The principle here is simple: Balance your leadership contribution to the People, Product, and Process while keeping your eyes on the horizon. We are going to start this outsmarticle with a negative contrast. It drives home with clarity how simple this principle is, and how damaging it is to ignore. Consider a newly-promoted CTO. He is in his early thirties, …
Ever applied for a Product Management role because you love the Domain, even if the Product needs are not quite a perfect fit? Ever sought to fill a role where you need robust Product Leadership, and don’t really care about Domain Expertise? Graphing Domain Expertise vs. Product Expertise helps clarify the needs for a given role, and conversely to understand …
I once worked for a very large retail client located outside the mainstream tech talent pool. As I brought with me experience from Amazon and a variety of companies in the Bay Area, I had a unique perspective to add to the mix of leadership that for the most part had come up within the company with little outside influence. One of …
Let’s face it, defining org structures is difficult. Reorgs are an iceberg problem; They appear simple at first but get massively more complex as you dive deeper. There are many choices: Should we be hierarchical, or matrix, or a super-sexy hybrid approach? Should we build two-pizza teams like Amazon? They optimize for different outcomes: Do we want tight control and high leverage, …