Ever feel like the relationship between a Founder/CEO and a Head of Product is… One awkward meeting away from a Netflix drama?
At Business of Software Europe 2025, Melissa Appel delivered a crucial guide for founders and CEOs titled “The Founders’ Guide to What Product Teams Need”, focusing on transforming potentially adversarial relationships into highly successful collaborations.
She opened with the story of two goats meeting on a narrow bridge, neither backing down, both falling into the ravine.
Sound familiar? Founders pushing last-minute ideas… Product leaders refusing to build unvalidated features… Both sides frustrated… Nobody wins.
Melissa’s talk is the antidote. She breaks down FOCUS, a framework every founder and product leader should honestly tattoo somewhere visible.
F: Foundational Enablement (Psychological Safety)
Foundational Enablement revolves around building a team culture free from fear. Melissa emphasized that holding teams to high, yet wrongly applied, standards can be counterproductive.
The Pitfalls of Fear:
- Strictly enforcing delivery estimates often leads teams to provide shorter, unrealistic estimates they know they won’t meet, leading to missed deadlines.
- Publicly reprimanding mistakes causes people to fear making decisions, leading to delays and stagnation as junior staff wait for executives to decide.
- Holding teams to 100% of goals leads to aiming low and avoiding valuable stretch goals.
Instead, leaders must establish psychological safety: the removal of the fear of repercussions for stating an opinion, sharing feelings, or making a mistake.
This is key to driving scientific experiments and innovation. Melissa suggests shifting language, such as asking “talk me through that decision” instead of “why did you do that?” to foster open communication. This mindset is encapsulated in the retrospective philosophy: “everyone did the best job they could given what they knew at the time”.
O: Objectives (Focus and Alignment)
Ambitious goals are necessary, but too many objectives dilute focus. Melissa shared a staggering example of a company with 200 people that had 57 ‘must-win battles,’ resulting in divided attention and misaligned executive priorities.
Founders must make tough decisions to choose just one to three key objectives for the company. To achieve this alignment, Melissa recommends “mining for conflict” early, perhaps using tools like “challenge rounds” in meetings, where participants are given permission to disagree or state reasons why a priority won’t work.
This objective-setting aligns perfectly with the concept of Framing highlighted by Ryan Singer (also presented at BoS), which involves narrowing down the problem and focusing on the demand side (the problem we are solving), rather than immediately jumping to the supply side (the solution).
C & U: Customers and Understanding What Works
Melissa stressed that the customer is not always right about the solution they request.
Customers often ask for specific features, but when built, these features may not actually solve their underlying problem. To grow successfully, businesses must avoid building custom solutions for every new client, which often delays product use and frustrates customers.
Founders and product teams should instead focus on finding scalable problems. This requires asking “why” (in a non-judgmental way) and physically getting out of the office to observe customers at work, a concept known as Nihito (Nothing Important Happens In The Office).
Once objectives are set, teams must measure outcomes, not just outputs. Melissa used the example of “striking fear in the hearts of the living” as the desired outcome of boos, not simply the output (the number of times “boo” is said). Measurement should occur before, during, and after development to estimate value and track success.
Melissa warned against the effects of Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. For instance, if the metric is sessions per user (to reduce churn), teams might simply make users log in more frequently without delivering real value. This is mitigated by using guardrail metrics (such as length of session) to ensure quality of engagement.
S: Switch If Needed (Prioritization)
While adaptability is key, constantly changing direction is detrimental. Too frequent switching leads to low morale, half-finished projects, and team “whiplash”.
When faced with a new, urgent idea, founders must prioritize based on estimated impact and technical feasibility. Critical considerations before switching focus include:
- Cost of Delay: What happens if we don’t do this for six months?
- Opportunity Cost: What are we currently working on that we will lose if we pivot?
- Dependencies: Will dropping the current project cause a domino effect on the work of other teams?
And the best part? Melissa ties it all back to one core truth: Great product teams aren’t built on brilliance. They’re built on clarity, trust and ruthless focus.
If you’re a founder, CEO, CPO, or anyone who’s ever sat in a tense product meeting wondering “Why is this so hard?”, you need this talk.
Watch Melissa Appel’s full BoS Europe 2025 full talk.