Prioritize needs over wants

As the HeartThis CEO, I constantly struggle with the conflict between what I need to do vs what I want to do. I spent most of my career as a software engineer and/or product manager, so I have a natural affinity for rolling up my sleeves and getting dirty building product. As CEO, that’s in direct conflict with my core priorities of setting the company vision, securing funding, and hiring and retaining a great team. As much as I want to slap on headphones and crank out a new feature, it’s my duty to set the team up for a long-term win. Focusing on hiring a new crack engineer who can do dev work full-time is a much higher leverage use of my time. Coding is a want, but recruiting is a need.

Similarly, while fundraising, it was painful to note the decreased speed of product development. I kept asking myself “what could we have accomplished if we spent these two months head-down building product rather than sitting in meetings talking to investors?” In reality, that was the ultimate short-term thinking. It’s true that fundraising slowed recruiting and product development down substantially, but it ultimately gave us the cash necessary to go out and hire top-notch talent.

A good leader has to learn to trust their team and stay focused on doing what needs to be done for the good of the company, even when it doesn’t perfectly align with what they want to do. I suspect this is one of the harder leadership lessons to learn for people who come from “hands-on” positions like engineering and design. I do still tend to do a small amount of dev work each week, but now it’s typically my lowest priority task that only gets addressed after everything else has been taken care of.