Brian Elliott on Culture Chaos, Ruthless Clarity, and Why Empathy Fuels Velocity
Product State Q&A
Brian Elliott is CEO at Work Forward, Senior Advisor at BCG, Co-Founder of Future Forum, and the co-author of ‘How the Future Works.’ He was formerly VP & GM at Slack, GM at Google Express, CEO at Monsoon Commerce, and Alibris.
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EC: What are the management behaviors tech leaders should prioritize to make their product teams thrive?
BE: Most product team problems aren't product problems – they're culture problems. I've seen too many leaders try to fix low velocity and missed deadlines with more process or harsher demands, when the real issue is cultural chaos.
Here are the three behaviors that actually move the needle:
Ruthless priority clarity
Ask each team member: ‘What are our top 3 priorities and how do we measure success?’
You'll get different answers from everyone – that's your first problem. This is a broad phenomenon that’s easy to prove: ask people how to make toast. Getting everyone on the same page about how we’ll measure success is critical.
Create a rank-ordered top 5 list of goals and give people permission to say no to everything else. Sounds easy, but can be really hard – we all fear that potential for not maximizing.
Your PMs need protection from random ‘urgent’ requests. Focus matters, and so does accountability. You are the sh*t shield.
Build trust through dependability
Start simple: Can your team count on you to do what you say? Build from there: Does everyone know what they’re responsible for delivering?
Create team-based performance wins. Small wins build trust. Celebrate teams that work well together – point out what they’re doing to accelerate progress and deliver outcomes.
Don't tolerate toxic high performers – they destroy team dynamics faster than you can hire
Balance performance with growth
Look at each person's last 6 months: Who's doing the same tasks repeatedly? Growth, not just rest, prevents burnout.
If I’m working on something that stretches me, I’ll go the extra mile – but not if I’ve done it 10 times before. Dedicate 10-20% of capacity to skill development and experimentation.
AI experimentation is a team sport. Play with the tools in public – have AI ‘show and tell’ sessions, share what you’ve built in public channels. If you’re a leader, get up to your elbows in it.
The diagnostic: If people can't articulate the same priorities, they're working hard in different directions. Fix alignment first, everything else follows.
EC: How can product leaders balance delivering near-term results with building long-term capabilities?
BE: This is a false trade-off. The fastest-shipping teams are also the ones investing most in capabilities. The key is treating every sprint as both delivery and learning lab:
Protect the split
You can vary percentages sprint-to-spring, but average 80% execution, 20% experimentation / capability building
Yes, this feels inefficient when everything's urgent – but teams that protect this over time consistently outperform those that don't.
Splits should vary across teams over time; every team hits ‘focus mode’ when delivery is critical; balance it out with ‘rebuild and renew’ periods.
Invest in how teams work
Capability building isn’t just tech or product experiments – it’s setting norms for how the team works, investing in automation. Activities that make you faster over time.
Setting norms at the beginning of a project (ex., roles, how we run meetings, what tools we use) slows down the start but accelerates long-term performance every time.
Invest in decision infrastructure: who decides what, and how we communicate. Use Netflix's ‘informed captain’ model: person closest to problem decides, after gathering dissent
Connect every sprint to future state
Every feature should answer: What are we learning about users? What are we learning about how we operate?
What new technical capabilities are we building? What better practices will we use as a team next time?
How is this expanding our team's skills? What skills do we need to build or source?
The reality: Companies that build learning into their delivery process ship faster long-term because they're building conviction about what to build next.
EC: What's the key to building empathy-driven teams who ship at high velocity?
BE: Empathy drives speed, not the opposite. The teams that ship fastest have deep user understanding and trust in each other. Being empathetic isn’t being ‘nice’ – it’s being demanding while creating environments where people can perform together at their best.
Diagnose team health first. Before you can empathize with users, fix internal empathy:
Misalignment: Everyone working on different priorities
Overload: Too many urgent projects simultaneously
Growth stagnation: People doing same tasks for 6+ months
Create shared user reality
Engineers, designers, PMs all need direct user exposure. Watch prospective customers interacting with your product for the first time together – group cringe is good.
When your iOS engineer understands why a feature matters to a specific customer, they'll find ways to ship faster – and often offer alternative approaches to solve the underlying problem.
Build regular rhythms where the whole team hears from users.
Psychological safety = speed
Common goals, shared transparently, updated regularly and assessed honestly build trust and reduce the internal rumor mill churn.
Bad news shared quickly gets solved quickly, especially when teams have common goals.
Celebrate learning-based failures alongside successes: what did we try that didn’t work, and what did we learn?
Model vulnerability: share your mistakes publicly. Share your personal user manual.
Quality as Empathy Broken releases aren't just operational problems – they signal you care more about dates than user value. The fastest teams are also the most disciplined about technical practices.
Bottom line: Sustainable velocity requires building quality and trust from the start, not bolting them on later.
“Most product team problems aren’t product problems – they’re culture problems. I've seen too many leaders try to fix low velocity and missed deadlines with more process or harsher demands, when the real issue is cultural chaos.”
— Brian Elliott
