Intent-based leadership in modern product teams

In 1999, David Marquet took command of the USS Santa Fe — the worst-performing submarine in the US Navy. Twelve months later, it was the best. He did not achieve this by making better decisions. He achieved it by making fewer.

His approach — which he later called Intent-Based Leadership — is one of the most useful frameworks for modern product organisations. Not because product teams are like submarines, but because both environments share the same fundamental challenge: decisions need to be made quickly, by people close to the information, in conditions of significant uncertainty.

The problem with traditional leadership

Traditional leadership models assume that good decisions are made at the top. Leaders are selected for their judgement, given authority over their domain, and expected to make the calls.

This works reasonably well in stable, predictable environments. When the work is routine and the environment is known, concentrating decision-making authority at the top is efficient.

But modern product development is neither stable nor predictable. The customer is complex. The technology is evolving. The market is shifting. The people closest to these realities — product managers, designers, engineers, researchers — often have information that never reaches leadership in time to inform decisions.

When decision authority is concentrated at the top in this environment, the organisation slows down, good information is ignored, and talented people leave because their judgement is never trusted.

What Intent-Based Leadership looks like

The core principle is simple: push authority to where the information is.

In practice, this means:

Leaders communicate intent, not instructions. Instead of telling teams what to do, they explain what success looks like and why it matters. Teams then make their own decisions about how to achieve it.

Teams brief up. Instead of asking permission, team members share their thinking and planned actions — giving leaders an opportunity to course-correct without creating a decision bottleneck.

The language changes. Instead of “request permission to…” it becomes “I intend to… and here is my reasoning…” This subtle shift moves decision authority while maintaining accountability.

Leaders develop people’s thinking, not just their skills. The highest-value thing a leader can do is help their team members think more clearly — not give them better instructions.

Why this matters for product organisations specifically

Product teams face a particular version of this challenge. The decisions that matter most — what to build, how to prioritise, which customer problem to solve — require information that is distributed across many people: customers, researchers, engineers, data analysts, salespeople.

No single leader can have all of this information. And even if they could, processing it fast enough to stay ahead of the market is impossible.

Intent-based leadership creates the conditions where good decisions can happen anywhere in the organisation — made by the person closest to the relevant information, guided by clear intent from leadership.

The organisations that implement this well are faster, more innovative, and significantly more effective at retaining talented people. Because talented people, almost universally, want their judgement to matter.

The question is not whether this approach works. It does. The question is whether your leadership team is willing to genuinely let go of the comfort of making all the important decisions themselves.

That is harder than it sounds.