The shape of leadership
Issue 294: Where do leaders spend their time now?
The leadership role has changed drastically in the past three years. We’ve moved from the blitz scaling era to the scale era of AI. Though managing towards outcomes is still the focus, the way we do it has changed. As organizations figure out how to go from AI-novice to AI-native, it’s important to find new ways of working across various companies and crafts. This results in leaders needing to conduct their own personal discovery.
Let’s look at where areas are de-emphasized and what highlights the new focus area for leaders. Whether you’re in the craft of Growth, Design, Engineering, or Product, we’re all participating in the organizational re-write.
Areas collapsing
In order to know what the focus areas are for leaders in this new era, we must understand what might converge and collapse. This doesn’t mean what changes isn’t important. It means how it’s done and the emphasis changes.
Being the single point of direction and communication
If the majority of your scope was passing down communications from one person to another, you aren’t a leader. You are a line manager like those in production factories. Communication is important, but it’s more bi-directional than ever. With Retrieval and other AI techniques, it’s easier to get a sense of what is going on. I find myself talking to Rovo at work before I ask another human to see if I can get the information I need first.
The era of extreme ownership
Carola Pescio Canale, our leader on Rovo & AI, speaks to this being the time for extreme ownership for everyone. For individual contributors, there are a high expectation and opportunity for agency. The saying, “You can just do things” is not a stretch. The ways of working are going from reviewing proposals of what to fund to reviewing existing evidence to continually fund.
The focus areas for leaders
Upholding craft excellence
If you are a leader of a craft such as Engineering, it’s your primary responsibility to ensure the way the work is done and what gets shipped meets the highest bar possible. It’s always been important, and more important than ever, to manage the work.
The bar itself is moving. When generation is cheap, the scarce resource is taste: the ability to tell what’s actually good from what merely looks good. A team that ships twenty AI-generated components a day but can’t distinguish the two that belong in the product from the eighteen that don’t is not shipping faster. It’s accumulating debt faster. Craft leaders hold the line on that distinction.
Our skills are being re-applied with new capabilities and new tools. Leaders need to be on top of the newest innovations and tools in order to enable the team.
This means using the tools yourself, not just reading about them. A leader who hasn’t built something with the current generation of models is calibrating on stale data, and their sense of what’s hard, what’s trivial, and what’s genuinely novel will be wrong within a quarter. Being on top of the tools is no longer a research task delegated to the most curious IC on the team. It’s a core leadership practice, and it’s what lets you keep setting a credible bar for everyone else.
Clarity of purpose and vision
As software is being re-written and many companies are re-founding themselves, it is difficult to find clarity and stability in a time of much distraction.
Every week brings a new model, a new benchmark, a new competitor, a new framing of what the company should be. Each one feels urgent, and most of them are noise. The leader’s job is to absorb that volatility so the team doesn’t have to. When everything looks like a priority, nothing is, and teams start optimizing for the loudest signal in the room rather than the work that actually compounds.
The role of the leader remains important to ensure the purpose and vision are clear. With priorities changing, it is crucial to set a vision that is enduring through the changes. Leaders must double down on the vital few initiatives that will sustain the change.
A useful test: can your team articulate the vision without quoting you? If the answer is no, the vision isn’t enduring, it’s just recent. Endurance comes from repetition and from pruning. Saying yes to the vital few means saying no to the interesting many, and that work is almost entirely the leader’s to do. Nobody below you has the standing to kill a promising initiative, which is exactly why so many of them survive past their usefulness.
Oversee a portfolio of outcomes
Julie Zhuo said, “You are all managers now,” speaking to agent orchestration and interacting with the new tools. If everyone is now a manager, leaders oversee a portfolio of outcomes.
The unit of leadership work used to be the team. Now it’s the bet. A team is a stable structure you staff and grow over quarters. A bet is a thesis about where value might emerge, and it may need two people for six weeks or ten people for a year. Treating every initiative like a team leads to over-investment in things that should have stayed experiments, and under-investment in the ones that were ready to scale.
First, leaders are constantly placing new bets that don’t scale. This is one of the reasons 70% of my direct reports are individual contributors. The reason to keep things flatter than conventional orgs in the past is because priorities fluctuate in relationship to the bets.
A flatter org is a faster org when the bets are still forming. Layers exist to manage known work, and most of what matters right now isn’t known work yet. Keeping ICs close also means the signal from the frontier reaches you without being filtered through three rounds of synthesis, which is what you need when the ground is moving.
Portfolio management includes initiatives and vision horizons. Leaders have to consider what aspects of capabilities to scale and what to transform. The hardest calls are the ones about existing capabilities. Scaling something that works is satisfying and legible, but transformation is where the compounding happens, and it rarely looks like progress in the quarter you commit to it. A portfolio without at least one uncomfortable transformation bet is probably a portfolio that’s quietly optimizing for the last era.
Fostering ecosystems
As a system designer at heart, the ecosystems must be nurtured, and there are many of them. Leaders must understand the possible paths in partnerships. As products and businesses are being re-written, partnerships become non-deterministic themselves. The question of build or buy becomes asked more frequently in the assets needed for the company. This could be a strategic lever, capability, or talent.
The build-or-buy question used to be an annual exercise. Now it’s a monthly one, and sometimes a weekly one. A capability you would have spent a year developing internally might be available as an API next quarter, and a partner you integrated with this summer might be acquired by a competitor before the year ends. Leaders have to hold the map loosely and redraw it often. The skill is less about picking the right partner and more about structuring relationships that can absorb change without collapsing.
The second ecosystem to foster is what once was systems built for governance. They now need to be transformed into a new shape. Brands and Design Systems are examples of this. Governance systems were built to create consistency across a large surface area, and they worked by constraining what people could do. That logic breaks when the surface area is being generated faster than any central team can review. The new shape of these systems is closer to a substrate than a gate: a set of primitives, defaults, and signals that guide good decisions at the edges without requiring approval at the center. Brands and design systems that survive this transition will be the ones that trade control for leverage.
Recap
Leaders used to be the ones that held the clarity and consistency, but now they need to be more of a source of disruption. I wrote about my three leadership pillars, and conviction is more important than ever.
The instinct in uncertain times is to wait for more data. More data is not coming. The environment is producing signal faster than anyone can synthesize it, and the leaders who wait for clarity before committing will find themselves a year behind the ones who committed without it. Disruption from the top is not recklessness. It’s the recognition that standing still is itself a bet, and usually a losing one. Leaders will need to have the conviction to place bets in a time where there are very few answers or previous playbooks to draw from. This is, in fact, what leadership was to begin with.
The playbook era made leadership look like execution. It wasn’t. The playbooks were scaffolding built on top of earlier conviction, and we mistook the scaffolding for the work. What’s happening now is a return to the actual job: deciding what to do when nobody can tell you whether you’re right, and staying with that decision long enough to find out.