A practical operating model for a product leader's partnership with a peer engineering executive (e.g., PM/CPO and CTO), built on four elements: explicit ownership splits (who decides what, drawn ahead of conflict), mutual trust as the default assumption, surfacing disagreement directly to the other person rather than through back-channel complaints to others, and running shared rituals — joint OKR reviews and joint exec reviews — so both sides see the same information at the same time.
The back-channel-avoidance element overlaps with Context-Then-Data-Then-Seniority Disagreement Protocol and Empathy-Based Disagreement Script; the joint-review element is the mechanism later reworked in Async OKR Review via Video Clips. This is the operating counterpart to Evaluate the Engineering Partnership Before Joining a Company, which is about assessing the partnership before signing on — this concept is about running it well once you're in it.
Reported by Tamar Yehoshua (Glean), describing her partnership with Slack's engineering leadership.
At Slack, this operating model included an explicit division of responsibility with the engineering counterpart — 'you drive this, I drive this' — honored in practice: disagreements were raised directly between the two peers rather than routed through teams, and each redirected stray questions to whichever of them actually owned that decision. The partnership showed up in shared cadences, not just decision rights: OKR reviews and weekly exec updates were done jointly rather than separately, so both leaders dug into the same teams together instead of receiving siloed updates. The model scaled further with a weekly four-person sync — the two peer leaders plus their respective Chiefs of Staff — to surface broader organizational issues before they escalated. See Async OKR Review via Video Clips for how the joint OKR review itself was run at scale, and Treating Your Own Alignment Process as a Product for how the pair treated their own review process as something to iterate on.
Из тем: Stakeholder Power and Trust