What I wish I knew before I led my first product team
I thought leadership would feel like an upgrade. More influence. More say. More control over outcomes. Instead, it felt like a demotion in disguise. Because the moment you lead a product team, you lose the thing that made you good in the first place: direct control over the work.
You can no longer will a good decision into existence through your own hands. You are now responsible for outcomes you do not personally execute, decisions you do not personally make, and judgment calls happening in rooms you are not even in. Nobody prepares you for how disorienting that is.
Here is what I had to learn — slowly, and at some cost:
Your job is no longer to have the best judgment in the room. It's to build a room where good judgment is possible without you.
I made the mistake early on that most new leaders make. I hired talented people, then quietly kept my hands on every decision that mattered — because I still trusted my own judgment more than theirs. What I didn't realize was that I wasn't leading a team. I was managing a group of highly capable people to execute my own thinking.
That doesn't scale. Worse, it doesn't last. The moment I stepped away, the judgment left with me.
Real leadership is not the multiplication of your own judgment through other people's hands. It is the construction of an environment where other people's judgment is trusted enough to be acted on, even when it differs from yours. Even when it's wrong sometimes. Especially then.
I also had to unlearn the instinct to be the smartest person in every meeting. Early on, I thought that was the job. It isn't.
The job is to be the person who asks the question the room hasn't thought to ask yet, and then has the discipline to sit back and let someone else answer it.
The hardest leadership lesson I've learned is this:
Your presence should make good judgment more likely, not more necessary.
If your team can only make the right call when you're in the room, you haven't built a team. You've built a bottleneck with a leadership title.
I don't say any of this with the posture of having mastered it. I say it because I'm still relearning it, every time I catch myself reaching to control a decision I should be trusting someone else to own.
Leadership, I've come to believe, is not about becoming the most capable person in the building. It's about becoming the least necessary one, in the best possible way.
If you lead a team, what's one instinct you've had to unlearn to actually lead well?
