Give people real ownership, not fake accountability

How do I get the job to fit the person as opposed to trying to find the person to fit the job? Because when you find good people, it's like, yeah, they fit, but they're just not perfect. And then you let them go. And the reality is what you probably want to do is actually find a way to get that person in and figure out how to actually reshape the job to fit that person.

Product owners are central to the company and its growth. They are end-to-end responsible for the product, for this part of the business, and for their customers to be happy.

Our culture is a very producty culture. Because we had this sprawling strategy, we needed a complex structure for it and that included lots of PMs that we gave a lot of autonomy to. And so the product of our big messy strategy was that we had PMs that got to act like mini CEOs.

The universe is bendable to your will. Organizations are very fluid and I like to organize around talented motivated individuals.

We have these fully cross-functional teams, meaning they're staffed with all necessary functions, engineers data, analysts, designers, operational managers and so on. And product owner is always the line manager for everyone on the team.

What we try to do is you don't actually have to have that many levels, but people can just already, when they start, they can start owning more areas. And I think that can be much more also interesting, not to everyone, but I think interesting to many people.

The worst thing that you can do is to say, 'I'm going to do product-led growth,' or, 'I'm going to do product-led sales and I'm going to do it in marketing.' Recipe for disaster. You'll be failure mode within six months because product has to take accountability over selling of the product itself.

What are you holding them accountable to? Are you holding the product manager accountable to elevating these strategic insights so that they are going to elevate it to everyone else and then everyone else is going to go out there and build thing and drive the value or are you holding them accountable to truly understanding the customer in whatever way possible?