Greatness Is Not About You

I used to walk into rooms believing my job was to have the best answer.

Twenty-plus years in technology and product leadership has a way of teaching you otherwise — not all at once, but in moments. Quiet ones, usually. The kind where someone on your team says something that changes everything, and you realize the only reason they said it was because you finally stopped talking.

That's the moment David Marquet's work lives in.

If you haven't seen the Inno-Versity animated short on Greatness, I'd encourage you to pause and watch it before you read another word. Marquet commanded the USS Santa Fe — a nuclear submarine ranked last in performance in the entire US Navy. He arrived with deep expertise in a different submarine. He literally didn't know the systems. And rather than fake his way through, he made a counterintuitive decision: he stopped giving answers.

The Santa Fe became the highest-performing submarine in the fleet.

Marquet's insight is deceptively simple: greatness is not what you do — it's what you unlock in the people around you. The leader's role is not to be the smartest person in the room. It's to build the conditions where the smartest answers can surface from the people closest to the work.

"Great leaders are servant leaders. Their success is entirely based on helping others succeed first."

This lands differently when you're building AI-powered products in high-stakes environments.

At CTS Partners, we're building ARIA — an agentic AI platform designed to compress M&A due diligence cycles for mid-market private equity firms. The deals are complex. The timelines are brutal. The pressure to have answers — right now — is constant. And I've learned that the leaders who perform best in those environments are not the ones with the most opinions. They're the ones who've learned to multiply the people around them.

I see this in every great PE Managing Partner I've worked with. The ones who close the best deals don't dominate their diligence teams — they ask better questions. They create space for the financial analyst who spotted something unusual in the QoE to speak up. They build cultures where a junior associate can stop a process because something doesn't feel right — and be thanked for it rather than silenced.

Marquet calls this the leader-leader model. Not leader-follower, where authority flows in one direction and the people closest to the work are simply executing. In a leader-leader model, everyone is expected to think. Everyone owns the outcome. Competence and clarity replace compliance and command.

Marty Cagan talks about this in the product context. He draws a sharp line between empowered teams — who are trusted with outcomes — and feature factories, who are handed a list and told to ship it. The difference in what those teams build is enormous. But the deeper difference is in who those teams become. Empowered teams develop judgment. Feature factories develop dependency.

Marquet would recognize that immediately.

For me, the practical application shows up most clearly in discovery. Teresa Torres' continuous discovery framework is built on a similar foundation: don't enter the conversation to validate your hypothesis. Enter with genuine curiosity. The discipline of staying open — of not deciding before you've listened — is harder than it sounds when you've been at this for twenty years and you think you know the answer.

But the best product decisions I've made in my career didn't originate with me. They came from someone on the team who felt safe enough to challenge the direction — to say quietly, 'I think we're solving the wrong problem.'

That only happens when the leader has learned the discipline of stepping back. Not stepping away — stepping back. Present, invested, accountable. But not occupying all the space.

Marquet's definition of greatness — competence combined with clarity of purpose — is ultimately a servant's definition. The competence you're developing isn't your own mastery. It's your ability to see and cultivate the mastery around you. And the clarity you're providing isn't your vision imposed on others. It's the shared understanding that lets each person move with intention.

I think the AI era makes this more urgent, not less. As we integrate intelligent systems into high-stakes workflows, the leaders who thrive won't be the ones who control the most. They'll be the ones who've built teams capable of directing, questioning, and improving those systems — teams who own the outcomes at every layer.

Greatness, it turns out, is not about you.

It never was.

Where in your leadership right now are you filling space that someone on your team is ready to own? What would it look like to give it to them?

Leah C. Jochim is a Product Executive, AI Strategist, Founder, and Board Director. She leads product development for ARIA, an AI-powered M&A intelligence platform at Convergence Technology Solutions. Explore her work at leahcjochim.com.

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