Keith Lucas is a startup advisor, author, and leader who specializes in building high-impact teams. In this episode with Product Momentum, Keith delivers a master class on leadership, team building, culture, values, and motivation. Our conversation is especially relevant in the context of transitioning from a technical individual contributor to product team leader in high-tech organizations.

Here’s what we learned:

IC to Team Lead: Navigating the Mindset Shift

The transition from hands-on IC to leader of a highly technical team requires a mindset shift from “me to we.” The transition requires an adjustment of priorities from solely outcomes-based to team health, inspiration, and mental well-being.

“A simple trick I use, when I wake up every day my first thoughts are, is the team on a good path? Are they unblocked? Are they inspired and mentally healthy? Are they all in a good place to have impact? Knowing those things helps reduce friction on the team and increases the odds of our success.”

Two ‘New Leader Archetypes’ – Overcoming Team Dysfunction

Keith discusses two types of leaders who struggle in their new roles. The first is the hands-on leader who has fallen into the oxymoronic trap of trying to “micromanage at scale.”  The other is the visionary talent-oriented leader whose eagerness to succeed leads to the team’s being focused on too many things. The hands-on person is just trying to get stuff done by being effective, efficient, Keith says, while the talent person is committed to autonomy and building a team that scales.

The goal is to put both of those value sets together. For the hands-on leader, that means creating regular touch points with your team. For the talent-oriented leader, it’s about closing loops while showing the team how to go from vision to delivering real outcomes. “In both cases,” Keith adds, “use a regular cadence for when you get together to talk about progress, challenges, and course correction.” This approach creates the right kind of trust — a trust in the system that you have opportunities to contribute in a healthy way.

Value-Based Culture: The Foundation of Decisionmaking

Keith thinks about culture as “the team’s operating system.” And the foundation of that operating system is the team’s values — i.e., their standards of behavior.

“The team’s values are really the foundation of the operating system,” Keith says. “If the system is to be reinforced, then decisions about who gets hired, promoted, and retained must be informed by those values.” If that’s not happening, Keith adds, you end up with a culture that may be codified, but never truly realized.

Here’s some more key takeaways:

• 04:58 – Moving from chief IC to chief team builder
• 07:32 – Micromanaging at scale is an oxymoron
• 13:08 – Values: embrace them, socialize them, apply them
• 18:07 – Vision Doc: The anti-job description
• 20:21 – Start with Goals; Structure will follow

As the author of Impact: How to Inspire, Align, and Amplify Innovative Teams, Keith Lucas distills years of experience at the intersection of data, storytelling, and strategy into a practical framework that helps leaders move from player/coach to true team builder while avoiding common scaling pitfalls like diminishing impact, productivity loss, culture dilution, and disempowerment. 

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Sean Murray [00:00:00] I love these concepts. I love the challenge of what is the vision of your role? What is the mission of your roll over the next six months? How does that vision align with maybe like the future of the product that you’re working on, right? Is it, are those directly tied or are they loosely tied? How does it work?

Keith Lucas [00:00:14] Oh, that’s an excellent question. So I think if you’re asking, I think they are tied. And you’re ask how coupled or tightly tied they are. This actually came up recently and it was a real good clarification for me. The structure of your team is not always the right structure for what you mean to do next. It’s really the structure you created because of other things that were going on previously. And now you want to move on and maybe you want to take some aggressive moves and maybe it’s a bit of a disruption. And so what do you do? My sort of sentiment and my aha was you move forward with the goals and you let the structure lag behind. And you focus on the team, on what you help the team organize around the goals. To achieve them now. And then that learning is what helps them figure out what is the right structure for the team moving forward. And so in that sense, there’s always a connection between the vision of the product or the company or the next level of the company and the role.

Dan Sharp [00:01:28] How do we make sure that the people that we’re kind of tasking with, owning that product opportunity are in a position to be motivated? Oh, I get it.

Keith Lucas [00:01:38] It. Okay, sure. So I think there’s a couple of pieces. There is a piece of evangelism of making the case, and then I think, there’s piece of co-development, so you have co-ownership. And so, making the case or evangelism, I think it’s really important that when you’re acting entrepreneurial-ly? You want to actually be also an entrepreneur of ideas. You want a picture idea. You wanna sell it. You wanna help people connect the dots. Why is this the right thing to do right now? And by taking on that responsibility of evangelism, you can better get people where you need to be or learn that you’re off.

