Why teams need systems, not visionaries

I think this archetype is not just overrated—it's actively harmful. When leaders try to embody this myth, they often end up prioritizing conviction over evidence, charisma over competence. Remember Elizabeth Holmes? She was explicitly emulating Steve Jobs.

The problem with visionary leadership is that it centralizes judgment.
The leader has the vision; everyone else executes it. This works fine when the leader is right. But product development is fundamentally uncertain. Nobody knows what's going to work. Not even visionaries.

What happens when the vision is wrong? In a system built around a visionary leader, the team can't correct course until the leader admits the mistake. And leaders who've built their authority on being visionary are especially bad at admitting mistakes. Their identity depends on being right.

Meanwhile, the people closest to the work—the ones talking to customers, building the product, seeing the data—they often spot problems early. But in a visionary-led organization, their observations get filtered through: "Does this support the vision?". If not, it gets dismissed or reframed.

This filtering compounds as information moves up the chain. Frontline employees hesitate to share problems that contradict the vision. Middle managers sanitize bad news before it reaches leadership, and by the time information gets to the top, leaders are making decisions based on a heavily distorted slice of reality. They don't know what they don't know.

The alternative isn't democracy or consensus: it's clarity about how decisions get made.

In effective product organizations, decisions are made by the people with the most relevant context, using explicit criteria. The criteria aren't hidden in the leader's head. They're written down, crystal clear, and often formalized as design principles—specific guidelines that empower teams to make decisions consistently.
And if there's disagreement, you argue about the criteria or how to measure them, not about who has the best intuition.

This doesn't mean leaders don't have opinions or direction. But their job isn't to have the vision. It's to create the conditions where good decisions happen consistently, regardless of who's in the room.

Practically, this means:

• Defining problems clearly. Not "We need to improve onboarding" but "Users who don't complete setup within 48 hours have a 70% higher churn rate. We need to get them to value faster."
• Setting measurable success criteria. Not "Make users happy" but "Reduce time-to-first-value from 3 days to 24 hours."
• Establishing decision rights. Not "Everything goes through me" but "Engineering owns technical approach, Product owns problem selection and scope, Design owns interaction model."

When these systems are in place, the team moves without waiting for the visionary to have another epiphany. That's not quiet leadership or servant leadership. It's just effective leadership.