This Week #2: Tackling the chicken-and-egg problem, building a growth team from scratch, and addressing overlap with PM peers 🤔
Sep 2019
When role overlap creates tension, don't negotiate based on current reality. Instead, work backward from what the ideal organizational structure should be as you scale—what skillsets should each role require? What's the career progression? This reframes the conversation from territorial to strategic.
Related
Ideas from across Lenny's archive that connect to this one
This Week #2: Tackling the chicken-and-egg problem, building a growth team from scratch, and addressing overlap with PM peers 🤔
Sep 2019Organizational friction around overlapping roles rarely resolves organically. These issues compound over time and require active management—either direct conversation with the peer, escalation to managers, or structural changes like title or team reassignment.
What Seven Years at Airbnb Taught Me About Building a Business
Jun 2019As you move up in leadership, the most critical product to get right is how you organize people. Structure determines whether teams move autonomously toward goals or get trapped in dependencies. Org design is either a force multiplier or a hidden tax on everything you build.
April Dunford on product positioning, segmentation, and optimizing your sales process
Jun 2022Weak positioning often stems from misalignment across the organization—founder, marketing, sales, product, and customer success all have slightly different understandings. The only way to fix it is to get all these functions in a room together to build positioning collaboratively, ensuring everyone leaves singing the same song.
This Week #1: Must reads on growth, what PMs should focus on when joining a new team, and the value of an MBA
Sep 2019Before developing strategy, ensure everyone knows what they should be doing, unnecessary meetings are eliminated, blockers are addressed quickly, and deadlines are clear. You can't build a compelling vision on top of a chaotic foundation.
This Week #2: Tackling the chicken-and-egg problem, building a growth team from scratch, and addressing overlap with PM peers 🤔
Sep 2019Don't wait for all details to be worked out before making organizational changes—this can take months or years. Identify the biggest issues, align on a few key improvements, and implement them while continuing to refine.
Import your highlights, and we'll find the connections you've been missing.