# Scaling Product Leadership Through Strategic Delegation

**Podcast:** All Things Product with Teresa and Petra
**Published:** 2026-02-17

## Transcript

Hi, folks.
This is All Things Product with Petra Wille.
And Teresa, of course.
And we're so happy you're here.
Hi, Petra.
Hi, Teresa.
I wanted to dig into a topic that I know is probably near and dear to you, just around support for leaders.
So I think we're in a time period where we're seeing headcount reduced in a lot of tech companies.
We're seeing generative AI disrupt everything.
From roadmaps to how we work day to day to just the pace of change is insane.
On top of all of that, we're in weird economic times and weird geopolitical times.
And I know that I talk to a lot of leaders that are just really overwhelmed.
And I'm curious, because you do a lot of product leadership coaching, I imagine you have thoughts on what leaders should be putting in place to have support through all of this.
Ah, yeah, that's a good question.
Yeah, maybe my observations, as always, are based on the product leaders that I'm working with and the product leaders that I'm talking to, the questions that I get online, all these kind of things, right?
So it's still my personal sample size.
But what I observe...
from the outside is that for whatever reason, it's hard for product leaders to scale themselves to some extent.
So it's hard for them to set up a support network around them.
So for example, it's super rare that the CPOs and head of products that I coach do have an executive assistant.
If their title is chief product officer, they are part of the leadership team of the entire organization and company, right?
It's not a coincidence that they called the chief product officer.
So there are not so many of them.
And when we look at their peers, it's most...
likely the case that the ceo has a personal assistant and the cfo has its personal assistant sometimes not not a full-time resource or not a few yeah it could be shared yeah it could be shared shared person on the team but it's rare that the product leaders are having that and this is for example one thing that i always challenge then in the coaching session and say like why is it that there is not Three hours of support or even six hours would be better than none or something like that.
Just somebody who's on top of your calendar or somebody who's on top of your email inbox and is doing a bit of pre-filtering and stuff like that.
So that is the first thing that I always encourage product leaders to at least think about.
More often, their personal limitation and their personal, I don't know, I'm in product, I can do it all.
I need to be on top of all the things anyways.
And I think it comes a lot from this, the product person being.
the single product person on the whole product development team.
So it's rare that there's more than one product person on a product development team and working on a product, right?
Sometimes, yes, but then there is another team attached to them.
So they are so used to be on top of things and they're so used to do it all themselves that they just have never thought about getting help from an assistant, for example.
So that is one thing.
And then there are similar functions or support functions that sometimes really do help unblock product leaders.
One, for example, if you are about to come up with a new product strategy and you really need to look at the market, at the trend, what the industry currently does, what technology demands, all these kind of things, what your competitors do.
Then it's a big research project.
That's a big strategy discovery project.
And then I think it does make sense to at least consider getting some help by a researcher just for your strategy initiative.
or from a data person, right?
Who is good at number crunching, who can do a bit of research.
And sometimes it could be on your company internal data.
So it's product KPIs and dashboards that then go through and see, is there any strategic insight in all of the data that we have?
Or it could be looking outside of the organization, maybe buying studies and looking at this macro trend studies that always come out.
The age of AI, what is happening in 2026, right?
All of them will be in our inboxes soon, I assume.
But you don't have to do all the heavy lifting yourself in a product leadership position.
So I think this data slash research capability does make sense on the team.
Does this need to be a full-time person?
Does this need to be a standing, dedicated role in your product leadership team?
That is something I don't know.
That really depends on the size of your org and your company and yada, yada, yada.
But that's definitely another thing that comes to mind when I think about supporting.
product leaders and then of course a coach could help to gain more clarity on certain things it could be sometimes a shortcut on particular topics so for example you need to deliver an important you made your strategy it's amazing you have an amazing story around your strategy but now you need to go on this tour within the organization to present it and to inspire people and maybe your public speaking is not where it should be then there could be something like a public speaking coach or In general, a leadership coach, all these coaching functions is definitely a thing.