Sean Murray [00:02:42] Dan, we just wrapped with Keith Lucas and it was amazing conversation. It was a master class in leadership, a fresh topic for us. Tell me.

Dan Sharp [00:02:49] Love that it was full of practical tips for being a better leader, right? We talked about how the role of the leaders, job number one, team building. We talked the importance of living values as one of the best ways to build a culture. Really great conversation.

Sean Murray [00:03:07] We’re doing it. We’re talking about core skills again. We’re back. Let’s get it.

Sean Murray [00:03:21] We are here today with Keith Lucas. Keith is a startup advisor, author, and builder of high impact teams who equips leaders with the knowledge, tools, and confidence to build teams that innovate, adapt, and deliver lasting impact. As the author of Impact, How to Inspire, Align, and Amplify Innovative Teams, he distills years of experience at the intersection of data, storytelling, and strategy into a practical framework that lets leaders move from a player coach role to a true team builder role. In his advisory work, he helps founders align product, people and culture to accelerate growth. Keith, thank you so much for being here today.

Keith Lucas [00:03:57] Yeah, thank you for having me, I’m excited to be here.

Sean Murray [00:04:01] You are officially the first rocket scientist that we’ve had on the podcast. So, you know, we’re excited about that. I think also Dan and I, as parents of young children, we’re exciting to hear about Roblox. Neil. Every listener that has small children hears Roblox and it’s like, wait, I should probably pay attention to this one. So, thank you so much for being here today. And we are also very excited about the topic we wanna talk about today because. We’re going to deviate from our regularly scheduled AI programming, and we want to talk about leadership today. So we’re really excited to dive into this topic. So here’s our first question, right? You started off as a technical leader at Roblox, and you kind of moved into a leadership role. So what are some of the biggest mindset shifts that you had to make when moving from this hands-on technical leader role to where you were actually building and leading the product org at Roblox?

Keith Lucas [00:04:58] So the biggest mindset shift for me was moving from this, I would say, chief individual contributor to a chief team builder for my team. Okay. So like, I, I liken this to my approach was like, how do I get everyone on the bus and just like press harder and harder on the gas pedal and do everything I can. And try to get us there. And over time, just like people wanted off that bus. So the real thing is coming to terms with my number one job is team building. And that was a bit hard for me, not because I didn’t recognize it, but I think like a lot of our weaknesses or failure modes are often driven by something positive. And in my case, I felt a real commitment to the outcomes. If you asked me to get something done, either on my own or with a team, I really felt committed to doing that. But over time, that commitment or focusing solely on that commitment can hamper you. So I’m really needing to shift my mindset that number one was building the team. And a simple trick I use, that I often advise today. When I woke up every day and the first thought on my mind is the team on a good path? Are they unblocked? Are they inspired? Are they mentally healthy? Are they all in a good place to have impact? And then after that, what else can I do to increase the odds of our success and to reduce friction for the team? So that little mental trick. Or prioritization really helped cement in the right mindset for me.

Dan Sharp [00:06:55] We’ve talked about new leaders and the main challenges they face. And I know like there’s a couple of archetypes, right? You have the new leader who, yeah, they’ve come out of an individual contributor role and they trend towards one of micromanage, every task, everything that’s doing, right. And then you have the flip side, coming in big ideas, but maybe not an attention to detail. You know, what kind of practices have you? Uncovered in your experience, you know, going from that senior individual contributor into a team lead to help new leaders kind of find that right direction, find the correct level of autonomy.

Keith Lucas [00:07:32] Yes. So again, I think like these two archetypes, again, the hands-on leader who falls into the dysfunction, the team is growing of trying to micromanage at scale. And then you have this visionary talent-oriented leader who fall into the dysfunction of having a team that’s just doing too many things and that’s a less focus. Both of these are driven, again, by ties and enforces. One, the hands-on person is trying to get stuff done and being effective, efficient. And the talent person, from my experience, is really, really committed to autonomy and building a team that scales. The win is trying to put both of those value sets together. So for the hands on leader, the advice I have is to think about creating touch points, times like regular cadence of times you get together to talk about progress, understand the learning, and potentially course correct. And this creates the right kind of trust, trust in the system that you have opportunities to jump in in a healthy way. And for the other leader, the visionary and talent-oriented leader, The advice I have is to… Start thinking about closing loops. So thinking about how do we go from vision to outcomes, and then working with the team again in some regular cadence to talk about that connection. How are we doing? How’s the progress, the learning, and is there any course correction needed? So the practices are actually the same for both, but the way you approach it is a little bit different for both based on… What values they’re coming at it with.

