I didn’t do that well on my pre-solo test. I wasn’t always well-coordinated and my landing was a bit flat. I was also talking way too fast on the radio. I was sure my instructor won’t let me pass but he asked me: “do you think you are ready?”. Affirmative. I know I can do better. The instructor signed off and told me “make good decisions”. Now, I am the Pilot In Command.

I’ve been flying for about 100H now. I remember when I started 4 years ago, I’ve been told about the concept of Pilot In Command (PIC): this one has the final authority and responsibility for the operation and safety of the flight. For some reasons, this concept hit me so hard and completely changed the way I look at leadership and team work.

In 2017, I was hired to drive the entire Product team in a start-up in an industry I barely know, with a team I haven’t built and working on problems I never considered before. I decided to implement the concept I learnt from aviation.

My team was composed of 6 people. They’ve been part of the company for a year or plus already and have all a much better understanding of the space than myself. The team is also extremely creative and, I’ll discover soon, came up with hundreds of ideas. A lot of them were excellent.

How could a team of so many talented people, with the right industry knowledge and great ideas, fail to do anything significative?

Empowerment.

I remember having an argument with a manager few years back and telling this person that “if you want to hire somebody to tell this one what to do, just buy a computer. It’s cheaper.” This is nothing new and I recall many instances where people told the same concept in different words. Some of the best leaders in the world have also talked in length about the importance of giving the team a way to prove themselves and be free. Talking is easy and doing is hard. And, in tech, implementation is a pain.

In this company, I’ll see soon enough that if everyone had the right intention, the materialization is a complete different story. And the manifestation of the miss-management was reflected in many ways, including:

1. Over-inflated titles
2. Disparities between titles and roles
3. No ownership
4. Almost every single decision is taken by the CEO eventually
5. Decisions are driven by emotion and intuition

Discussing with the different parties, I realized that all these problems were linked. Because people don’t have ownership, they can’t decide who has the authority. So they all go to ask the management’s support. Because the management can’t deal with so many tasks on a daily basis, the CEO gives artificial authority by handling people higher titles. The problem then is people were still lost since their roles were undefined and now they are supposed to hold more power. No one respect their power since they are seen as given and not earnt. And since there is still no ownership, there is no accountability, and no matter what decision is taken, “nothing bad could happen anyway”.

What if something bad could happen? And what if you are the sole responsible for it? In a plane, if the person in charge, the PIC, makes a bad decision in a critical moment, this could mean death. And if there are passengers, this person is responsible for everyone’s safety. How about translating this into business?

I wrote, during a week end, a simple plan:

1. For every mission, there is an assigned Pilot In Command (PIC)
2. The PIC has the final authority for the entire duration of the mission
3. The PIC is responsible for the success or the failure of the mission
4. A mission is defined by a goal, a number of tasks, metrics to measure the performance of the execution, critical metrics and a set of success criteria
5. A mission ends only when the decided success criteria is met OR when the critical metrics are reached OR when the PIC leaves/abandon/call it stop

The next day, I spent few hours with my superiors, the CEO and the President, and told them about my idea. They never heard about the concept before. Ironically enough, we were a startup in the aviation space. But were ready to give a shot.

To test whether they were serious or not I asked them to immediately stop joining every product meeting. From that day, as the leader in Product, I will decide on what gets pushed on the roadmap, what gets priority and what should be built from a product perspective. I keep them posted with regular net status update, request their opinions if I need and they can give me pieces of advice if they want but, eventually, I got the last call. They were shocked. Still, they accepted. Good, that was an important first step.

Second step was to explain the concept to my own team. As usual, understanding is easy, doing is hard. I decided to list all the ideas the team wrote since they joined the company. I displayed the entire list and I asked who strongly believe in any of these ideas. Those who strongly believe in certain ideas will become the PIC for these ones. There can only be one PIC per idea. The folks who don’t feel being the PIC can choose to follow any PIC. After some moment, we had 3 projects defined, led by a clear PIC each. The remaining staff all decided to follow the project, or the people, they liked most. On that day, we removed dozen of on-going project that were blocked for months from the roadmap.