Some people struggle to hold themselves accountable or to push themselves to finish a particular task or something like that.
Even that is something where a coach could help.
And then what else is...
I am communities of practice.
You know, that's one of my favorite topics as well.
But it does help leaders as well, because if there is an active product community of practice, they, for example, could help you with onboarding, sometimes interview of candidates.
You don't have to do all of that yourself as well.
At least pre-qualification could be done by you.
active community members, the most senior people on your team.
They could help you write role descriptions.
If that is something that your organization is missing, at least they could come up with the first version of it.
So all these kind of things could live in your community of product practice, I would say.
So that's another function that I think is worth considering if you struggle with your time management in a product leadership role.
So it's more like...
you are a pro athlete.
So you're no longer just like one person on a bigger team, right?
So you're now the CPO of this organization and there's one of you.
So it does make sense to think about how can I scale my impact without having even more stuff on my calendar?
Is there anything that you observe being particularly helpful?
Or what comes up in conversations that you're having?
I like this topic a lot because I think...
Especially in product, and I think also we see this in engineering as well.
And then I think design probably has similar symptoms.
And I think it's grounded in the fact that we historically have thought of technology as IT.
It's a cost center.
I think these organizations, the leaders in the organizations tend to put their teams first.
So if they have professional development budget, they're going to spend it on their team, not on themselves.
If they need logistical, tactical day-to-day help, they're going to help their teams, not themselves.
So when we talk about things like executive administration help, things like that, it's not the first thing that comes to mind.
It's not very common in organizations.
It might be common in the C-suite, but it's not common even in the C-suite for product design and engineering roles.
But I think what is at the heart of all four things that you suggested is this idea of, and I love your professional athlete analogy, this idea of like, as you become busier, it's more and more important that you focus on the things that you can uniquely do.
And so, like, you won't be able to do all the things every day.
It's just like, that's a fact.
There's more things to do than you could possibly do.
So if that's a given, then...
What are the things that you can uniquely do?
Because that's where you add the most value to the organization.
And then what are the things that you should be delegating to somebody else?
And so like going through the 400 emails you get every day from vendors that have nothing to do with how you deliver value to the organization is probably not where you're going to add most value.
And so I would reframe this a little bit.
I think all four of the things that you mentioned.
I would as a leader to help make it more palatable that like you should be asking for help you should be putting this support system in place is you're thinking think about it as like how do I spend more of my time offering the value that I uniquely bring to this organization and how do I spend as little time as possible doing things that somebody else could be doing because I think as you As you like move up in an organization, you're getting pulled in more directions, you're in more meetings, but you're also being asked to do way more.
And so I think protecting that and getting really good at those two things becomes critical.
Yeah.
And doubling down on the protecting sometimes.
It's just easier if you have somebody like an executive assistant helping you to protect your priorities, right?
Because then there is another person reinforcing the boundaries that you set.
And in particular, the people that struggle with saying no, this is such a helpful tactic to have somebody.
else saying no on your behalf to some extent.
And that's another upside of having somebody at least for a few hours on your calendar, on your team, on your inbox to say to other folks like, no, that's currently not what she's prioritizing.
Or yeah, I put it on her list and to review it for in a month or something like that.
That does help in a leadership role, especially for the folks who struggle with saying no.
i also think like this is where a coach helps a ton too because a coach can help you identify what are the things that unique you uniquely bring what are the things that other people can take off your plate and then i also think this is where a community of practice helps too because connecting with peers helps you see one even what you do uniquely compared to your peers Yeah.
But also what your peers are doing and what your peers are learning to delegate so that you're not just figuring it out on your own, because we, this is a pattern that's been repeated a hundred thousand times.
You don't, a million times, probably like you don't have to figure it all out on your own.
Yeah, no, I did.
Yeah, go ahead.
Oh, go ahead.
