# Decoupling Structure From Goals For Agile Leadership

**Podcast:** Product Momentum Podcast
**Published:** 2026-02-17

## Transcript

I love these concept.
I love the challenge of what is the vision of your role?
What is the mission of your role over the next six months?
How does that vision align with maybe like the future of the product that you're that you're working on?
Right?
Is it dire are those directly tied or are they loosely tied?
How does that work?
Oh, that's a good question.
So I think if you're asking I I think they are tied.
Uh and you're asking how how how coupled or tightly tied they are.
This this actually came up recently and it and it and it was a real good clarification for me.
The structure of your team is not always the right structure for what you mean to do next.
It's it's really the structure you created because of other things that were going on previously.
And now you want to move on and maybe you wanna take some aggressive moves and maybe it's it's a bit of a disruption.
And so what do you do?
My sort of sense of it and my aha was you move forward with the goals and you let the structure lag behind.
And you focus on the team on what you help the team organize around the goals to achieve them now.
And then that learning is what helps them figure out what is the right structure for the team moving forward.
And so in that sense, there's always a connection between uh the vision of the product or the or the company or the next level of the company and the role.
How do we make sure that the people that we're kind of tasking with owning that product opportunity um are in position to be motivated, yeah.
Oh, I get it.
I get it.
Okay, sure.
So I think there's a couple of pieces.
The the fur and there's a piece of evangelism of making the case, and then I think there's a piece of co-development, so you have co-ownership.
And so making the case or evangelism.
I think it's it's really important that when you're when you're acting entrepreneurially, you want to actually be also an entrepreneur of ideas.
You want to, you want to pitch your idea, you want to sell it, you want to help people connect the dots.
Why is this the right thing to do right now?
And by taking on that responsibility of evangelism, you can better get people where you need to be or learn that you're off, right?
And we just wrapped with Keith Lucas.
It was an amazing conversation.
It was a masterclass in leadership, a fresh topic for us.
Tell me what you thought.
Love that it was full of practical tips for being a better leader, right?
We talked about how the role of the leaders, job number one, team building.
We talked about the importance of living values as one of the best ways to build a culture.
Um, really great conversation.
We're doing it, we're talking about core skills again.
We're back.
Let's get it.
We are here today with Keith Lucas.
Keith is a startup advisor, author, and builder of high-impact teams who equips leaders with the knowledge, tools, and confidence to build teams that innovate, adapt, and deliver lasting impact.
As the author of Impact, How to Inspire, Align, and Amplify Innovative Teams, he distills years of experience at the intersection of data, storytelling, and strategy into a practical framework that lets leaders move from a player coach role to a true team builder role.
In his advisory work, he helps founders align product, people, and culture to accelerate growth.
Keith, thank you so much for being here today.
Yeah, thank you for having me.
I'm excited to be here.
Right.
You are officially the first rocket scientist that we've had on the podcast.
So uh, you know, we're we're excited about that.
I think also Dan and I, as as parents of young children, we're excited to hear about Roblox.
Every listener uh that has small children hears Roblox and it's like, wait, I should probably pay attention to this one.
So thank you so much for being here today.
And we are also very excited about the topic we want to talk about today because we're gonna deviate from our regularly scheduled AI programming, and we want to talk about leadership today.
So we're really excited to to dive into this topic.
So here's our here's our first question, right?
You started off as a technical leader at Roblox, and you kind of moved into a leadership role.
So, what are some of the biggest mindset shifts that you had to make when moving from this hands-on technical leader role to where you were actually building and leading the product org at Roblox?
Yeah, so the biggest mindset shift for me was moving from this, I would say, chief individual contributor to a chief team builder for my team.
Okay.
So I I I liken this to my approach was like, how do I get everyone on the bus and just like press harder and harder on the gas pedal and do everything I can and try to get us mayor?
And over time, just like people wanted off that bus.
So the real thing is coming to terms with my number one job is team building.
And that was a bit hard for me, not because I didn't recognize it.
But I think like a lot of our weaknesses or failure modes are often driven by something positive.
And in my case, I felt a real commitment to the outcomes.
If you asked me to get something done, either on my own or with a team, I really felt committed to doing that.
But over time, that commitment or focusing solely on that commitment can be can hamper you.
So when you I'm really needing to shift my mindset that number one was building the team.
And a simple trick I use and then I often advise today is when I woke up every day, and the first thought on my mind, is the team on a good path?