Sean Murray [00:09:31] You mentioned early on, people trying to get off the bus, right? Yeah. You’re pressing too hard. Is that you’ve at that point when people are trying to get off of the bus that’s where you’ve identified a culture problem. What are some of the signs that you have a culture problem that you got to solve as a leader?

Keith Lucas [00:09:49] I think there’s, you know, there’s different signs depending on what the problem of the culture is. Okay. So in, in let’s take the, let’s pay the get stuff done leader who’s sort of devolving into micromanagement. I think, I think the signs there are that it ultimately over time is harder to retain people who you might need the most people who are ownership oriented because people want. To feel ownership in the winds that they have. They want that connection to impact. And so if you’re trying to micromanage at scale, you pull that away from people. So you might have a retention problem with people who are really ownership-orienting and take initiative. You might have other issues where you’re noticing that you are throttling your growth because if you are micrmanaging at scale. Everything has to fit inside your head and anything that nicely fits inside your head falls off. So you are maybe having scaling issues. On the other side, the person who is more, uh, visionary and sort of talent oriented and wants the team to, uh, do all these, to really solve the problems and drive it on their, on their own without a lot of engagement. What happens here is there’s I think of it as punching in too many directions. When I’ve talked to companies that are organizing this way or operating this way, you can talk to team members who are really committed and love the company, but they’ll also talk about chaos or not quite, we’re doing too much or we’re not finishing things. And so that’s an example of too much parallelization that can happen when you have under alignment. And so those are, those are like the failure modes or the signs for those two models, but there’s another, one other one I’ll throw out there and that is when you are not building a team that’s really high performing and some of the signs there are you’re keeping people around who are not necessarily on a growth track. They’re not, they’re not growing or you’re keeping people around who are forever on. Probation or are just all around okay, but not really that inspiring or that impactful. These can, viewing this too much really drives you towards a culture of mediocrity, not performance. So that’s another failure mode and those are the signs of that mode.

Dan Sharp [00:12:39] You’ve made it upon that last mode that you mentioned, right? Culture is such an interesting phenomenon in organizations, right, because like, everybody, yeah, everyone cares deeply about it, but like it’s kind of, you know, just there, how, as leaders, do we make sure that culture doesn’t go from good to bad, kind of abruptly, right. Like how do we stay on top of building a positive culture, but especially in the case you’re trying to build that high performing team.

Keith Lucas [00:13:08] Yeah. So, you know, one of the things I’ve done, I did when writing the book is really think about what is culture, what, when I saw it working well, really what is it and it’s not like the superficial stuff, like having a food ball table or stuff like that. Pizza lunches. Yeah. Pizza lunch and that, you know, that could reflect some culture, but it’s not, it’s not culture. So I think about culture as a team’s operating system. And the foundation of that operating system is the team’s values. There’s standards of behavior. What are the behaviors that really pattern match to success on the team? And what are the behavior that don’t pattern match or anti-match? So the values of the team are really the foundation of the operating system, And so for that to be reinforced… Foundationally values must determine who gets hired promoted and retained if if that’s not happening then culture is much more what I would call codified but it’s not realized and there’s a gap between that what you write down and what you what actually happens if it’s not driving the people part of it the other thing is to hold yourself Accountable. And asked others to hold you to account on your own behavior. Because when a leader, we all have gaps. We’re all human. So like, what I say is most important to me and the kind of person I wanna be is not necessarily the person I am all the time. But the wider the gap, the bigger the dysfunction on the team. And if the gap is too wide, then you become an inauthentic leader. Which will turn off a lot of people. And also if you can’t hold yourself to account, it really is hard for any sort of achievement oriented or growth mime in person to feel like you’re taking the team seriously. So these are really the two components. One other one that’s super critical is just socialization because values are a belief system and so you have to socialize them regularly? For everyone to remember them and to use them in decision-making. But it starts with who you hire, promote, and retain. It’s holding yourself to account. And then it’s that socialization piece so that values can feed into decision- making.

