# Beyond Command and Control: Adaptive Leadership for Product Teams

**Podcast:** All Things Product with Teresa and Petra
**Published:** 2026-04-28

## Transcript

Hi folks, this is All Things Product with Petra Wille and Teresa Torres.
And we're so happy you're here.
Petra, I feel like whenever there's uncertainty, which by the way is always, companies tend to like return to what they're most comfortable with, which tends to be command and control structures.
We saw this with like...
Who was it?
The CEO of Spotify talking about how empowered teams didn't work.
We see this with like founder mode and you just got to go back to your founder dictating all the decisions.
And so I wanted to explore with you, when does command and control make sense, if ever?
Oh, that's an easy question that you brought for me today.
Yeah, I might be tolerating it.
In a zero to one situation, but not even then, most likely.
So I think there is historically a tendency to think command and control is basically the serious way of leadership, right?
So that's what's the fastest.
That's what's the quickest.
That's what the military uses, which, by the way, isn't true in large parts, as I learned over the years.
That's what doctors are using when triaging patients and when things are really pressing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So I think that is why some people think it might be a good idea to use more command and control when the sea is rough.
I could say, because it is shortcutting stuff, right?
So then we have one person making the call, one person making the decision.
Maybe we extend it to a few, but these are the ones basically knowing everything they have.
overview of basically all the complexity of the company system, all the complexity of the environment around the organization.
They have all the information because one person can easily hold so much context.
And they are the one in the best position to make decisions.
From my introduction, you could already read into what I think about command and control.
I just haven't seen.
It working on a large scale.
Some people would argue, but there are these super command and control companies where it is working.
They are super successful.
They make a lot of money.
Stock exchange is amazing for them.
My answer to that is usually, well, they oftentimes have very talented people under the hood that are really good in orchestrating teamwork.
because otherwise the organization would not be so successful.
We see a lot of this founder mode theater, for example.
The founder thinks that they're making the call, but they're not making the call.
So that's oftentimes what I see when I'm in organizations that think that they have a pretty hierarchical command and control leadership model.
So, yeah, and I think there are many, many shortcomings of that leadership model.
We could talk about that if you want to.
Yeah.
So I know some companies seem to be successful despite that they're using this command and control leadership model, but I'm not sure if that really is the case in reality.
I have a funny analogy.
Please share it with the old people.
So let's say you're in a house that's burning down, like literally your house is on fire and you have to leave.
Like, maybe it makes sense for one person to take the lead and say, I got the dog, you get the kid, and you rush out the door, right?
But now let's say you have 20 kids and 17 dogs.
Everybody in the family knows there's kids and dogs.
Like, wouldn't it be better if someone says, I got Susie, I got Sam, I got Billy.
rather than one person assigned to all 20 people who they should get and how it's going to happen.
And so then you might say, okay, so in small companies, command and control is okay.
But here's the deal.
Even in a small family, what about the cat?
Like the person commanding forgot about the cat.
Shouldn't somebody be able to grab the cat?
But then six-year-old Bobby will think about the cat and he will take it and carry it out of this burning house, ideally.
And I think like the logical flaw in this command and control at any size is that one person has all the information they need to make all of the decisions.
That is never true.
No.
Even in a tiny company, right?
And so like...
There is a need, especially in urgent situations, which startups feel like they're always in urgent situations, to have a strong leader.
But I don't think strong leadership means command and control.
I think strong leadership means setting direction, setting guardrails, building feedback loops, allowing everybody to contribute their perspective, add their knowledge, but keeping them going.
And I was actually in a board meeting where somebody used this analogy of a flotilla of kayaks okay everybody is independent and goes but somebody is in charge of we're going down this river uh and i actually really love that analogy because i feel like it's a much better metaphor yeah then like we're not all in the same rowboat rowing exactly together where one person decides the direction we all are exploring and that's the benefit but we need to be generally going in the same direction.
Yeah, and let's face it, for example, the Spotify example is a great one because I bet there was amazing, and I know to some extent because Hendrik Niebuhr was there for quite some time, so there has been amazing storytelling.
around what the company does and why we explored that part of the river and not this other part of the river.
And that created a lot of cohesion and clarity and alignment.
And therefore, everybody could play to their talent, which is not given when somebody is in this command and control structure and told what to do, because then it's impossible.
Because that would mean, again, The leader very well understands the talent and the former experience of everybody playing on the team as well.
And that's impossible in a larger organization.
So not only you cannot hold all the context of your organization and your company and the environment you're operating in, in the industry and the macro trends and the micro trends and all these kinds of things, you would also need to be keeping track of.
everybody on your team and what their current skills are and capabilities and talents and strengths and weaknesses and blah.
Impossible.
Yeah.
I also think that like I can hear objection in my brain of like, yeah, but there's plenty of companies that operate this way that are wildly successful.
But I actually think it's misunderstood.
I think this is not, it's a false dichotomy.
It's not that we have command and control.
leaders and then like say empowered product teams on the other side.
I think it's more about a spectrum and where you should be on that spectrum in different moments in time and with different problems and with different teams.
So like people talk about Apple.
So yes, it is true, like especially under Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs, maybe you could argue was a command and control leader.
I would not argue that.
What I would argue is that he set a really high quality bar.
And he set a really strong vision.
Yeah.
Amazing story.
If you look at the amount of exploration and like experimenting and just like the latitude teams had, they had to meet his standard, but right.
And so I think there's degrees.
Now, was he perfect?
Of course not.
I'm sure there were times where he came in and dictated this button is going here.
And that's also why this is a false dichotomy.
Like the same person isn't completely command and control or completely on whatever the opposite of that is.
