Anneka Gupta: evaluation

Transcript context

…I really love the point you made, especially about how the founder could be this lever to get things done. When you identify something needs to change, the best way to change that is just have the founder go in there, tell everyone, "Hey, we're going to do this thing differently." It's such like a positive spin on how to leverage founder mode where a founder actually has a lot of power to change that other people in the company don't. Okay, so let's go from the other side. So, I was talking to Nikhyl Singhal who runs the Skip, which is a community you're part of about you. And he said that you're a leader who excels in founder mode, that you operate in founder mode a lot. And so as a product leader, what have you learned about just how to think in founder mode, operate in founder mode, leverage that approach to leading teams, leading product teams? Yeah, I think it's often easy as a leader to say, "I'm not going to roll up my sleeves and get into the details of the business or ask a lot of detailed questions about the business because you want to empower people and make them successful." What I've found is that understanding the details of the business and asking questions and understanding to the utmost extent you can, what's working, what's not, what are the financial goals of the business? Are we on track to get there? How are we making decisions? Getting into that level of depth is super important, and then you can decide as a leader, what do you want to do with that information? So there's a lot of information that I collect about what's happening in the organization, the decisions that we're making that I don't do anything with at a point in time. That's my choice to make, but I want the information because in understanding the depth and what is happening, I can decide where I actually think I need to go in deep and make either very significant course correction or a small course correction. Then the way that I think about how do I bring my team along for that so they don't feel like I'm coming in and stomping all over the work that they're doing or trying to re-adjudicate a decision, one, is how do I get in there early? One of the tactics I use is I ask people to present their strategies for things that I think we may need to do a course correction on, and I have them come in and then I ask them questions and then I make suggestion. And I'm able to do that in a forum where it doesn't feel like I'm coming in and rewriting the entire strategy, but I'm giving them there an opportunity to present their best thinking and then trying to figure out how do I take that and make that better and make them feel like I'm making it better versus stomping all over and dismissing the work that they've done. I pick a strategic set of areas. So I think about what is most important for the business? What's going to kill the business if we don't get right and what are the biggest opportunities for the business that we need to go after regardless of how difficult it is for us to actually execute on that? By doing that, then at least I have clarity in my mind and I can provide clarity to the team about what is most important and rally the troops around making that stuff happen if that is what is essentially right. And I'll have all the context because I've asked all the questions of why this is right for the business, why is this going to help us with increased margins or get better growth or get into a new persona if that's what we're trying to do as an overall organization. So in that example, and I love this tactic, you have your team come in, you ask them, "Tell me what the strategy is for this thing that you're working on." What you've seen work is instead of like, "No, this is broken, this is wrong, this isn't going to work." Your approach is ask questions and hope that they see the flaws or gaps. Is that how-…

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