Are they unblocked?
Are they inspired?
Are they uh mentally healthy?
Are they all in a good place to have impact?
And then after that, what else can I do to increase the odds of our success and to reduce friction for the team?
So that that little trip mental trick or prioritization really helped cement in the right mindset for me.
We talked about you know new new leaders and the main challenges they face.
And I know like there's a couple arch types, right?
Um, you have the the new leader who you know, they've come out of an individual contributor role and they trend towards want to micromanage every task, everything that's doing, right?
And then you have the flip side, you know, coming in big ideas, but maybe not an attention to detail.
You know, what kind of practices have you uncovered in your experience, you know, going from that senior individual contributor into you know, a team lead to help new leaders kind of find that right direction, find the uh the correct level of autonomy?
Yes.
So so again, I think like these two archetypes.
Again, the hands-on leader who falls into the the dysfunction the team is growing of trying to micromanage at scale, and then you have this visionary, talent-oriented leader who falls into the dysfunction of uh uh having a team that's just doing too many things, and that's a less focus.
Both of these are driven again by positive forces.
One, the hands-on person is trying to get stuff done and being effective, efficient.
And the talent person, from my experience, is really really committed to autonomy and building a team that scales.
So for the for the hands-on leader, the advice I have is to think about creating touch points.
Times like regular cadence of times you get together to talk about progress, understand the learning, and potentially course correct.
And this creates the right kind of trust, trust in the system that you have opportunities to jump in in a healthy way.
And for the other leader, the the visionary and talent-oriented leader, the advice I have is to start thinking about closing loops.
So thinking about how do we go from vision to outcomes, and then working with the team again at in some regular cadence to talk about that connection.
How are we doing?
How's the progress, the learning, and is there any course correction needed?
So the practices are actually the same for both, but the the way you approach it is a little bit different for both based on what values they're coming at it with.
You mentioned early on people trying to get off the bus, right?
Yeah.
You're pressing too hard.
Is that you've at that point when people are trying to get off the bus, that's where you've identified a culture problem.
What what are some of the signs that you've that they that you have a culture problem that you've got to solve as a leader?
I think there's you know, there's different signs depending on what the problem of the culture is.
Okay.
So in in let's say the let's take the get stuff done leader who's sort of devolving into micromanagement.
I think the I think the signs there are that in it ultimately over time is harder to retain people who you might need the most, people who are ownership oriented because people want to feel ownership in the winds that they have.
They want that connection to impact.
And so if you're trying to micromanage at scale, you pull that away from people.
So you might have a retention problem with people who are really ownership oriented and and take initiative.
You might have other issues where you're noticing that you are throttling your growth because if you're micromanaging at scale, you everything has to fit inside your head, and anything that doesn't fit inside your head falls off.
So you you are maybe having scaling issues.
On the other side, the person who is more uh visionary and and and kind of talent oriented and wants the team to uh do all these to to really solve the problems and drive it on their on their own without a lot of engagement.
What happens here is there's I think of it as punching in too many directions.
When I've talked to companies that are organized this way or operating this way, you you can talk to team members who are really committed and love the company, but they'll also talk about chaos or not quite we're doing too much or uh we're not finishing things.
And so that's an example of too much parallelization that can happen when you have underalignment.
And so th those are those are like the failure modes or the signs for those two models.
But there's another one other one I'll throw out there, and that is when you are not building a team that's really high performing.
And some of the signs, Mayor, are you're keeping people around who are not necessarily on a growth track.
They're not they're not growing, or you're keeping people around who are forever on probation or are just all around okay, but not really that inspiring or that impactful.
These can viewing this too much really drives you towards a culture of mediocrity, not performance.
So that that's another failure mode and and sign and those are the signs of that mode.
You're gonna hit upon that last mode that you mentioned.
Um, right?
Cul culture is such an interesting phenomenon in organizations, right?
Because like everybody, yeah, everyone cares deeply about it, but like it it's kind of, you know, just there.
How as leaders do we make sure that culture doesn't go from good to bad kind of abruptly, right?
Like how how do we stay on top of building a positive culture?
But especially in the case you're trying to build that high performing team.
Yeah, so you know, one of the things I've done I did when writing the book is really think about what is culture.
What when I saw it working well, really what is it?
And it's not like the superficial stuff, like having a foo's ball table or stuff like that.
Pizza lunches.
