Keith Lucas is a startup advisor, author, and leader who specializes in building high-impact teams. In this episode with Product Momentum, Keith delivers a master class on leadership, team building, culture, values, and motivation. Our conversation is especially relevant in the context of transitioning from a technical individual contributor to product team leader in high-tech organizations.

Here’s what we learned:

IC to Team Lead: Navigating the Mindset Shift

The transition from hands-on IC to leader of a highly technical team requires a mindset shift from “me to we.” The transition requires an adjustment of priorities from solely outcomes-based to team health, inspiration, and mental well-being.

“A simple trick I use, when I wake up every day my first thoughts are, is the team on a good path? Are they unblocked? Are they inspired and mentally healthy? Are they all in a good place to have impact? Knowing those things helps reduce friction on the team and increases the odds of our success.”

Two ‘New Leader Archetypes’ – Overcoming Team Dysfunction

Keith discusses two types of leaders who struggle in their new roles. The first is the hands-on leader who has fallen into the oxymoronic trap of trying to “micromanage at scale.” The other is the visionary talent-oriented leader whose eagerness to succeed leads to the team’s being focused on too many things. The hands-on person is just trying to get stuff done by being effective, efficient, Keith says, while the talent person is committed to autonomy and building a team that scales.

The goal is to put both of those value sets together. For the hands-on leader, that means creating regular touch points with your team. For the talent-oriented leader, it’s about closing loops while showing the team how to go from vision to delivering real outcomes. “In both cases,” Keith adds, “use a regular cadence for when you get together to talk about progress, challenges, and course correction.” This approach creates the right kind of trust — a trust in the system that you have opportunities to contribute in a healthy way.

Value-Based Culture: The Foundation of Decisionmaking

Keith thinks about culture as “the team’s operating system.” And the foundation of that operating system is the team’s values — i.e., their standards of behavior.

“The team’s values are really the foundation of the operating system,” Keith says. “If the system is to be reinforced, then decisions about who gets hired, promoted, and retained must be informed by those values.” If that’s not happening, Keith adds, you end up with a culture that may be codified, but never truly realized.

Here’s some more key takeaways:

• 04:58 – Moving from chief IC to chief team builder
• 07:32 – Micromanaging at scale is an oxymoron
• 13:08 – Values: embrace them, socialize them, apply them
• 18:07 – Vision Doc: The anti-job description
• 20:21 – Start with Goals; Structure will follow

As the author of Impact: How to Inspire, Align, and Amplify Innovative Teams, Keith Lucas distills years of experience at the intersection of data, storytelling, and strategy into a practical framework that helps leaders move from player/coach to true team builder while avoiding common scaling pitfalls like diminishing impact, productivity loss, culture dilution, and disempowerment.

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The Product Momentum team first met Oji Udezue following his keynote at INDUSTRY 2025. And we just knew we had to have him on the pod. Oji is a highly skilled product leader whose CV includes companies like Calendly, Atlassian, and Microsoft. In addition, he co-authored (with wife, Ezinne Udezue) Building Rocket Ships, Product Management for High-Growth Companies a manual for product leaders, product managers, and executives who want to build faster, better, and more profitably (raise your hand if that describes you!).

In this episode, we begin broadly by discussing the evolving role of product management in the era of AI. We then pivot quickly, drilling into some of the new challenges that require today’s product leaders to:

• Readjust to the accelerated pace of product development in today’s AI-empowered world (the three-speed problem),
• Re-emphasize product management’s core principles that remain constant, and
• Reconsider what counts as essential skills for today’s product manager.

AI’s Impact and the Three-Speed Problem

Companies do three things to build great technology products, Oji says: customer science, construction/development, and go-to-market. Each step on this cycle moves at its own pace. Before AI, engineering speed was the process bottleneck. But with AI-driven automation, construction has become much faster, creating new challenges in synchronizing these three phases.

