Organizational Design

Product managers are not yet common or well understood in web3 because the 0-1 phase depends more on technical infrastructure, cryptoeconomics, and community than on traditional PM skills.

The PM role varies dramatically across companies along two axes: which skills matter most and how much influence a PM has, with Zynga at the mini-CEO end and Apple at the project-manager end.

Every company should create a small incident response team with a single DRI, full authority to change anything, blown-up OKRs, and daily standups to move fast during a crisis.

At Airbnb there was a very strong correlation between teams that drove significant impact and teams that were organized around outcomes rather than product surface areas.

Wherever the majority of your growth comes from determines who is driving the ship: product-led companies like Dropbox, engineering-led like Stripe, sales-led like Salesforce, or marketing-led like DTC brands.

When pursuing an initiative in an ambiguous area of ownership, communicate your intent and proceed rather than blocking on approval, creating a culture of impact over ownership.

Organizing teams around outcomes rather than features was a critical ingredient in Airbnb's success because it breaks the idea of clean divisions of product surface-area ownership and prevents over-optimizing features that aren't driving impact.

The root cause of nearly all bad planning processes is a lack of understanding of roles -- who is responsible for what, when.

The most important product to get right in a product org is how you organize your people; the ideal is dedicated cross-functional teams with a clear mandate that can move autonomously, and any missing resource or added dependency cuts impact immensely.