“We cannot do this without you” can sound like a compliment to a senior Product person.
It feels good. You know the history. You know the stakeholders. You can spot the bad tradeoff before everyone else. You can get the decision unstuck. You can walk into the messy meeting and make the thing move.
That is valuable. It can also be a warning. If every important decision still requires your presence, the organization may have gained an expert without gaining capability. Seniority should create leverage that survives you.
Heroics are visible. Leverage is quieter.
The senior person who rescues the launch gets noticed. The senior person who creates a system that prevents ten future launches from needing rescue can be harder to see. That is part of the problem. We reward the moment where expertise is consumed more easily than the mechanism that makes expertise reusable. Andy Grove wrote about managerial output as more than the work a manager personally produces. I think the useful part of that idea extends beyond people management. Senior Product work should increase the output and decision quality of the surrounding system, not only the quality of the senior person’s own decisions.
That can happen through people. It can happen through reusable Product capability. It can happen through better decision mechanisms. It can happen through shared context that keeps teams from rediscovering the same truth every quarter.
The important part is transfer.
One of the best leadership ideas I picked up was almost a joke
A mentor of mine once made a comment that stuck with me far more than he probably intended. We had a casual relationship and were talking about people, teams, and leadership. Somewhere in that conversation, he joked that his goal was to coach and grow people so well that eventually he would not have a job anymore. We laughed about it. The idea stayed with me.
His point was not that good leaders should make themselves useless. It was that leadership should create enough capability around you that your value is not measured by how many things collapse when you leave the room. That became a standard I kept coming back to as I grew teams of my own. Can I grow people who make better decisions without me? Can I build leaders who can coach other people? Can the team carry the context, challenge the model, and move the work without waiting for me to interpret everything?
If the answer is no, I may be helping a lot while still concentrating the capability in the wrong place.
Stop becoming the human API
A senior person can accidentally build the organization around themselves.
Every team asks them what the principle means. Every exception needs their interpretation. Every executive update needs their rewrite. Every difficult Product decision comes through them because “they know how this works.”
Then they create documentation. Great. Except everybody still calls them before using it. That is not leverage yet. The document may exist, but the capability has not transferred.
A useful test is simple:
Can a capable person use what you created, make a good decision, and adapt it to a new situation without needing you to translate it every time?
If not, you may have created a dependency with nicer packaging.
Development means ownership changes hands
One leadership pattern I still find useful is some version of: I do. We do. You do. Then I get out of the way.
The labels are not the point. The point is that ownership should move. Early in complicated work, senior involvement may need to be intense. Somebody has to connect the Product logic, the operational reality, the business consequence, and the decisions that are still fuzzy. But the goal cannot be for one senior person to remain the permanent interpreter forever.
Other people need to own pieces of the thinking. They need to challenge the model. They need to explain it to partners. They need to make decisions without waiting for the original person to enter the room.
That is development when it works. Not cloning your judgment. Building more judgment around you.
Reusable capability matters too
The same principle applies to Product mechanisms. A measurement system that requires one person to explain every metric manually is fragile. A journey model that only makes sense inside the original workshop is fragile. A Product vision that disappears when the original storyteller leaves is fragile. The leverage comes when what you built changes what future teams can do.
A shared measurement model can let several teams compare experience more consistently. A journey structure can help teams connect customer and operational evidence that used to live in separate places. A coherent Product direction can become a reference point later teams extend rather than reconstruct from scratch. None of that means the original creator gets to claim every later outcome. Quite the opposite.
The proof is that ownership spreads.
What survives can still become bad
There is an obvious counterargument here. Organizations are full of things that survived their creators and should have died years ago.
Templates. Governance gates. Architecture standards. Approval forms. Scoring models.
A mechanism is not good because it is durable. Durability without adaptability becomes bureaucracy. That gives senior leverage another test:
Does the mechanism help future people exercise judgment, or does it remove judgment from them?
A good standard makes recurring decisions easier while leaving room for context. A bad standard turns yesterday’s answer into tomorrow’s rule. A good framework reduces the amount of thinking people have to reconstruct. A bad framework gives people permission to stop thinking. The goal is not to make your work permanent.
The goal is to make the organization better able to work.
Seniority should increase future capacity
I do not think seniority means becoming less hands-on. Sometimes the most senior person should absolutely get into the details, build the prototype, interrogate the model, write the narrative, or help rescue the decision. The question is what remains afterward. Did somebody learn how to do the work? Did a reusable capability get created?
Did the next decision become easier? Did the team gain context it can carry forward? Did ownership become more distributed instead of more concentrated? That is the leverage test I care about. Look at one recurring thing you personally do well.
Executive narrative. Portfolio judgment. Customer synthesis. Cross-team decision shaping. Coaching. Measurement. Strategy.
Then ask:
What would have to exist for the next capable person to do this without me?
Your seniority is not only in how well you solve the hard problem. It is in what you build so the next hard problem requires less of you.