I've worked under both extremes of product leadership: a CEO who controlled every decision, and a company where the entire executive team was fired and the teams ran themselves. Those experiences taught me that control creates the illusion of efficiency while community creates the reality of it.
Two CEOs, Two Worlds
Early in my career, I worked at a midsize company where the CEO made every major decision. Product redesigns, feature requests, architecture choices, financial models, and strategic pivots all flowed through his desk. He was embedded in everything, creating a bottleneck that paralyzed our entire PM team. We spent countless hours building elaborate justifications for decisions we were probably going to make anyway. Our team felt frustrated, our customers were underserved, and our competitive position weakened month after month.
Later, I worked directly with a CEO who led through influence rather than control. He almost never told people what to do. Instead, he was obsessed with painting the market picture, understanding industry dynamics, talking directly to customers, and building effective teams. When something broke, he didn't dive into tactical details. He examined the team first, asking what was missing or broken in our collaborative processes.
These two experiences were night and day. The command-and-control environment represented one of the lowest periods of my career, while working with the empowering leader became one of the most fulfilling and productive. The difference wasn't just personal satisfaction. The business results spoke for themselves.
When Self-Organization Saved the Day
If I had any remaining doubts about community versus control, they were erased at a company plagued by high turnover and constant kingdom-building. Different leaders battled for influence, pitting PMs against engineering leaders, salespeople against the finance team, and everyone against each other.
The situation reached a crisis point when the board fired the entire executive team after internal conflicts became unsustainable. The board expected to rebuild leadership quickly, but the process took much longer than anticipated. In the meantime, directors and PMs across the company still had jobs to do.
Instead of waiting for new leadership, these teams started working directly with each other. They formed cross-functional councils and collaborative decision-making bodies. They shared roadmaps, business data, technology information, and strategic context. Together, they kept the business running profitably for months without an executive team.
When new leadership was finally brought in, they found an engaged community ready for action. It was one of the strangest experiences of my career, but it proved something I'd already suspected from watching those two CEOs: people can self-organize and solve complex problems effectively when they have common goals and are left to their own devices. The dictator CEO thought he was the engine. The empowering CEO knew the team was. And when the executive team disappeared entirely, the team proved it.