How We Build Product Teams at Owner

It all starts with the bar you set for talent. You have to model your team after the most elite, high-performing groups in the world.

The Navy SEALs are elite. To even be considered, you have to pass extreme physical and mental tests. Out of ~20,000 Navy candidates each year, only 1000 make it to SEAL training, and fewer than 200 graduate.

The Delta Force is the elite of the elite. Roughly 1,700 special forces members (SEALs, Rangers, etc) apply each year. Fewer than 30 make it to the "Operator Training Course". Of those, most drop out or fail — leaving ~6 people who make it through. That's ~0.35%.

Thats the type of talent bar we aim for at Owner. Our application-to-offer rate is ~0.22%. We would take the 6 Delta Force operators over 20,000 SEALs any day of the week.

We set that bar because small teams only work when every person is exceptional. Even one average performer can break the model:

1. Everyone is on the critical path. One weak link becomes a bottleneck.

2. Judgement replaces process. This only works if judgement is excellent.

3. Performance compounds. Exceptional people raise the bar. Mediocrity lowers it.

This is even more true with AI, since AI helps the best people most. When someone with exceptional judgment uses AI well, their leverage explodes.

Put simply: If you want to build a Delta Force, every individual must be truly exceptional.

Here's an example from Owner: One of our engineers solo-built our restaurant mobile app generator in under 3 months. It now powers 6,000+ apps across the US. That same engineer, alongside 3 others, built our POS from zero to live in under 8 weeks.

At a typical company, these products would take ~10-12 months and teams of 6–8 engineers.

Extraordinary companies require extraordinary people. Everything else is downstream.

Aren't the best companies in the world ... large?

Yes — the best companies in the world are large.

But they don't scale by turning one team into a massive organization. They scale by building many small, autonomous teams.

You can see this in the best companies. Amazon is famous for its two-pizza teams. Shopify has maintained small pods even as they've scaled to thousands of employees.

They understand that you can scale a company without scaling coordination.

The challenge is this model is fragile. As companies grow, product surface area and complexity increase. The natural response is to hire specialists and organize around them.

So instead of teams owning outcomes end-to-end, you get functional teams — frontend, backend, infra.

It feels efficient. But in optimizing for efficiency, you break ownership. Shipping anything meaningful requires coordination across multiple teams. Priorities compete. Roadmaps collide. This is where speed goes to die.

You can see this in companies that slowed as they scaled.

Take Twitter. Before Elon acquired it, the company had ~7,500 employees and was widely criticized for slow product velocity. Core features took years to ship. Simple changes required coordination across layers of teams.

After the acquisition, Elon cut roughly 70–80% of the company.

Whatever you think about how that was handled, one thing became clear: The product didn't collapse. It sped up.

Features started shipping faster. The team operated with far fewer people and far fewer coordination layers.

Why? Because the unit of execution got smaller again.

Elon flattened layers of management, pushed for small teams with direct ownership, and expected engineers to own full systems end-to-end.

His implicit belief was that Twitter didn't need 7,500 people. It needed a few hundred highly effective builders.

Twitter had grown large — but in the process, it lost something critical: small-team execution.

The best companies avoid this trap. They don't need to stay small. But they do need to keep teams small and self-contained.

Long term, I believe companies in the AI era will look very different. You'll be able to build something the size of Shopify or Block with a fraction of the people.

But even then — you likely won't get there with one team. You'll get there with many small, elite ones.

Elon Musk famously said that building a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.

He's not wrong - at times it really does feel like that.

The majority of companies don't die because of competition or a lack of funding. They die because it's f^*%ing hard and their teams lose faith and energy.

That's why energy is so important - it's literally the fuel that teams operate on. And it's what separates good teams from exceptional ones.

Good energy matters on every team. But on small teams, its effects are amplified. There's nowhere to hide and energy is contagious. One person's mindset ripples through the entire system.

Beyond talent, I've found that energy is the most important ingredient in high-performing teams. And yet, it's almost never talked about.

Over the years, I've made "good energy" more concrete by distilling it into a few qualities that I can hire for and reinforce with my teams:

1. Missionaries, not mercenaries
2. Above the line, not below
3. Cup fillers, not drainers

When a team is full of people with these qualities, the energy compounds, momentum builds, and the entire system starts to feel alive.

1. Missionaries, not mercenaries

Mercenaries show up asking "what can I get"? Missionaries ask "what can I give"?

The Delta Force is a team of missionaries.

They're not motivated by title, wealth, or status. They're oriented around the mission — grounded in a genuine care to build something meaningful and make it better every day.

They're like painters who would paint in a forest with no one watching. Not for credit, but because they love the act itself.

This orientation changes everything. Work stops being transactional. You stop optimizing for personal gain and start pouring yourself into making the product better, the team stronger, and the customer happier. You take ownership because you care.

On small teams, this difference is felt in every interaction.

Mercenaries create drag. They build the thing that looks impressive rather than the thing the customer needs. They choose the project that leads to a promotion over the work that moves the mission forward. Their decisions are filtered through personal gain, which means they're often making the wrong decisions for the team.

Missionaries create lift. They're focused on what actually matters: customer impact, team success, business results. They build what customers need, even when it's boring or unsexy. They help teammates win, even when no one's watching. Their impact compounds because they care about the whole, not just their slice.

When you build a team of givers, you get something rare: a group of people who have left their ego at the door and genuinely care about what matters most — the customer, the team, and the business. That shared focus makes small teams unstoppable.

2. Above the line, not below

I think of energy like a line. You're either above it or below it at any given moment.

