When a top engineer planned to leave to found a startup, Amplitude retained him by giving him autonomy to build his own project (AI Visibility). They offered a safe space to learn "while getting paid" and promised to fund his future venture, turning a potential talent loss into a massive product win.

Companies mistakenly bundle management with authority, forcing top performers onto a management track to gain influence. Separate them. Define management's role as coordination and context-sharing, allowing senior individual contributors to drive decisions without managing people.

When Figma's COO left, CFO Praveer Melwani viewed the operational void not as a crisis, but as a chance to learn. He volunteered for unfamiliar functions like legal and sales ops, accelerating his development by hiring experts and managing areas beyond his experience.

First-time executives lack the baggage of "how things are usually done." This forces them to solve problems from scratch using first principles, which can lead to more innovative, context-specific solutions for the company, as Figma's CFO Praveer Melwani experienced.

Instead of seeking a fully-formed, expensive owner-level thinker, a more practical strategy is to hire a top-tier project-level thinker showing potential. Granting them autonomy and responsibility can cultivate them into the owner you need.

Applovin's CEO believes top performers don't need traditional management like one-on-ones, performance reviews, or structured L&D programs. 'A players' are defined by their curiosity and ability to figure things out independently. Providing process and hand-holding caters to the wrong type of employee.

Lovable prioritizes hiring individuals with extreme passion, high agency, and autonomy—people for whom the work is a core part of their identity. This focus on intrinsic motivation, verified through paid work trials, allows them to build a team that can thrive in chaos and drive initiatives from start to finish without supervision.

A primary motivator for many successful entrepreneurs isn't just the desire to build something new, but a fundamental incompatibility with corporate structure. This craving for autonomy makes entrepreneurship less of a career choice and more of a personal necessity, a powerful 'push' factor away from traditional employment.

At Figma, most executives are in their seat for the first time. This creates a unique advantage: no one can "copy and paste" playbooks from previous roles. It forces first-principles thinking and establishes a shared expectation that every leader will be deep in the details.