Collapse the talent stack every chance you get. As I reflect on the teams I’ve led and hundreds of start-ups I’ve worked with, there is a consistent unfair competitive advantage i’ve witnessed when the talent stack was collapsed - when the lead designer was also the product leader, when the front-end engineer was also a designer, when the designer is also a great copywriter, when the product leader was also the founder/ceo, etc. Tighter conduits for decision making and synthesizing information are an incredible advantage when it comes to crafting products. Many start-ups enjoy the benefits of collapsed talent stacks and then undo them as they grow (and most big companies just don’t understand this). In your hiring (and your consolidating), I encourage you to collapse the stack whenever you can. Especially given all the focus on “product led growth,” these days (which really means helping new customers feel successful more quickly, discover the benefit of sharing, people talking about the product doing things they didn’t expect), all of these are as much marketing driven experiments as they are “traditional product specs” and design explorations! Collapse the stack. While it might feel like “double duty” to your leaders, it works magic - especially in early stage products or periods of self-disruption where you need to speed up exploration and execution. I go into detail on this and share a bunch of other Implications for the way modern teams should be structured on Implications. (implications. com)