(2024-12-10) Cagan Founder Style Leadership

Martin Cagan: Founder-Style Leadership. At this point, many people have heard about, and/or shared their thoughts on the “founder mode” discussion kicked off by the Paul Graham essay. I weighed in on this myself earlier in the article Coaching Founder Mode.

I’m convinced that most people have been missing the real point of this critically important topic.

The foundation of the product model is empowered product teams. Most people I meet understand this. But what they don’t always understand is that empowered teams require a specific type of leadership.

So the purpose of this article is to discuss the question of “what is this specific type of better leadership, and why is it that founders so often have an advantage?”

The word “mode” is not ideal. It implies it’s something that can be turned on or off, depending on the circumstances. But I think what we’re really talking about is a style of leadership, as practiced by the most effective founders and other product leaders.

this founder-style leadership is absolutely critical not just to successful startups, but also to successful scaleups, and especially to enterprise scale success

Third, startups often have two or more founders, but this entire discussion is especially relevant to the product founder.

The Problems of Professional Management

*The problems of micro-management are well known, and have been known since forever.

But the problems of so-called “professional management” (sometimes referred to as “delegation-based management” or “laissez-faire management”) are much less widely known, and continue to damage or even destroy promising product companies.*

strong product companies understand that it’s easier to train an expert to manage well, than to train a manager to be an expert.

At Apple, that learning turned into the foundational leadership principle: experts lead experts. You will find a very similar principle at all the top product model companies.

There are two different situations, and we need to talk about each.

Founder-Style Leadership at Startups

They had a front row seat to every learning. The mistakes that were made were very likely theirs, but they benefited by learning from them

The result of all this learning is that they have developed what we call product sense.

if you show me a startup that has achieved product/market fit, I’ll show you a product founder that has developed this product sense.

So can you imagine what happens to a company if this person leaves? Or if this person thinks that in order to grow and scale they have to back off and let people figure things out for themselves?

But then what does that strong founder do when the company grows to the point where a single product person is not able to play the necessary role the product teams need?

funding, finance, marketing, sales, operations, and more also make very real demands on the founder’s time.

The product founder can sometimes buy some time by hiring a COO style operating partner –

for product founders to truly scale, they need to learn a critical skill: coaching.

The product sense expertise is still essential – but now it’s all about scaling that expertise.

Consider Amazon, Apple and Google. I would argue that in all three companies, they strive for founder-style leadership, and this is not an accident:

I’d encourage you to read each company’s full set of leadership principles, but pay particular attention to the importance of product sense

Then contrast this with the idea of a “professional manager” coming in to lead a team or an organization but without the foundation of actual product sense.

So what to do if you’re new to a company, or you’re coming from a role or part of the company where you do not have the expertise of the people that work for you?

Your goal is to develop real product sense, and to develop your coaching skills.

Once you have a solid foundation of expertise, so long as you understand your goal is to help develop others, rather than to micro-manage them, or try to do all of the work yourself, you will most likely find good results.

Founder-Style Leadership = Product Sense + Coaching

It is this powerful combination of product sense and commitment to spreading this knowledge through coaching that provides empowered product teams with the strategic context and support they need to solve hard problems for their customers in ways that customers love, yet work for the business.