Tom Verrilli: evaluation

Transcript context

…Awesome. So a couple things you've learned here for building, and I think in consumer, this is especially important, is counterintuitively to how maybe people think things should work, you're finding that the best teams, companies, products end up coming from top-down, founder-led, almost micromanagement is a dirty word to a lot of people, but it's basically being in the weeds is, in spite of how people may feel, this actually ends up being leading to better stuff, better [inaudible 00:55:56]. Top-down works well if leadership is good enough to be in the weeds and be specifically correct. I think where it falls apart is where you don't actually know ground truth and then you attempt to manage people from above. And that's where I think the term micromanagement comes from. Otherwise, if you're working from the same data and you have it, I don't know a junior engineer or an entry-level designer who isn't stoked to sit there and work alongside the CPO or the CEO and ship something because you're just unblocked. There's no alignment meetings, there's nothing to do. I also find that you can give way better feedback if you're literally in the detail. And I think the nuance is just like, how do you make sure you can do that in enough places? There's never been a better time to attempt to be in the detail on things because you can literally query it in real time. I think that's such an important nuance here. The story told is so powerful, this idea of Grant just, okay, I'm going to clear my day. I'm going to spend time going deep on this stuff. That feels like a very necessary ingredient for someone at the top to be making micro decisions. Because to your point, if they don't have all the details, they're not making a decision out of real data.…

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