Founder Style Leadership: The Key to Empowered Product Teams
Marty Cagan opened the 2025 Product at Heart conference with a keynote on Founder Style Leadership – a leadership approach particularly effective for those leading product organizations. He emphasized its importance in today’s context. While a few years ago, his talks were often focussed on distinguishing the role of the Product Manager from that of the Product Owner, he now sees a different gap in Europe: a lack of strong product leadership.
Why is it so crucial to focus on leadership as the path to empowered product teams? In short, because leaders are accountable for the following core dimensions of a product organization:
Product vision
Aggregation of key customer and data Learnings
Product strategy
Empowering of product teams with problems to solve
Development of skills within the team
Aligning teams
Team topologies
Staffing
If these fundamental factors are flawed or not actively worked on, individual contributors will have a hard time driving change toward more empowerment. So, we understand why it’s hard for a company without these building blocks to empower product teams. But what makes overcoming these challenges so difficult?
According to Marty, it’s not a question of the right process – it’s a question of culture. Both company culture and country culture need to change to pave the way for more empowered product organizations in Europe. What we need here is a stronger culture of product leadership.
Tech Bros and Micro Managers are not the Solution
But what does good leadership in tech look like? As stated by Marty, it’s definitely not about being a macho tech bro – in fact, he explicitly states that it is not. It is also – as most of us are well aware – not micromanagement. But why is micromanagement a problem in the first place? Marty cites some of the greats of our profession. For example, we hear from Apple, whose current Director of Engineering, Michael Lopp, states, “As an engineer, nothing ticks me off more than micromanagement. I never want to tell people what to do, because I never want to be told what to do”. This culture goes back to Steve Jobs, who famously reiterated a point that the legendary Silicon Valley coach Bill Campbell often made: “We don’t hire all these engineers in order to tell them what to build; we hire them to show us what’s possible.”
Don’t Expect Help from Management ‘Bozos’
So we get it. Good management is not micromanagement. But what is it? As asserted by Marty, many European companies still follow a culture of ‘professional management’ that focuses heavily on processes. People in these roles often lack experience in the actual craft they’re managing. We’re talking about engineering managers with an MBA but no hands-on engineering experience, or heads of product who have never actually been product managers. Marty again quotes industry voices to underline why this is a problem. Steve Jobs, for example, called the managers taking over Apple in 1983 “Bozos,” and Sam Corcos, CEO of Levels, stated that they outright stopped hiring so-called professional managers. The problem with them is that they can’t really manage – because if you look at the list of responsibilities Marty outlined earlier, it’s hard to imagine someone without craft skills being able to handle them. So while professional managers may be good at defining processes, in Marty’s view, this amounts to a form of under-management.
“To empower product teams, you don’t need less leadership – you need better leadership.”
…in a tongue-in-cheek move, Marty quotes himself on one of his slides. But what does that look like? That’s where the concept of founder style leadership comes into play – which, as he explains, is the product of product sense + coaching. But wait, what does that mean? He unpacks the two terms as follows.
Product sense combines empathy for users and stakeholders with creativity and critical thinking. Founders are special in this regard because:
1 - By definition they have been there, since the beginning of a company
2 - They created the initial product vision and evangelized a ton of people
3 - They were there for many customer interactions and experiments
4 - They’re deeply immersed in their market and industry, which brings a lot of context knowledge
These activities ensure that founders develop a strong product sense, which enables them to be effective leaders. Granted – Marty points out – not every founder is fun to work for. His estimate: about 90% are great, while 10% are jerks. But we’re talking about the great ones here.
So why are great founders so often great leaders? In other words: what does founder style leadership really mean? According to Marty, the strong product sense founders have allows them to lead in ways that so-called professional managers simply cannot:
1 - Assign problems to solve, and discuss desired outcomes
2 - Ask intentional questions, expect solid answers
3 - When necessary, coach on how to come up with answers
4 - Empower teams, but ensure they have skills to succeed
Now, not everyone is a founder – in fact, most people in product leadership roles aren’t. So what can non-founders do to also develop strong product sense? Marty has a clear answer: act as if you were a founder. Personally engage with customers. Spend time with engineers. Immerse yourself in all available product data. Deeply engage with stakeholders. Consume tons of content about your industry. And if possible, spend time with the original founders of your company – many of them will be happy to teach you what they learned in the early days.
Doing these things consistently will help you develop a product sense so strong that you can move beyond micromanagement or under-management – and become the kind of product leader who leads with founder style.