I just wanted to say that if we have this in coaching conversations, we oftentimes find this one or two things that the product leader.
really does not want to delegate because they enjoy doing it, even if it's kind of really kind, a bit of busy work.
Some like the number crunching, other like the calendar Tetris.
And so I'm not advising people to get rid of all of these stuff because there is a bit of beauty in the things that kind of...
keep you busy and you feel i have done so much today so i've really i'm closed all these tasks so i looked at all these numbers or i came up with a new dashboard so if you enjoy some of that hands-on work still you can keep it but in general i agree with what you said teresa so what is the value that you uniquely can bring to the table in the organization for your team and then really critically look at the rest.
And if you love it, then keep it.
And if you don't, then maybe somebody else could actually be doing it.
Yeah.
And I think another obstacle here.
So first of all, I love that.
You don't have to give away all the things you love, even if it's not your highest value thing, because you still have to be a happy human.
But I think there's a second part to this, which is for leaders in particular, they feel responsible.
And oftentimes when we feel responsible, we feel like we have to do it ourselves to get the quality that we want.
And so then it's hard to delegate.
And there's a phrase that I read in a book that I absolutely love that I keep in the back of my head all the time because I struggle with delegating.
And it's by Dan Martell.
I forget the name of the book it's from, but I'll find it and we'll put it in the show notes.
The phrase is 80% done by someone else is 100% awesome.
So it's this idea.
Yeah, it's this idea of like...
Well, if I did it, it would be 100%.
And if I give it to somebody else, it's only going to be 80%.
And I don't like that.
Like, it's uncomfortable.
I want it to be 100%.
But because it was done by somebody else, it's 100% awesome.
And I love that framing because it forces yourself to start asking, like, do I really need this to be 100% or do I really just need it off my plate?
Yeah, and you could then still decide, okay, it's not...
100% and I put in the work to bring it to 100%, but you didn't need to do the first 80%, right?
Or oftentimes you're then like, nah, you know, it's good enough.
Just let me send this email or yeah, accept that dashboard numbers, figure, research report, whatever.
And then there's one other thing I want to add to this, which is we're living in a time period where I can imagine a lot of leaders are listening to this and they're like, yeah, but I don't need an admin.
I can just have AI do it.
And I think there's some truth to that.
Like a lot of people, even myself, I'm building like an AI personal assistant.
Turns out I also have a human personal assistant.
And I think the value of delegating to somebody else, you can even delegate some of that AI workflow building.
Like you don't have to do it all yourself, right?
And having another human that can just look and say, let me take this off your plate.
And I was really lucky.
I actually had this as a first-time CEO.
So in late, like 2008, I became a startup CEO of somebody else's company.
I had never worked with an admin before.
We had an office manager who was also my admin.
she was amazing.
She basically taught me how to use an admin.
She basically was like, Teresa, stop.
Let me do this for you.
And what's great is I ended up hiring her later in my own business.
So she was my admin for Product Talk for many, many years.
And she had a great personality.
She understood I wasn't used to working with an admin.
I didn't know how to use an admin.
And she just really helped me see that these are things that she can do that I don't need to do anymore.
And so that's the other thing.
Like, yes, AI can do a lot of this, but I think there's still a huge value because you don't know what you don't know.
So there's a huge value in bringing in somebody that can help you with it.
Yeah, I just realized that it makes maybe make sense to add a few words on that as well.
Because again, that's where the coaches can come into play or go to a meetup.
for product leaders whatever it is but you should have conversations with peers or people who have seen it before and done it before or a mentor or more senior person on on your organization to say like hey i'm really struggling i consider to enter whatever role i talked about um the ea the data person the research person whatever um what has helped you in the past to delegate stuff to these kind of functions what has worked what has not worked you could still have the conversation with ai what they think would work um so leverage that but um i think as as you were saying you don't know what you don't know so how should you explore use cases for delegation and that could be one thing pick other people's brains i think that that's a good starting point i agree yeah absolutely all right this has been great thanks petra yeah Thanks for asking Teresa.