“The best engineers can toggle back and forth between manager and IC roles. Make sure your technical foundation and fundamental skills are solid enough to pull that off.”

A bunch of very relevant guidelines of how to setup a product team at various stages of a company from the CPO of Credit Karma.

There are the leaders that — like samurai — embrace death. They see their role as protecting and empowering the people below them who do the real work and it’s an honor to serve the team’s interests even if things do not go well for them personally.