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The cult of personality is always an enticing idea, it's pretty much certain that Jim Keller had a stellar team to work with in all of those places. That being
by belval 3y ago
The cult of personality is always an enticing idea, it's pretty much certain that Jim Keller had a stellar team to work with in all of those places.
That being said, even a strong team is still usually only as good as its leadership. You can have all the great ideas in the world, but if the organisation does not allow you to pursue them (or on the other extreme, allows everyone to work on what they think is best) you will still fail to execute.
At the end of the day you need someone to make the correct decisions every step of the way.
- toast0 3y agoOne thing I gathered from interviews is that Jim Keller is good at identifying good people already on the teams and inspiring and working with them to set the priorities and goals to make a better product. The team that built Zen isn't that much different than the team that built Bulldozer, but Zen is a much better product. He's also pretty good at spreading the credit around. Having a good grasp of everything in the whole stack is obviously helpful for setting priorities and goals, and there's a lot of leadership skills involved in getting people to work together and follow the organizational goals. Having a track record of success is obviously helpful, too.