Yeah, pizza lunches.
You know, it could that could reflect some culture, but it's not it's not culture.
So I I think about culture as a team's operating system.
And the foundation of that operating system is the team's values and their standards of behavior.
What what are the behaviors that really pattern match to success on the team?
And what are the behaviors that that don't pattern match or anti-match?
So the values of the team are really the foundation of the operating system.
And so for that to be reinforced, foundationally, values must determine who gets hired, promoted, and retained.
If if that's not happening, then culture is much more what I would call codified, but it's not realized.
A gap between that, what you write down and what you s what actually happens, if it's not driving the people part of it.
The other thing is to hold yourself accountable and ask others to hold you to account on your own behavior.
Because when a leader, we all have gaps.
We're all human, so like what I say is uh most important to me and the kind of person I want to be is not necessarily the person I am all the time.
But the wider the gap, the bigger the dysfunction on the team.
And if the gap is too wide, then you you're you become an inauthentic leader, which will turn off a lot of people.
And also i if if you can't hold yourself to account, it really is hard for any sort of achievement-oriented or a growth-minded person to feel like you're taking the the team seriously.
So these are really the two components.
One one other one that's super critical is just socialization, because values are a are a belief system and retain.
It's holding yourself to account.
And then it's that socialization piece so that values can feed into decision making.
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there.
It's really think back to teams I work with.
I'm curious what your thoughts are.
As leaders, we need to, you know, kind of show the path and model what we want to see.
How do we best empower the individual contributors on the team to also live and demonstrate and uphold those values, right?
And and help, yeah, help grow it organically within the team.
Sure.
So the I think there's when you talk about individual contributors, there's an element to empowering them to live those values, and then there's an element to empowering them for ownership and things like that.
So maybe I'll I'll talk a little bit about both.
So on the on the on the value side, the empowerment is really making the values front and center when people are living them.
One form of empowerment is recognition, is calling out when people are living a value.
So when someone has a win, it might be a technical win, it might be a sales win, it might be some other win, some some achievement on behalf of the team, it really helps to identify what values that person lived in having that win.
And that is part of the empowerment is that it's time to success.
But the other part of empowerment on values is having someone's back.
Is that if they are executing on the values, if they are living those values, and things don't work out, they don't get the win, maybe there's a a miss, misses happen, sales happen.
If they are exhibiting those values and you don't have their back, then that sends another signal that maybe the values don't matter.
So in terms of empowering them on values, it really is about calling out living values when there's a win and having people fat on the values when they're living them and there's not a win.
In terms of ownership, I think there's we can take a break there and see if you have any other questions before I move on to the ownership piece.
Nope.
Keep going to ownership.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So on on the ownership piece, the way I I drive that or I like to think about that, I developed this idea of what I call a vision doc, not a job description.
And a job description can be written from a vision document, but the vision document is first.
And so what the vision document is, and I started out with writing these for executives, and but after they were successful, I wrote them for others.
You write down what is the vision of this role, and what is the vision of this person in this role based on where they are.
Where can they go?
Where does the role mean to go in order for the company to be successful?
What is the mission of the person over the next six months or year?
What are the priorities?
What's the scope?
What are the goals?
And when I would onboard someone, I would uh or even before onboarding, as the last page in the interview, I would present this document to a an executive and let them know that this was their document to rewrite over time.
But here was the initial one.
And it really was clarifying.
It it helped everyone have one step up in terms of their view on what they were doing.
And even when I don't use MAT document, helping help when I coach people and help them think about the vision of where they of their role.
It really does elevate the ownership that they are not just owning a task or owning the project, but they're owning the role on behalf of the team.
And by making that role better, they're taking another way of contributing to the team.
So that vision document, I think is really critical.
I love these concept.
I love the challenge of what is the vision of your role?
What is the mission of your role over the next six months?
How does when we think about going from I own this task or I own this project?
You said I really own this vision.
How does that vision align with maybe like the future of the product that you're that you're working on?
Right?
Is it dire are those directly tied or are they loosely tied?
How does that work?
Oh, that's a good question.
So I think if you're asking, I think they are tied.
Uh, and you're asking how how how coupled or tightly tied they are.
And this actually came up recently and it was a real good clarification for me, is the structure of your team is not always the right structure for what you mean to do next.
It's really the structure you created because of other things that were going on previously.
And now you want to move on, and maybe you want to take some aggressive moves, and maybe it's it's a bit of a disruption.
