When Builders Became Bullies

Builders once disrupted the tech world, but now they’re the gatekeepers. As their success made them risk-averse, they see any change as a threat. Today, they’re bullies - ripe for disruption.

This is nothing new - we’ve watched this same story play out across many industries in our lifetime, as well as by empires rising and falling throughout our history.

These days, the empires may be smaller - e.g. products, teams, startups - but the pattern is still the same. If every move needs a meeting and every idea a committee, you’re not short on talent, you’re just tangled in control.

Here's three ways I've found to break out of this:

Cycle Leadership: To avoid entrenched thinking, cycle leadership between projects. This demonstrates both upward mobility as well as the idea that growth is continuous, and nobody is ever done.

Institutionalize Experimentation: Embrace the “how might we” mentality to continuously experiment and iterate. Form hypotheses and find the lowest cost way to validate them.

Subordinate to Metrics: Rather than following people, follow metrics - the measures that prove you’re moving in the right direction. This shifts teams from control towards collaboration, based on a set of values shared by both the market and the team.

As they say, in life the only constant is change. How is your organization tackling it? Are your teams builders, or bullies? I'd love to hear about your challenges and solutions.