Building a culture of 100% team empowerment is dangerous. Commercial realities mean top-down directives are inevitable. If the organization isn't culturally prepared for this, it will grind to a halt when that moment arrives, causing widespread dissatisfaction.
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Effective delegation of decision-making authority is impossible without first ensuring leaders are deeply aligned on organizational objectives. When individuals are empowered to make choices but pull in different directions, the result is a quagmire, not progress. Alignment must precede autonomy.
Amplitude's CEO describes the painful transition from founder (running to the hardest problem) to large-company executive. The latter role requires embracing hierarchy, saying "no" to most things, and managing through leverage rather than direct contribution—a skill set many founders resist and fail to learn.
When leaders ask for input but have already decided on the outcome, it creates a 'charade' of empowerment. This practice is incredibly demotivating for team members who believe they have genuine autonomy, only to find out their work was irrelevant.
The core job of a Product Manager is not writing specs or talking to press; it's a leadership role. Success means getting a product to market that wins. This requires influencing engineering, marketing, and sales without any formal authority, making it the ultimate training ground for real leadership.
Pendo's CPO warns that scaling isn't just about replicating processes for more teams. Leaders must simultaneously build coordination systems (design reviews, clear communication) while fighting to maintain the "maniacal focus on the customer" and rapid innovation that characterize small teams.
A key, often overlooked, function of leaders in high-growth groups is to act as a shield against internal company interference. This allows their teams to focus on innovation and execution rather than navigating organizational friction, which is a primary driver of top talent attrition.
In a truly product-led company, the product organization must accept ultimate accountability for business-wide challenges. Issues in sales, marketing, or customer success are not separate functional problems; they are reflections of the product's shortcomings, requiring product leaders to take ownership beyond their immediate domain.
Product leaders often try to implement agile best practices within their team, but fail because the surrounding organization still operates on a project-based model. The rest of the company treats the product team like a feature factory, handing over requests and demanding deadlines, creating immense internal friction.
As companies grow from 30 to 200 people, they naturally become slower. A CEO's critical role is to rebuild the company's operating model, deliberately balancing bottom-up culture with top-down strategic planning to regain speed and ensure everyone is aligned.
Contrary to the popular bottoms-up startup ethos, a top-down approach is crucial for speed in a large organization. It prevents fragmentation that arises from hundreds of teams pursuing separate initiatives, aligning everyone towards unified missions for faster, more coherent progress.