And I think it's more like the more valuable conversation is which, what model or at what point in the spectrum is the right one for this project, for this moment in time, for this problem, given this environment.
Yeah.
And that's, by the way, something that I often see an organization that would call themselves more command and control, maybe, is that oftentimes teams have a lot of freedom because they earned the trust of the people that have this command and control leadership style to some extent.
under this trust umbrella to some extent and then have a lot more freedom and liberty to experiment and to kind of have your own ideas, maybe even make your own decisions.
And I think that happens a lot in these type of organizations because of leaders in that command and control model, they struggle to hold all the context.
And then the first thing they do is they drop the ball on the teams that they think are on it.
Right.
Because then they stop commanding and controlling those ones because they're just so busy with holding contacts and commanding and controlling the other ones.
And that is oftentimes how these companies become so successful, because there are teams that had a bit of liberty and freedom, and they invented the stuff that then was the next big thing of this organization.
This is actually an argument for what Marty Kagan advocates for, which is like.
Leaders should be coaching their teams and building that trust and like enabling that freedom and that exploration, upskilling so that that works.
Right.
Because I think you're right.
Like probably even in the most command and control cultures, there's still teams that have autonomy that are allowed to go and explore and to run with things and have that trust.
And that's also why I think it's not either or.
It's about when and if.
Yeah.
It's really good that you say like it's a scale.
And it is true.
It's on an individual level.
It's a scale.
So per leader, this is true.
And per organization, this is true as well.
And just to bring in another layer, per culture.
Because I think the culture you're surrounded by.
speaking from a German perspective here, command and control definitely something that we're good at.
And what a lot of leaders are gravitating towards if they're not taught that there are other options, I'd say.
So culture plays a big role in that as well and how quickly people flip the switch and go back to this command and control leadership model.
Yeah, so that's the three layers that I see.
There's also like a leader team match.
So some leaders maybe are going to have a skill like what's their trust level?
Like how likely are they to trust?
How much are they micromanagers?
But you could take that leader.
Let's say that you have someone who's like prone to extreme micromanagement and they manage 10 teams.
My guess is they still have some teams that have more.
uh freedom than other teams and some of that has to do with like the teams learn to manage up they learn to ask the leader like what would you need to see to give to trust me on this task or what would you need to see to let me run with this um and so like a lot of it is that match between the team and the leader and both sides like the leader learning to trust more and the team learning to earn that trust more and then that being this continuous negotiation I have a story for that because I once worked with a team, various retrospectives.
We were optimizing for us to be more efficient, like yada, yada, yada.
And at some point, one of the engineers said like, Petra, can we just like agree on you making the call and we speak up if we don't like the call that you made?
Because we think that will speed us up because you always come discussing basically everything with us.
And more often than not, we would just say like, yeah.
Cool.
Whatever you suggested is cool.
And then that was our modus operandi.
So I basically made all the calls.
I just said like, hey, I'm about to make that decision.
And then the team just said like, nope, go for it.
And did it speed up our decision making?
Hell yes.
Was it a command and control model?
Not because I made the call.
They still had veto rights.
They used it quite often.
But sometimes it was just like not important to discuss this topic again and again and again.
And it really helped us and sped us up.
So I don't think that you cannot have somebody making a call or making a decision, a preliminary decision when you are working in the alternative model on the other end of the scale.
But yeah, I think it's important to have these conversations about decision making and about who do we want to include in decision making and why.
And not every decision needs to be collaborative.
That's exhausting.
Super exhausting.
I think the key, like this comes up a lot in trio work.
So people say like, who make, like, does the product manager always make the decision?
How does this work?
And my answer is always.
you should let the person with the most relevant domain expertise make the decision.
So if you're discussing how the UI should work, the designer probably should make the decision.
And if you're discussing like the underlying data model, maybe your engineer should make that decision.
But I think the key is don't lose the collaborative piece.
If the product manager has input on the data model, the engineer should listen to it.
And if the engineer has feedback on the UI, the designer should listen to it.
I think people mix these up.
Like if people are just stating their preferences, then you should let the person with the expertise make the decision.
If somebody is raising a legitimate concern, the person with the expertise shouldn't let their ego get in the way of acknowledging and integrating that concern.
And that's like the messy human part of this is like, how do you do that well?
And it takes a lot of practice.
It doesn't just happen.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's why it's so hard to default.
to this other model and everybody has heard about the other model and everybody understands this other model, the command and control model, but it's harder to understand how you could operate elsewhere or in other cases.
And therefore it needs more practice and more reflection and more clarity and more collaboration to get it to a decent level when it comes to speed in decision-making, for example.
Yeah.
Teresa.
That was an intro.
By the way, there is a word for what you were just describing in German.
And I say it because it's so funny.
Consultative Einzelentscheid.
That's one word that we're having for exactly this thing.
So you need to consult others before you then are allowed to make the decision.
I like it.
I love two things.
I love that German always has a word for it.
Like always.
Is it like the largest language in history because it has a word for everything?
And then two, I love that the words are always ridiculously long.
Yeah, that's how we roll.
It almost feels like a comedy skit.
Germans are like, let's see how long of a word we can make and convince non-German speakers it's really a word.
We have very long words and I put another one in the show notes for everybody.
For everybody's pleasure.
I think this is what German comedians do.
They sit around and make up longer and longer German words for the rest of the world to see if we'll be suckers and believe if it's really a word.
There are words.
You can combine basically every noun.
Oh, thank you, Teresa.
Apparently we're going to put a little German primer in the show notes for everybody.
So have fun with that.
Thanks, Petra.