“We’re all going to spend a lot of time balancing that equation,” Oji adds, “finding the practices, the team structure, the team ratios, the new AI tools that help us keep this thing fast but then speed up customer science and GTM.“

Essential Skills for Today’s ‘Renaissance PM’

The AI transformation calls on product managers to add new arrows to their quiver of skills – e.g., curiosity, humility, agency among them. In the same way we transitioned from a pre-internet to internet environment, Oji adds, AI “requires brand new thinking.”

But the old skills still apply: “These are worth bringing up because a lot of PMs don’t have them: communication, creativity, the ability to ship, and leadership – being the kind of person people want to follow – all of that has to do with judgment. The role is evolving into that of a “renaissance PM” who blends traditional skills with new AI-related capabilities.

Evolution of the PM Role

Has the PM role evolved so much that the skills required to perform it are now preeminent to the role itself? Is that where AI is taking us?

“I’ve always thought the skills…the mindset…was way more important,” Oji offers. “The title just gives us a way to put it in a box. The title is nothing without the skills. That’s why I wrote the book. Because I want more people to have the skillsets” required to succeed in this new world order.

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For the past 20 years, Teresa Torres has championed the cause of product discovery. We’ve made progress, she says, but there are plenty of companies and teams out there who don’t know much about their customers – and still think they have all the answers. Is AI exacerbating the problem?

In this episode, Teresa returns to Product Momentum taking us on a rollercoaster ride that begins in a pre-ChatGPT world full of hopeful optimism in which product leaders were (slowly, steadily) recognizing the value good Discovery brings – but then spirals through phases of grief as AI-powered Delivery seems to have reclaimed our attention.

As you’ll hear, Teresa remains bullish on AI. But she’s also concerned that AI is pulling us in the wrong direction, making it easier and faster to build and, thus, putting even more emphasis on Delivery. Ever the optimist, Teresa believes that product builders can use the same technology that created today’s predicament to help us course-correct, refocusing our attention on high-quality Discovery practices.

Here’s a few of our key takeaways:

AI Might Be Helping Us Build the Wrong Thing

In our earlier episode with Teresa (58 / Innovate with Product Discovery, published shortly before the release her Continuous Discovery Habits, a must read for anyone in the software space), Teresa talked about how the product community under-emphasized Discovery and over-emphasized Delivery. It was a time highlighted by a gnawing anxiety that we were building the wrong stuff. Since then, the trend was moving back toward a focus on Discovery, Teresa says, until AI changed the trajectory again.

“AI is making it easier and faster to build software,” Teresa says. “But as we do, we’re once again putting even more emphasis on Delivery and forgetting to ask whether we’re building the right thing?”

AI’s Double-Edged Sword: Broad Participation vs. Product Coherence

Teams across the organization are now contributing to software development – a positive trend that Teresa calls awesome.

“We want to empower product teams and draw people closer to the customer to impact the product in positive ways,” Teresa says. “But it’s equally terrifying: who’s creating product coherence, and how do we make sure [each team] is serving the market and not their own specific needs?”

The Opportunity Solution Tree: A Structure Of Discovery That Doesn’t Change

With the Opportunity Solution Tree, Teresa provides teams with “a simple underlying structure that gives us a mental representation” of the interaction between what success looks like (outcome), our customers and their needs (opportunity space), and impact on our customers and our business.

“Do I think that’s ever gonna change?,” Teresa asks. “I don’t. We’re always gonna have to create value for our business. We’re always going to have to create value for our customers. Hopefully, we are doing one thing to accomplish both – not doing competing things.”

As AI enables more people to be makers, teams and organizations will learn new skills and allow everyone who wants, to contribute while still delivering a coherent product that serves their users.

“I actually think that’s gonna be net positive in the long run,” Teresa concludes.

You can catch even more of Teresa’s insights by checking out her podcast, Just Now Possible, which releases new episodes every Thursday. And, beginning this month (Jan. 2026), Teresa and Product Talk are launching a new course called, Business Fundamentals.

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