How Great CEOs Stay in the Details

Most founders lose quality as they scale. Here's how the best ones maintain it.

Every founder who's reached product market fit has been told they need to get out of the details.

The logic is that spending time in the details will fill up your calendar, overwhelm you with decisions, and make you less able to make strategic choices.

Initially, stepping out of the details can feel liberating. But it often doesn't end well.

Functional leaders go off in different directions. Bad decisions get made. And the overall product and customer experience becomes increasingly disjointed.

Despite the advice, tech CEOs who successfully scale their businesses to hundreds of millions in revenue stay in the details.

I know this first hand as a coach to some of the fastest-growing companies in tech.

This essay is about how they do it.

This Is Not How Most Companies Are Run

The traditional way companies scale is to create divisions and manage them by the numbers. Set budgets and targets, review every quarter, and focus on hitting the plan.

Management by numbers is a laissez-faire philosophy:

'I give you the target, you get the result, and I don't care how you do it.'

Hire great people, and get out of their way.

But the CEOs of some of the most enduring tech companies of the last two decades don't manage this way. They stay in the details.  

They believe the how matters as much as the what.

What follows is drawn from their operating styles and from what I've seen working with CEOs scaling past $100M in annual revenue.

Some will read this as micromanagement or control-freakism. That's fair—it's not for everyone. My goal is simply to lay out the method so you can decide for yourself.

Step One: Set The Core Company Narratives

The inspiration for this style of management comes from the newspaper industry.

Every newspaper has an editor, and the editor has two key roles:

• Ensuring all content is appropriate for the audience.
• Maintaining the highest standards of journalism.

Their name goes on every publication. They're the quality seal. If standards slip, the buck stops with them.

An editor’s job isn’t purely objective—it requires judgment. There is no unbiased newspaper, and there are no unbiased editors.

As a scale-up CEO, your role is Chief Editor. Except your role extends beyond the content.

The quality of everything that goes out the door—product features, code, sales messages, hiring decisions—is your responsibility.

That means being really clear on two things:

1. The narratives that position your company for success
2. Your standards for quality

Most people think of positioning as a statement about customers. But CEOs have four narratives to align simultaneously:

• The product narrative—the value you're creating for customers
• The focus narrative—what's in and out of scope for your team
• The team narrative—how you work and who you hire
• The finance narrative—the financial opportunity you're building toward

Your job is to provide clarity over these four narratives and help your teams interpret them in their day-to-day work. Without that clarity, the details you're reviewing have no north star to be judged against.

Step Two: Design The Review Schedule

If you want to be in the details, you need to review the work.

Most people experience reviews as a tax—an empty ritual where managers poke and prod and add to the to-do list.

But that's a failure of how reviews are run, not a problem with reviews themselves. Done well, accountability is a service, not a tax.

Brian Chesky is an example of this in practice.

As Airbnb grew, Brian became frustrated by misaligned teams and sloppy quality standards.

Some teams went as far as banning him from reviewing their work in the name of moving faster. But rather than creating speed, it just created more misalignment.

With a goal to unite the company and help it move fast again, Brian committed to being the Chief Editor and reviewing the work himself.

He quickly realised there were too many projects to review. So instead of spreading himself thin, he ruthlessly cut projects that weren't in the top 20%.

"The role of the CEO is to make every detail perfect, but to limit the number of details."—Jack Dorsey

Next, Brian created a review schedule for each project—weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly—and then followed it.

Brian’s approach to reviewing the work reflects his passion for design. His reviews focus on product flows, visual design, and narrative.

However, every CEO will review work differently, depending on their unique expertise and values.

Elon Musk is fanatical about engineering, so he focuses his review time on the biggest technical bottleneck in the business at any given moment.

One of my CEOs created a unique system in which leaders can proactively ask him for reviews asynchronously.

But the most effective CEOs have a few things in common. They approach reviews as thought partners, not as critics. They're looking for places to clarify and simplify, not expand the scope or catch people out.

Step Three: Meet in Groups, Not in Siloes

Most CEOs review work in a series of separate meetings with functional leaders. Often these happen 1-1 or in small groups.

However, this approach takes a lot of the CEO's time, and creates parallel conversations where misalignment can creep in.

The best CEOs review the work in larger groups, often with their entire leadership team present.

Steve Jobs spent three hours every week reviewing everything in the company with his senior team.

Jensen Huang has a similar practice. He gives feedback in front of all his executives—not because he wants to make examples of people, but because, as he says, "Why should only one person learn from a mistake when everyone can?"

The goal of the group review isn't just to improve the project at hand. It's to build shared consciousness across the team.

The CEO acts as a teacher. Every piece of feedback is an opportunity to illustrate a core narrative, clarify an important detail, and learn together as a team.

This time spent reviewing work as a group changes how the team works on its own. They start to anticipate the CEO's feedback and hold each other to the same standards. The CEO's taste becomes distributed across the organisation.

And when this happens, you get your time back.

Making It Work

There are three steps to staying in the details:

1. Set The Core Company Narratives
2. Design The Review Schedule
3. Meet In Groups, Not Siloes

Early-stage startups instinctively operate this way—and it’s easy when the whole company fits in a single room.

But as I've shown, this approach can also work at scale, if you’re systematic about it.

If you managed by numbers and your teams have significant autonomy, expect a tough transition. Brian Chesky said the migration took two years of pain.

Many of his leaders left—voluntarily or otherwise—because they wanted more autonomy than this model allows.

That's a real cost. This approach will filter out talented people who prefer more traditional management. It also limits your ability to step away.

The tradeoff is a company that moves fast because everyone's rowing the same direction. That can create an unbeatable customer experience.

The CEOs who build this shared consciousness at scale outperform the ones who manage by numbers alone, especially in tech.

And the companies they create are harder to replicate.

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Related Reading: 

• Is your startup burning cash on the wrong channels? Discover the distribution strategy framework that separates winners from failures.
• Are your exec meetings all talk and no action? Learn the management meeting structure that top-performing teams use to stay aligned.
• Are you confusing being busy with being effective? Use this framework to understand what CEOs should actually spend their time on.

Originally published on February 18th, 2026