Apr 10, 2025
Async Leadership
The best CEOs can live at two different heights at the same time.
Up high: where the market is going. When to push hard and where to place the bet.
Down low: the part of the product or customer experience that doesn't quite work, the risk that no one brought up or the stress in the room.
In a small business, this is doable.
There are less people. Not as many layers. The CEO can zoom out in the morning and in the afternoon. One head can still hold both strategy and detail.
A new limit appears as a business grows: bandwidth.
At the beginning, you can talk your way into alignment. Take a seat in a room and look at faces. Repeat the vision, one conversation at a time, many times a week.
That works... until it doesn't.
More people join and layers start to form. In the end, talking to everyone all the time isn't enough to keep them on the same page.
That's when the real problem starts to show.
If your leadership team can't write, the CEO becomes the main translator - sharing, repeating, and putting the pieces back together.
Presence isn't the real superpower at scale.
It's building a group that can think clearly enough to write it down.
Up high: where the market is going. When to push hard and where to place the bet.
Down low: the part of the product or customer experience that doesn't quite work, the risk that no one brought up or the stress in the room.
In a small business, this is doable.
There are less people. Not as many layers. The CEO can zoom out in the morning and in the afternoon. One head can still hold both strategy and detail.
A new limit appears as a business grows: bandwidth.
At the beginning, you can talk your way into alignment. Take a seat in a room and look at faces. Repeat the vision, one conversation at a time, many times a week.
That works... until it doesn't.
More people join and layers start to form. In the end, talking to everyone all the time isn't enough to keep them on the same page.
That's when the real problem starts to show.
If your leadership team can't write, the CEO becomes the main translator - sharing, repeating, and putting the pieces back together.
Presence isn't the real superpower at scale.
It's building a group that can think clearly enough to write it down.
About Max Antonov
I'm a father of three from Sydney, a Product Director and a Product Coach. I write about product management and run the Product Manager community.
Feel free to reach out: [email protected].
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