage. It is ok to ask them why they made some choice, it is ok to challenge them in a respectful way. But they probably know better. It is not just a morale problem, it is a specific problem.
When you become a manager, your task is no more doing their jobs. Your task is to help them become better at doing their jobs. (The next step is to become a leader, where you simply inspire). I saw a lot of managers at different levels (startup CEOs, mid-level manager) failing because they believe they are better at their jobs than their employees.
He certainly couldn't do many of the technical guy's jobs as well as they could. Even if he'd run the whole thing by himself 5 years earlier he had not kept up with the new systems when everything had grown by 10x.
Even for relatively simply things like helpdesk jobs he could just "make it so" since he was the CEO (eg just give customer a credit) rather than having to go though the normal procedures but his technical knowledge was still out-of-date there.
He wasn't the nicest person in general. The problem was that he assumed he could jump into any situation and was as expert as any other staff member. So he'd start telling the network guys what to do to solve something (and trying to login to the routers) despite having virtually no idea how the routing protocols used on the network worked.
The problem was he assumed that any employee only knew a subset of what he knew, so that employee's only value-add was saving him time, not any expertise.
Something like: "I know your job better than you do, now get out of my way so I fix the problem quickly and get back to important stuff that you don't understand"
> The problem was he assumed that any employee only knew a subset of what he knew, so that employee's only value-add was saving him time, not any expertise.
Wow, if I didn't know any better, I'd bet we worked at the same company! However, my guess is that the above attitude is commonly found among type-A founders. They would not have gotten to where they are without a healthy dose of arrogance.
> They would not have gotten to where they are without a healthy dose of arrogance.
I've seen this idea expressed on occasion. I don't think it's true. They need drive, they need confidence, they need decisiveness, they can certainly use a dash of charisma... but outright arrogance? No.
Arrogance is the refusal to consider even the possibility that one might be wrong. No dose of it is "healthy".
In small companies that are truly solving hard problems, having a CEO who could legitimately do everyone's job points to a hiring failure. In a less ambitious company, having a CEO who could legitimately do everyone's job probably means that the CEO is under-employed.
It is far more common for CEOs to think they can do everyone else's job than for that to actually be the case.
Product managers are potentially both the most helpful and potentially most damaging hire you can make, as you are ceding them control (if you do) over the very definition of the value your company provides.
I think someone like Steve Jobs keeping a lot of that control there is definitely of value - in not delegating it.
I've worked with a lot of PMs that were like "this dialog needs to be more orange" (one defunct startup from many years ago), and miss the picture, because they are just kind of faking it -- they are the guy with the opinion and the title, because somebody had to do it, but not really trying to make the best choice for the end user.
There are some that could be exceptional. (Speaking of several different companies where I've experienced this). You need to have someone with a really good gut feel and instinct, and a lot of passion to believe in the thing they are doing. But if a PM is a "CEO of a product", that makes it the most important choice in your entire organization -- for that product. If you have one product, that's huge.
An alternative approach is to get a company really involved, to where everybody on the team has input in the product, and that you source the ideas from everywhere, but yeah, somebody still has to drive it.
Depending on who you talk to PM can mean like 37 different things, and no one person can concentrate on all 37 -- you do need people doing all of those things, but I think it's GREAT if the person at the helm of your company is all about the product. Else, you're just cranking size and numbers?
The purpose of the company, to me, is about creating the things you believe in and want to create - the business is the means to the end, and the food on the table along the way. Approaching it from a pure business perspective is missing a lot of the fun and opportunity.
>Product managers are potentially both the most helpful and potentially most damaging hire you can make, as you are ceding them control (if you do) over the very definition of the value your company provides.
I think it ties into what paul graham wrote about hackers making things for users. The more layers you have between the hackers and the users, there's more potentially that your product won't be that great. I've worked with product managers who supposedly talk to the users directly and channel that into the work us developers have to do but they always seemed to just copy the competitor or only make small changes whose value is questionable.
>An alternative approach is to get a company really involved, to where everybody on the team has input in the product, and that you source the ideas from everywhere, but yeah, somebody still has to drive it.
It's probably better to create the position of product manager from within.
> So why do you feel the need to over-ride your product managers on
> product direction, feature set, user acquisition plans, retention
> strategy, etc?
As long as the CEO isn't micro-managing, why wouldn't they intervene on these topics if the product managers are going in a direction the CEO doesn't want to take the company just yet? The CEO's job is to set the strategy and vision; the manager's job is to execute. If you've hired competent managers, how they execute is up to them. What and why they execute is the responsibility of the CEO and, if the managers are off-course, the CEO must sometimes override them to line things back up with the vision and strategy.
Overall strategy: fine. Vision: fine. Feature-by-feature product definition? Not so much. If you, as CEO, want to do that, great--just don't go out and hire product management professionals. They'll have nothing to do, with you doing their job for them. They'll eventually leave out of boredom and/or frustration.
I suspect we're mostly in agreement. Going through and defining every single feature is micromanagement. However, product direction, feature set, and covering user acquisition plans and retention strategy are places where the CEO (a primary stakeholder) must have input and override where necessary; I see that as non-negotiable. There's certainly a balance that must be struck somewhere between the CEO micromanaging all the decisions and the product managers operating in a vacuum.
When you're running a 500+ person company, you're not going to go into the code and start optimizing the graph traversal algorithm--you hired smart engineers to do this. You're not going to fire up Illustrator and start drawing buttons--you have artists for this. You're not going to write the company blog yourself, or fix the automated test systems yourself, or design the marketing materials yourself. So why do you feel the need to over-ride your product managers on product direction, feature set, user acquisition plans, retention strategy, etc? Doing so de-motivates the professionals you have whose job is to do these awesomely.