Noah Weiss: belief

Transcript context

…Absolutely. I think it's actually great to say, "Okay. The overall vision for the company, is it the responsibility of any one team to have everyone buy into that vision, but then to have space for teams to be able to actually do creative work, do explorations because you know that it's aligned with that high level vision." If you can get that alignment and you can get those principles as the common language of what creative software looks like, I think you can have a really good working relationship. Then the other bit I would just say is I think when to involve the founder CEO in a project is really important. The short version I think that works the best is almost like a U-curve where the X-axis is time and the Y-axis is level of involvement. I think you want to get the founder CEO really involved early on, especially if it's a big new project, to make sure that there's strategic buy-in that you agree on the principle strategy and approaching you agree on the goals and the anti-goals, getting that to then the team can run and explore. Then I think at the very end you want them to really be bought in that did you build something that's up to the quality ... the company? Is this something that's going to customers, literally taste the soup. What's missing in it? I think at most companies that have a maniacally customer-focused founder, if you don't do that last step, it's going to be much more painful after you launch because they weren't part of that co-creation of the team. I think that formula winds up working pretty well if you throw in that alignment on principles and envision. That usually sounds nice in theory, but I often imagine you get to that final step and the founder is like, "What the hell is this? This is not at all what I was hoping it be." Is there an example of that, that comes to mind where you maybe went through that and then it's just like, "No. That did not work out the way we expected" and if not, no problem.…

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