Noah Weiss: belief

Transcript context

…Okay. Speaking of Foursquare, Dennis Crowley was the CEO and founder, a very strong product-minded founder. I know you've worked with a number of very strong product-minded founders including Stewart Butterfield, Dennis, obviously we just talked about, maybe others. I'm curious what you've learned as a product leader working with very opinionated founders. I think this is interesting not just as a product leader working with very product-minded CEOs, but also as a first PM at a startup you're often put in this tough spot of just the founders just telling you what to do and you have to go build it versus having a lot of say in agency. I'm curious what you've learned about working and being successful in that position, which is often really hard. I would say to folks in general, if you're joining company and the CEO does the role that is your functional area of expertise, it's probably the area where you'll learn the most because they're hopefully world class at it. But also, one will you'll be the most frustrated at times because you're going to feel like you have less agency. You should just know that going into it. If you go to company to run by a former marketer and you're in marketing, they'll probably want to have a lot of say and influence over that. I think just going into knowing that is good. Looking back, I would say probably two main things stand out of what's really worked with both Dennis and Stewart, not just for me but I think for the teams that work with him as well. The first is, I think as much as possible, I think maybe we'll talk about this a little bit later as well, is getting to the point where you have alignment on the principles for what it means to build a great product of that company. Not just about if the intuition and tasting gut, but how do you distill that to principles that become the language of the company so that everybody else can start thinking through a similar frame or similar lens when you're designing a product. Because otherwise it can feel a little bit Goldilocks every time a team builds something, they take it to the CEO. CEO is like, "No, not quite right. Again, no, not exactly that." Then you don't have the language to actually have a more constructive review. Then doing that at the little strategy as well. I think the product founder CEO is always going to be the holder of the vision for the company. I'm sure at Airbnb. I imagine Brian was very much like that as well. Absolutely.…

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