And so what do you do?
My sort of sense of it and my aha, was you move forward with the goals and you let the structure lag behind.
And you focus on the team on what you help the team organize around the goals to to achieve them now.
And then that learning is what helps them figure out what is the right structure for the team moving forward.
And so in that sense, there's always a connection between the vision of the product or the or the company or the next level of the company and the role, but there could be time lags so that they're not so tightly coupled that every time you want to disrupt what you're doing or move fast to take advantage of an opportunity, you have to have a big re-org.
And then there's going to be a lot of resistance.
So I think it is it is it is coupled.
I think over time it can make may shouldn't be come together, get closer together, but there is a time lag.
This is really resonating with me as the director of product management and at a at a software development agency, right?
So we are working with our partners, right?
Helping them to create new products that are helping them create new products or helping to improve new products that are gonna resonate in market.
So we have like an oblig we have delivery obligations from a contract perspective.
So kind of like some short-term, shorter term, task-driven mission thing, but from a values perspective, we want to work in that consulting capacity, right?
And come up with other ideas or bring other challenges to the to that organization so that they can help solve the right problem at the right time.
You know, in thinking about our context, not trying to get some free advisory work.
No, no, I but thinking about our context, how does that kind of concept of like knowing your mission or knowing your values in the agency world?
How does does that apply differently or no?
I don't think so.
And are are you asking, are you asking a little bit about how that might impact the structure of the of the client or how that might impact your structure?
I think I think let's start with the client or because I think that they're looking for us.
I think they're all ultimately they're looking for us to operate in that consultative mode.
Like they want us to come come through with innovation or identifying problems that maybe they didn't know existed, right?
That are gonna have to solve.
Yeah, so I I do this myself.
So I can tell you from personal experience how I've learned to advise here.
And it's also that what I do now is built on mistakes I made earlier on where I did try to keep the structure and the goals tightly coupled.
And it created bureaucracy and it created a lot of churn that was not needed.
So the way I frame it is that the system has to serve the mission.
The mission can never be subordinate to the system.
And so what I would be doing and what I do is I first advise the company and work with the company on what do they need to be doing, what what are they trying to accomplish, and then how to help them get on track to accomplishing that and that's really front of mind.
And then along the way in learning about how to help them accomplish those goals, I learn about the structure.
I get to understand how the team makes decisions.
I get to understand how it's structured in order to accomplish some things.
And then usually there are recommendations of changing structure over time.
But I always approach those a little more cautiously because of the churn or feeling of disruption that that can cause.
So you want a little more learning before you do it, but I do give feedback on both.
You said something that that that really kind of resonated the idea of focusing on the goals and then building the structure after right because it seems very you know almost 180 degrees away from how we normally operate like hey we're going to build a scaffolding and then we're gonna figure out how to meet the goals.
So that that's really cool.
I mean that's just something I'm gonna take away is like hey we can worry about the actual formal operating model after we figure out how we're going to get where we want to go.
Yeah and do you mind if I just add on to that uh just my own personal anecdote is uh and this is where I mean kind I I wouldn't say I went off the rails when I was bumping up against the rails quite a bit, is we would set out, we would start with what are we like Roblox, for example.
We would start by what are we trying to accomplish?
And we've been thinking about, okay, who do we have that can help lead these different initiatives?
And so at that point, all of that was great.
Like that was like like we started not with momentum, like, oh, and which is I think really important.
We did not start with momentum of, well, we've been doing this, or these teams say they need to do ABC.
It's more what's critical to do now and what are our goals.
And then how do we find owners across the company to lead those initiates?
But what I then tried to do is I was too uncomfortable with the idea that this person over here who reported to so and so had to then go over here and work here.
And then I I really wanted things to make sense on the org chart.
And I think that was just too much because it it reduced our desire to change goals because it meant a reorg.
But now when I advise, I say keep them separate and and have org lazily follow because it will allow you to be much more nimble with goals.
And it seems everybody we talked to about impact always comes back to goals and always tells us to lead with goals.
Right?
Maybe maybe one day we'll learn.
I I know.
I know, I know.
Right.
Uh this has been awesome.
We rare w like it feels like every episode that we've had, we somehow get into a conversation about we'll start on one topic and then we will eventually pivot to how does AI impact us, right?
We've been able to avoid the AI pitfall in this call.
