An early stage startup is an empowered product team, I would say. I would never found a company, take on the CEO role, and then hand off responsibility for cust

An early stage startup is an empowered product team, I would say. I would never found a company, take on the CEO role, and then hand off responsibility for customer value and business viability to a newly hired “empowered product manager”. That makes no sense to me. For a later stage company I fully agree with this model though. I tend to think of these “empowered product teams” as sort of internal startups, each with a “mini-CEO” and a “mini-CTO”.