Getting Into The Details
Why Operating At The Right Level Of Detail Matters When Building Products
Details provide vital context, helping us make smarter decisions. When product leaders are deeply involved and interested in every aspect of product development, their teams are more likely to deliver great products. Being in the details is about understanding the mechanics that influence outcomes and responding strategically to key signals. Operating only on high-level information leads to missing critical gaps. However, with a strong grasp of specifics, we can anticipate challenges, address root causes, and move away from reactive firefighting. This can increase the likelihood of success while minimizing the risk and the consequences of failure.
How To Get Into The Details
Uncover The Right Information
There are a lot of tasks involved in building a product. It’s not feasible or productive to try to know and control every detail. You need to adjust your focus deliberately to be effective. Therefore, it’s important to know where to look. A good place to start is asking, “What’s not working? Where do we need improvements and fixes?” Then, hone in on the critical areas where you need more information. For example, if the team constantly encounters bugs, you need to dig deeper to identify, understand, and address the core technical challenges causing them. Diving into the specifics gives you insight into processes and their outputs. This helps you surface important details that explain why teams are underperforming or failing to deliver.
Ask The Right Questions
Once you know where you need to be more involved, you must gather more context on those areas. Ask deep and detailed questions to understand what’s going on, what's working, and what's not. For example, how are we completing a specific task? How are we making decisions around that task? How do those decisions affect the output and the outcomes? What could we do differently to achieve the same result? Etc. Targeted questions help you and your teams critically examine issues, challenge assumptions, uncover blind spots, and explore alternatives. The questions you ask signal what matters and shape your team’s thinking.
A useful tactic is asking the team to present their strategies for dealing with a problem area you have identified. Ask them questions to evaluate their ideas and offer suggestions to refine their thinking. This approach ensures team members don’t feel you are stomping on their work, but rather partnering with them to problem solve. It also gives you greater clarity on what needs to happen, so you can offer more specific guidance and support. When you consistently ask your team tough questions, they get familiar with the rigor and depth of thinking expected, which improves the quality of their work.
As leaders, probably the most important role we can play is asking the right questions and focusing on the right problems. If you're focusing on the wrong questions, you're not really providing the leadership you should.
— Liz Wiseman, Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
Make The Right Decisions
You need context to make strategic decisions. Getting into the details helps you gain a richer perspective on what’s going on, so you can figure out what needs to happen—what actions you need to take to support, accelerate, or unblock the work. It allows you to identify the levers to pull to get better results. It also clarifies whether major or minor course corrections are necessary and where these need to happen specifically. This improves the quality of the decisions you make.
You could argue that hiring smart people can eliminate the need for all this. Since competent people can be trusted to make good decisions. If this works for your organization, then that’s great. However, in reality, it often takes tremendous effort, focus, and coordination to get people to work towards a shared goal. Without the right systems and oversight, smart, well-intentioned people can still end up pursuing diverging and even conflicting goals. You can’t steer a boat (or get very far) if people are rowing in opposite directions. So, it can be incredibly helpful to have leaders deeply involved in the work because they can course-correct as necessary.
How Is This Different From Micromanagement
Getting into the details is about empowering teams to improve, not controlling every action.
Last year, there was a lot of interest in the concept of ‘founder mode,’ which was a case for leaders more involved in what their teams are doing. Getting into the details helps them evaluate if people are doing a good job, manage the work more effectively, and, ultimately, produce better results. However, many people didn’t see the difference between this approach and micromanagement. While they appear similar on the surface, the intents and consequences are different.
Micromanagement is about telling people exactly what to do and closely controlling their actions and decisions. This is often frustrating and draining for both leaders and their team members. It undermines autonomy and erodes confidence. Getting into the details is about gaining context on what people are doing and making strategic course corrections, not dictating every step. When leaders are involved at a deep level, they can shape the team’s thinking in the right direction. This helps teams get better at executing, without taking their autonomy away.
As an example, here are two ways of training someone to shoot an arrow:
Option 1: You tell them exactly what to do for every shot (raise/lower their arms, move left/right, increase/decrease force, etc.). You might even physically move their body into position. They learn to get better at following instructions and eventually successfully hit the target. However, they don’t know how to adjust if the target moves, so they wait for more instructions. While it might take them less time to hit the target initially, they become dependent on your supervision long-term.
Option 2: You observe their technique and then show how you shoot an arrow. You explain how you assess distance, align your shoulders, adjust your aim, etc. You ask them questions (e.g., “What would you do differently?”) and offer guidance (e.g., “Try changing XYZ”). They learn to make their own adjustments and eventually successfully hit the target. Even if the target moves, they can still hit it. While it might take them longer to hit the target initially, they are not dependent on you long-term.
How Can This Improve Productivity
It helps your team improve their decision-making, so they can work more effectively.
When you are involved in the details, you have context on every decision your team makes. So, help them understand what you want to achieve and how: Be explicit about which factors matter and how you evaluated them. Also, clearly indicate which decisions need your approval or input. This helps the team understand how they need to approach the work to be effective, even when you are not in the room. Over time, this creates muscle memory, helping them meet expectations more consistently.
You need to focus on building your team’s judgment, not replacing it. This ensures that they can figure things out, even without you standing over their shoulder. Micromanagement is simply impractical at scale. It becomes increasingly difficult as the team and the volume of work grow. It’s also counterproductive to have people waiting for your instruction or approval for every single thing they have to do.
My philosophy is you start in the details. You’re involved in every single thing. You hire great people, and you’re in all their details. Over time, once they develop muscle memory and they prove that they understand the system, then you can gradually let go.
— Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb
Conclusion
Leaders should model the level of rigor that they expect from their team.
People often assume that leaders have to be at a distance from the work. However, the best leaders don’t disappear behind closed doors. They stay connected to the specifics of what their teams do. They pay attention to how the work gets done, not just what gets done. They actively sharpen their team’s thinking and support them in creating the outcomes they care about most. They help them become more thoughtful, thorough, and effective. This creates and sustains momentum, so teams don’t just move fast, but move in the right direction.