My co-founder is our Head of Product, but our developers complain he is a bottleneck because he refuses to document specifications. He says his genius is intuitive, not procedural. How do we make an objective GWC™ call when my co-founder insists his seat cannot be systematized?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

No seat on the Accountability Chart is exempt from systematization, especially not one as critical as product development. When a co-founder claims their work is too intuitive to document, they are usually hiding a lack of Capacity or a lack of Want It for the tedious parts of the seat.

To address this objectively, you must separate his owner hat from his employee hat. As a shareholder, he has a right to dividends and equity growth, but as the Head of Product, he must GWC™ the seat as it is defined today, not how it was defined when you started in a garage.

First, review the roles for the Head of Product seat. If one of those roles is delivering clear, documented product specifications to the engineering team, and he is refusing to do it, he is failing the seat.

Second, sit down with him and run a GWC™ assessment. Does he genuinely want to spend his days documenting specs? If he says no, or if his actions prove he cannot do it consistently, then he does not GWC™ the seat.

The solution is not to tolerate the bottleneck. The solution is to move him to a seat that fits his unique ability, such as a Product Visionary or Chief Creative Officer seat, where he can focus on high-level design and market trends. You can then hire a Product Owner or Product Manager who excels at process, documentation, and execution to sit underneath him or report to the Integrator.