Dan Sharp [00:15:50] Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there. It’s really free. And I just think back to teams I work with. I’m curious what your thoughts are. As leaders, we need to, you know, kind of show the path and model what we want to see. How do we best empower, you’re kind of the individual contributors on the team to also live and demonstrate and uphold those values, right, and help, you help grow it organically within the team.

Keith Lucas [00:16:15] Sure. So the I think there’s when you talk about individual contributors, there’s an element to empowering them to live those values. And then there’s and element to empowering them for ownership and things like that. So maybe I’ll talk a little bit about both. So on the on the value side, the empowerment is really making the values front and center when people are living them. One form of empowerment is recognition, is calling out when people are living a value. So when someone has a win, it might be a technical win, it might me a sales win, it might some other win, some achievement on behalf of the team. It really helps to identify what values that person lived in having that win. And that is part of the empowerment, is that it’s time to success. But the other part of empowerment on values is having someone’s back, is that if they are executing on the values, if they’re living those values, and things don’t work out, they don’t get the win, maybe there’s a miss, misses happen, fails happen. If they are exhibiting those values and you don’t have their back. Then that sends another signal that maybe the values don’t matter. So in terms of empowering them on values, it really is about calling out living values when there’s a win and having people bat on the values when they’re living them and there’s not a win. In terms of ownership, I think there is, we can take a break there and see if we have any other questions before I move on to the ownership piece.

Sean Murray [00:18:06] We keep going to ownership. Yeah.

Keith Lucas [00:18:07] Yeah, yeah. So on the ownership piece, the way I drive that, or I like to think about that, I developed this idea of what I call a vision doc, not a job description. And a job description can be written from a vision document, but the vision document is first. And so what the vision documents is, and I started out with writing these for executives, but after they were successful, I wrote them for others. You write down what is the vision of this role and what is vision of the person in this role based on where they are. Where can they go? Where does the role mean to go in order for the company to be successful? What is the mission of the the person over the next six months or year? What are the priorities? What’s the scope? What are goals? And when I would onboard someone. Or even before onboarding, as the last stage in the interview I would present this document to an executive and let them know that this was their document to rewrite over time, but here was the initial one. And it really was clarifying. It helped everyone have one step up in terms of their view on what they were doing. And even when I don’t use that document, helping… Help when I coach people and help them think about the vision of where they of their role. It really does elevate the ownership that they are not just owning a task or owning the project, but they’re owning the role on behalf of the team. And by making that role better, they’re it’s another way of contributing to the team So that vision document, I think it really…

Sean Murray [00:19:59] I love these concepts. I love the challenge of what is the vision of your role and what is the mission of your roll over the next six months? How does, when we think about going from, I own this task or I own this project and you said, I really own this vision, how does that vision align with maybe like the future of the product that you’re, that you’re working on, right? Is it, are those directly tied or are they loosely tied? How does that work?

Keith Lucas [00:20:21] Oh, and I sent them a question. So I think if you’re asking, I think they are tied. And you’re asked how, how, how coupled or tightly tied they are. And this actually came up recently and it was a real good clarification for me is the structure of your team is not always the right structure for what you mean to do next. It’s really the structure you created. Because of other things that were going on previously. And now you wanna move on and maybe you wanna take some aggressive moves and maybe it’s a bit of a disruption. And so what do you do? My sort of sense of it and my aha was you move forward with the goals and you let the structure lag behind and you focus on the team on what you help the team organize around the goals to achieve them now. And then that learning is what helps them figure out what is the right structure for the team moving forward. And so in that sense, there’s always a connection between the vision of the product or the company or the next level of the company and the role, but there could be time lags so that they’re not so tightly coupled that every time you want to disrupt what you’re doing or move fast and take advantage. Of an opportunity, you have to have a big reorg, and then there’s gonna be a lot of resistance. So I think it is coupled. I think over time it can, they shouldn’t be, come together, get closer together, but there is a time lag.

