Tom Verrilli: belief

Transcript context

…With a very product-minded founder, CPO classically is a very challenging role for people because you're basically this person between a very opinionated founder and the team building it. What have you found works in creating an environment where you are happy in that role? Yeah. Funnily, that's become most of my career. Actually, I've worked for three founders in a row who are all very product-minded and whatnot. I've got two, which is a blessing actually. In general, I try not to double up. If Grant or Logan, our founders are on a thing, probably doesn't need me. What's the advantage of an extra layer? I think jokingly one of the PMs on the team has referred to it as the two dads problem where you've just got two people issuing conflicting instructions, or somebody wants to review and then you do all this work to present it to me, and then you go back and it gets a different thing. So my first thing is if Grant or Logan are on it, I check that they're watching it, they're accountable for it, and I step out. So there'll be long periods of time where fully half my team can be working on something, and I couldn't tell you day-to-day where it is because it's with Grant, it's with Logan, and that's totally fine. I don't have to be across all of the things they're doing. We just need to make sure that there is somebody doing that bar raising. So we spent much time doing that alignment. I think the second one is, ultimately, if you are a product leader in a founder-led company, you have to understand it's not your company, it's theirs. And you just find the right balance of, hey, are you open to feedback on this? Have you made up your mind? Are you open to a push on this? And you just find that rhythm working with folks. Generally speaking, there's a reason that founder-led companies do so well in our industry. The insight required and the kind of customer intuition to make the thing in the first place and work tends to be really important. And then I just view my job as making sure that we've got coverage on the places where our founders are. 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].…

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