The third step was to spent time and establish common ground with the PIC themselves. I dedicated 1H of internal kick off with my 3 project owners to discuss about the limits of their freedom and of their responsibility. We also discussed about the general timeline, metrics and resources. We all agreed on a simple process, using very simple canvas and score card to track the projects’ progress. On the top of that, I reserved 1H/PIC/week for one-on-one and I also have 15min slot every 2H that are optional for any PIC to take if they have a question or something they want to discuss face to face. Emails are free and unlimited: anyone can mail me all the time. I wanted to have, as much as possible, “paper trace”.

Once we were on the same page, I had to empower my PIC. I asked each of them to prepare a presentation to pitch the entire company (we were about 100 at that time) and they’ll be responsible for recruiting the engineering resource they need themselves. If they fail to convince engineers to help them, the project will be cancelled. While they were doing so, I spent time with my CTO and all the different engineer leads to socialize the idea. They were all very skeptical initially but due to a lack of good argument, accepted to play “my game”. I also spent time with other departments’ heads such as Marketing, Sales, Legal and Operations. Unexpectedly, they were all really excited about it and few of them even asked to join some of the projects. I told them to talk to the PIC directly.

Once step four was done, the last step was the general presentation. I gave a week for my team to prepare something good. We scheduled an entire afternoon and everyone came. Obviously, some PIC are better than others when it comes to public speaking but, in general, they all did well and, more importantly, they all got the resources they needed.

There are many other things we learnt and we adapted the process along the way. Still, the general aspect remained unchanged and the concept of PIC was well adopted.

The outcome was way beyond my imagination. We increased our velocity by 50x. Yes: fifty times! The company failed to release anything in more than a year and with the new model, we were releasing new MVPs, products, features, patches, corrections etc. on a daily basis. We had documentation for every project. We reduced the entire Product Department’s costs by 60% in few months. The side implication of this sudden growth is that employees’ engagement and satisfaction also increased significantly. Finally, after doing this for a while, other departments started to suggest ideas. We decided to have a company pitch session every month, during a lunch break, and the goal is to convince a Product Manager to lead the idea. It was well received.

Looking back, there were many things I did by intuition and could have gone wrong. I clearly wasn’t an expert and I was betting on my team to know better. If we use aviation analogy, I was a Chief Instructor who didn’t know much about flying a plane who signed off a student for solo. Bad. Luckily for me, my PIC were all very good.

I needed to be better myself so I can guide them.

While members of my team were in leading their projects on a day to day basis, I spent my days and nights educating myself on what could happen next. Quickly, I observed that my one-on-one were much more about strategic alignments and personal coaching than task-oriented tactical conversations. For instance, I had no idea about the specificities of each GDS, but people in my team do. And they didn’t require me to choose for them. But the questions they were asking me were about where I want Product to go, how much sales we wanted, at what costs, how is it aligned with our Unique Value Proposition etc. And based on my requirements, they decide what to pick for their projects.

In many ways, I acted like ATC when my Product managers were PIC. I was the tower. I had time, I was safe, so I could look around and tell the pilots what’s going on. I could give them tips and give suggestions. From time to time, when I felt something was dangerous, I could warn them or even issue a command. But the PIC had the final authority on their project. They were flying the plane. No matter what I thought, they were the one putting their lives -or in this case, their career- in danger. I respected it.

I have to admit, I was scared in the beginning. Many times I told myself I should really handle a specific task myself directly. There are also examples where I felt very strongly against someone working on a project. But I forced myself to apply my own rules. And turned out, the PIC made good decisions.

Since the first time I implemented and tested it, I have always used this concept. I keep refining the process with additional knowledge. Usually, it means to be a better ATC: communicate better, look farer ahead, make it easier to collaborate etc. One thing I do now is to empower my managers to empower their own resources.

Today, I manage one of the largest departments in my company as an executive. I have 6 VP reporting to me directly. Each of them have 2 to 6 other managers reporting to them. Not only we made them PIC on different objectives, the concept is now well spread and themselves have named their own directors and managers PIC on different programs or projects.

It was 0730. I walked in the office looking for my computer. I had an important business event to attend. The marketing team was already in the office. Of course, it was the launch of a new pricing test. I completely forgot. Luckily for me, my head of Marketing was driving it. The entire team was assembled in what was a war room, finishing and refining the last few tasks before the launch. As I passed by the meeting room, I thought about saying “hi” so I can give some last minute tips. Then I heard my head of Marketing saying “You got this.” And immediately someone replied “Yes, I got this.”

I didn’t enter the room. They got this. They are ready.