Sean Murray [00:22:01] This is really resonating with me as the Director of Product Management at a software development agency, right? So we are working with our partners, right, helping them to create new products that are helping them create new products, helping to improve new products, they’re going to resonate in market. So we have like an obli- we have delivery obligations from a contract perspective. So kind of like some short term, shorter term, task driven mission thing, but from a values perspective, we want to work in that consulting capacity, right. End. Come up with other ideas or bring other challenges to that organization so that they can help solve the right problem at the right time. You know, in thinking about our context, not trying to get some free advisory work.

Keith Lucas [00:22:40] No, it’s fine.

Sean Murray [00:22:42] But thinking about our context, how does that kind of concept of knowing your mission or knowing your values in the agency world, does that apply differently?

Keith Lucas [00:22:51] No, I don’t think so. And are you asking a little bit about how that might impact the structure of the client or how that may impact your structure?

Sean Murray [00:23:01] I think let’s start with the client or because I think that they’re looking for us. I think they’re all ultimately they’re looking for us to operate in that consultative mode like they want us to come come through with innovation or identifying problems that maybe they didn’t know existed right that are going to have to solve.

Keith Lucas [00:23:17] Yeah, so I do this myself. So I can tell you from personal experience how I’ve learned to advise here. And it’s also that what I do now is built on the mistakes I made earlier on where I did try to keep the structure and the goals tightly coupled. And it created bureaucracy and that created a lot of churn that was not needed. So… The way I frame it is that the system has to serve the mission. The mission can never be subordinate to the system. And so what I would be doing and what I do is I first advise the company and work with the company on what do they need to be doing, what, what are they trying to accomplish and then how to help them get on track to accomplishing that that’s really front of mind. And then along the way in learning about how to help them accomplish those goals, I learned about the structure. I get to understand how to teammates decisions. I get an understand how it’s structured in order to accomplish some things. And then usually there, there are recommendations of changing structure over time. But I always approach those a little more cautiously because of the churn or feeling of disruption that that can cause. So you want a little more learning before you do it, but I do give feedback on both.

Dan Sharp [00:24:51] You said something that really kind of resonated with me, the idea of focusing on the goals and then building the structure after, right? Because it seems very, almost 180 degrees away from how we normally operate. Like, hey, we’re gonna build a scaffolding and then we’re going to figure out how to meet the goals. So that’s really cool. I mean, that’s just something I’m gonna take away is like, hey we can worry about the actual formal operating model after we figure out how we’re to get where we want to go.

Keith Lucas [00:25:18] Yeah, and do you mind if I just add on to that, my own personal anecdote is, and this is where I wouldn’t say I went off the rails, but I was bumping up against the rails quite a bit, is we would set out, we would start with what are we, like Roblox, for example, We would start by, what are we trying to accomplish? And. We’ve been thinking about, okay, who do we have that can help lead these different initiatives? And so at that point, all of that was great. That was like, we started not with momentum, which is I think really important. We did not start with momentum of, well, we’ve done this, or these teams say they need to do ABC. It’s more what’s critical to do now and what are our goals? And then how do we find owners across the to meet those conditions. But what I then tried to do is, I was too uncomfortable with the idea that this person over here, who reported to so and so, had to then go over here and work here. And then I really wanted things to make sense on the org chart. And I think that was just too much because it, it reduced our desire to change goals I think it meant a reorder. But now when I advise, I say keep them separate and have, or gracefully follow, because it will allow you to be much more nimble with goals.

Sean Murray [00:26:50] And it seems everybody we talked to about impact always comes back to goals and always tells us to lead with goals. Right. Maybe, maybe one day we’ll learn.

Keith Lucas [00:27:00] It’s high. I know I know I know.

Sean Murray [00:27:05] This has been awesome. We rare, like it feels like every episode that we’ve had, we somehow get into a conversation about we’ll start on one topic and then we will eventually pivot to how does AI impact this, right? We’ve been able to avoid the AI pitfall in this call. You gave us some amazing some free advisory work for us. And I think that the way that you look at leadership as a function and the way you are supposed to inspire creativity and not micromanage at scale is a really fresh look for us, so I really appreciate you being here. Dan, I think you had one more question.

