Lore

IC Process Aversion as a Byproduct of Customer Obsession

Individual-contributor PMs often carry a cavalier "process is lame" attitude — impatience with rituals, documentation, and formal rules in favor of getting close to the customer and shipping. That attitude is a feature, not a bug, of being genuinely customer-obsessed.

But it has a cost at the leadership level: leaders who came up through this culture are reluctant to deliberately design how their team operates, because doing so feels like exactly the kind of process-mindedness they spent their careers pushing against.

Related