You gave us some amazing feedback on just some free advisory work for us.
And I think that your the way that you look at leadership as a function and like the way that you are supposed to inspire creativity, right?
And not micromanage at scale, uh, is a really fresh look for us.
So I I really appreciate you being here.
Dan, I think you had one or you had one more question.
Uh yeah, I mean, just building off of that that idea of like, yeah, let's not worry about the orator, let's worry about the pe you know, find the people who are best suited to to work on that goal.
Yeah, I think um wrapping up just on this concept of intrinsic motivation, because it right, those seem to go hand in hand.
Yeah, just what what advice do you see that actually moves the needle, both in the startup world but also in larger companies with constraints, you know, for those folks that you're saying, hey Keith, we have a really cool product opportunity here and we want you to go after it.
What advice for going after product opportunities?
Or you mentioned intrinsic motivation Yeah, have well how do yeah, how I mean how how do we make sure that the people that we're kind of tasking with owning that product opportunity are in position to be motivated, yeah.
Oh, I get it.
I get it.
Okay, sure.
So I think there's a couple of pieces.
The the first there's a piece of evangelism of making the case, and then I think there's a piece of co-development, so you have co-ownership.
And so making the case or evangelism.
I think it's it's really important that when you're when you're acting entrepreneurially, you want to actually be also an entrepreneur of ideas.
You want to you want to pitch your idea, you want to sell it, you want to help people connect the dots to why they why is why is this the right thing to do right now?
And by taking on that responsibility of evangelism, you can better get people where you need to be, or learn that you're off, right?
And you can come together and have this shared sense of purpose.
But then the other one is once you have that shared sense of purpose, and maybe as a leader, you also feel like there should be some parameters around this, or you have a little bit of a vision around this, you want to invite the person to come back with how they want to approach this.
What is their approach?
What are what are the goals may be the milestones?
As much as possible of how they're gonna get this done is as much as you can hand off to them, the more they will own it, and that will drive intrinsic motivation.
So they align on purpose.
Then they have that ownership which touches upon autonomy, and then giving them the space can do a a good job.
Even though we all have to move fast, people need to have Miss Place can do a good job or a great job, depending on the situation, or they also won't be intrinsically motivated.
So that's how I would go about it.
And do a micromanagement in the process.
Yeah.
Nice vibe.
Right.
I have some key takeaways from today.
Besides just now I realize that micromanaging at scale is in fact an oxymoron.
Uh right.
This does not work, right?
I love recognizing the signs of culture problems and your advice around that.
I loved the basic know your values, right?
Know the values that you want your team to follow.
And then know the vision of your role and know the mission of your role, even if that's just for the next six months.
Yeah.
Right.
I think that that if we have the if you have values, you have vision, and if you have your mission, right, you have motivated people, right?
Yep.
You're gonna have better outcomes.
That's right.
Tying it all together.
This has been excellent.
Thank you so much for being here.
The last question that we normally ask people, and I know that you are an author, so I hope that your book is on your bookshelf, but what are you reading today?
Oh, I'm going back and I'm reading some of the classics, crossing the chasm.
I'm there's a couple of books that I've read uh a number of times.
On my fiction.
I'm I'm reading the um Master and Commander series.
I'm on I don't know what book twelve of that long twenty book series.
I love that one.
And yeah, I think that books like Drive, Four Steps in the Epiphany, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, all of that, th those kind of books are and and also Simon Sinek's uh Infinite Game, I think these are really have been really amazingly helpful to me.
What what motivated you to kind of go back and and reread and what were some of the what were some of the things that maybe you reread?
Yeah, like like so one of the one of the things is that my learning style is like I really need to read things over and over again to really get it.
Uh really absorb it.
The other one is I'm just a different person's name than I was back then.
And I think that I'm able to digest uh a lot more quickly and maybe in a different way than I was when I was younger.
I think some of those books I read it w I remember the title.
That's it.
So now I have you know, so yeah, so those are those are some of them uh that are on my bookshelf.
I really like that I that idea of I was a different person when I read those books, right?
Yeah, I got some new book recommendations, including for those listening, Impact, How to Inspire, Align, and Amplify Innovative Teams, written by Keith Lucas.
So make sure that you're checking that out.
Yeah.
Keith, thank you so much for being here today.
This has been a very authentic episode.
Thank you again.
Yeah, thank you both.
I've really enjoyed it.
Yeah, it was a fun one.