Dan Sharp [00:27:44] Uh, yeah, I mean, just building off of that, that idea of like, yeah. Let’s not worry about the order chart. Let’s worry about, you know, find the people who are best sued to, to work on that goal. Yeah. I think I’m wrapping up just on this concept of intrinsic motivation. Cause it, right. Those seem to go hand in hand. Yeah. Just what, what advice do you see that actually moves the needle both in the startup world, but also in larger companies with constraints. You know, for those folks that are saying, hey, Keith, we have a really cool product opportunity here and we want you to go after it.

Keith Lucas [00:28:17] What advice for going after product opportunities or you mentioned intrinsic motivation.

Dan Sharp [00:28:22] Yeah, how do we make sure that the people that we’re kind of tasking with owning that product opportunity are in position to be motivated? Yeah. Oh, I get.

Keith Lucas [00:28:34] I get it. Okay, sure. So I think there’s a couple of pieces. There is a piece of evangelism of making the case, and then I think, there’s piece of co-development, so you have co-ownership. And so, making the Case, or evangelism, I think it’s really important that when you’re acting entrepreneurial-ly? You want to actually be also an entrepreneur of ideas. You want a picture idea, you want to sell it, you want help people connect the dots. Why is this the right thing to do right now? And by taking on that responsibility of evangelism, you can better get people where you need to be or learn that you’re off, right? And you can come together. And have this shared sense of purpose. But then the other one is once you have that shared sense of purpose, and maybe as a leader, you also feel like there should be some parameters around this or you have a little bit of a vision around this, you want to invite the person to come back with how they want to approach this. What is their approach? What are the goals they think, the milestones? As much as possible of how they’re gonna get this done. As much as you can hand off to them the more they will own it and that will drive intrinsic motivation so they align on purpose then they have that ownership which touches upon autonomy and then giving them the space can do a good job even though we all have to move fast people need to have misplaced to do a good job or a great job depending on the situation. Or they also won’t be intrinsically motivated. So, that’s how I would feel about it.

Dan Sharp [00:30:32] And do micromanagement in the process.

Sean Murray [00:30:37] I have some key takeaways from today, besides just now I realized that micromanaging at scale is in fact an oxymoron. Right. This does not work. Right. I love recognizing the signs of culture problems and your advice around that. I loved the basic know your values, right? Know the values that you want your team to follow and then know the vision of your role and know the mission of your own, even if that’s just for the next six months. Yeah. Right. I think that that if we have the, if you have values, you have vision and if you, have your mission, right. You have motivated people. Right? You’re gonna have better outcomes. That’s right. Tying it all together. This has been excellent. Thank you so much for being here. The last question that we normally ask people, and I know that you are an author, so I hope that your book is on your bookshelf, but what are you reading today?

Keith Lucas [00:31:32] I’m going back and I’m reading some of the classics, Crossing the Tasm, there’s a couple of books that I’ve read a number of times. On my fiction, I’m, I am reading the Master and Commander series, I don’t know what, Book 12 of that long 20 book series, and I love that one. And, yeah, I think that books like Drive, Four Snaps in the Epiphany… The Hard Thing About Hard Things. All of that, those kind of books are, and also Simon Sinek’s Infinite Game. I think these really have been really amazingly helpful to me.

Sean Murray [00:32:14] What, what motivated you to kind of go back and re-read? And what were some of the, what were the things that made you re- read?

Keith Lucas [00:32:21] Yeah, like, so one of the things is that my learning style is like, I really need to read things over and over again to really get it, really absorb it. The other one is I’m just a different person today than I was back then. And I think that I’m able to digest a lot more quickly and maybe in a different way than I was when I was younger. I think some of those books I read, I remembered the title. That’s it. So now I have it, you know, so yeah, so those are those are some of them And then that matter on my bookshelf

Sean Murray [00:32:58] I really liked that idea of I was a different person when I read Dave’s books, right?

Dan Sharp [00:33:04] I got some new book recommendations including for those listening impact how to inspire align and amplify innovative teams Written by Keith Lucas. So make sure that you’re checking that out

Sean Murray [00:33:15] Thank you so much for being here today, this has been a very authentic episode. Thank you again.

Keith Lucas [00:33:20] Yeah, thank you both. I’ve really enjoyed it.