“Someone that rose through the ranks” IME, being able to actually do the work involved is the single best filter to reduce the risk of “idea people.” People w

“Someone that rose through the ranks” IME, being able to actually do the work involved is the single best filter to reduce the risk of “idea people.” People with “great ideas” who also previously did similar work themselves can be hugely valuable. People with “great ideas” who lack first-hand knowledge of the tasks involved are usually not worth following. Usually. The product management role comes to mind as one where we see this rule playing out far too often. However, when I was at Netflix I saw a handful of notable exceptions. One of the Product Managers for recommendation algorithms was an expert at math but not engineering. That person had excellent ideas and was incredibly effective even though they needed a team to build their ideas. Another Product Manager I worked with also lacked an engineering background but was nonetheless very effective as a partner in projects we did together when I was an engineering manager. (In general, I think Netflix has some of the best PMs around.) Elsewhere, I’ve seen PMs routinely fail by promoting infeasible schedules, overreaching into the engineering agendas, or discounting engineers’ ideas—- the type of mistakes that are easy to make when someone lacks first-hand development experience. The PMs who were the exceptions to the rule made up for their lack of first-hand engineering knowledge by years of experience “embedded” into software teams where they could build their sensitivity to engineering issues, which later allowed them to easily defer to engineers and eng. managers when those issues arose. They were also eager to roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty, and get into the details with you to understand problems. Infinite curiosity but quick to delegate and defer to specialists. Those kind of “idea people” are awesome to work with. BTW, I’ve also worked with plenty of great “idea people” who were engineers. They are awesome at creating ideas, refining them, AND building them. For an especially entertaining example, check out the Stuff Made Here channel on YouTube —- here’s a person with ideas great enough to attract tens of millions of views AND the electrical, mechanical, and software engineering skills to turn his ideas into reality. https://youtube.com/c/StuffMadeHere https://youtube.com/c/StuffMadeHere