When you're below the line, you're closed, defensive, focused on being right. When you're above the line, you're open, curious, focused on learning and creating.

Imagine a room full of people who are all above the line. It's electric. Ideas flow freely. People build on each other's thoughts. You tap into the collective genius of the group.

I saw this play out at one of our recent hackathons. I teamed up with four engineers to build a to build a kiosk - a mix of standalone hardware and software that customers can use to order from a restaurant - which at a typical company would take months. We built a fully functional, extremely polished product in under 12 hours. We had customers at the off-site that were literally begging to take it home.

The only reason we pulled it off was because everyone on the team was firmly above the line. We tapped into the collective energy and genius of the group and created something extraordinary.

If even one person had drifted below the line, everything would have changed. The soul would have been sucked from the room. Progress would have slowed to a crawl. We would have accomplished a fraction of what we did.

This is why I look for people who naturally live above the line. Who default to curiosity over defensiveness. Who stay open even when things get hard. Those are the people who keep the momentum alive and compound impact across the entire company.

3. Cup fillers, not drainers

Some people fill cups. Others drain them.

Cup fillers are people whose presence lifts the room — not because they're loud or trying to perform, but because they're open, kind, and fully present.

Cup drainers do the opposite. They complain. They project their negative emotions onto the team. When they leave, you feel depleted.

There's a teaching from Michael Singer that captures this beautifully. He says to "aim to make every moment that passes before you better off because it did."

That's what cup fillers do. They make the people, the conversations, and even the ordinary moments around them better simply by being there.

This shows up everywhere. In how they write Slack messages. In how they show up to meetings. In how they talk to customers. Every interaction is a chance to fill someone's cup.

On small teams, one cup drainer can poison the entire system.

But a team of cup fillers? That's when something magical happens. The energy compounds. People feel inspired to do their best work. The team builds momentum that feeds on itself.

If everyone on a team brings just 10% more positive energy to each interaction, the ripple effect is massive. The team's mood lifts. The product gets better. And customers feel it — they can tell when something was built with genuine care.

That's why I only hire cup fillers. They don't just make the work better — they make everything better.

Even the best people accomplish very little if they're not moving in the same direction.

I like to think about it this way: every person is a vector. They have magnitude (their talent and capacity) and direction (what they're focused on). Progress isn't the sum of talent — it's the sum of aligned vectors.

If the directions don't line up, you don't make progress:

On my teams, each individual knows exactly what we're trying to achieve, why it matters, and what problem they need to solve right now. Not ten things — the one thing that matters most.

Alignment doesn't happen on its own. Teams naturally drift into disorder — priorities blur, energy scatters, and people start optimizing locally instead of pulling together. I fight entropy and earn alignment by consistently being explicit about a few things:

• Why does this matter? I anchor the work in real customer pain and the business opportunity it creates.
• What's the vision? We describe what success will look and feel like 2 to 3 years out.
• What's the strategy? We define where we'll play and how we'll win — what we'll do differently, and what we'll intentionally ignore.
• What matters now? We use a simple now / next / later roadmap so everyone knows what deserves full focus today and what can wait.

By doing this, we point every vector at the same outcome. When a small team is fully aligned, it moves with the force of something much bigger.

Delta Force teams are obsessed with customer impact.

They believe that deeply satisfying customer needs is the highest order bit in company building.

When you focus on creating real value for customers, the business takes care of itself. Revenue, retention, word of mouth, and brand strength are all effects, not causes. You don't serve the business directly — you serve it by serving the customer first.

As Tobi Lütke puts it: "You have to serve the customer first, and then the business — not the other way around."

That framing matters a lot. When teams invert it — when they start with revenue targets, internal metrics, or feature checklists — they drift. They optimize for optics instead of impact. They build impressive things that don't actually matter to the customer.

Focusing on customer impact recenters the work around what's real.

But how do you actually create customer impact?

Caring about the customer obviously isn't enough. To create real customer impact, you need to do 3 things:

1. Deeply understand their world
2. Identify the needs that actually matter
3. Invent solutions on their behalf

1. Deeply understand their world

Great products come from great mental models of the customer.

The quality of your product is directly tied to the quality of your understanding. The best teams don't just collect feedback — they develop a deep, nuanced, and intuitive model of how their customers live, work, and struggle.

Bad mental models lead to wasted effort. Teams ship features that look good at the surface but don't move the needle. They argue endlessly because no one is anchored in reality. Progress slows, not because people lack talent, but because they're solving the wrong problems.

Accurate mental models don't come from dashboards, surveys, or second-hand summaries. Great mental models require proximity.

You can't build real understanding from a distance. You have to be in the trenches with your customers. You have to walk a mile in their shoes. I joke with my teams that they should know the customer so well they know what kind of gum they chew.

Many people on our team literally work out of restaurants. They watch the rush. They feel the stress. They experience the product the way customers do.

This kind of proximity changes how you think. Abstract "users" turn into real people with real problems. Edge cases stop being theoretical. Opinions matter less because reality starts settling the arguments for you.

2. Identify the needs that actually matter

Spending time with customers teaches you something important: what customers ask for is often not what they actually need.

Human needs are fractal. The closer you look, the more you find. The challenge isn't discovering needs — it's finding the right level of abstraction.

At Owner, customers often say they want to rank higher on Google. But their real need isn't rankings — it's growth. If we fixate on SEO, we miss higher-leverage ways to help them win.

Correctly identifying fundamental needs reframes the work. It shifts teams away from local optimizations and toward the highest-leverage opportunities to create real customer impact.

But not all fundamental needs are equally valuable to build around.

The most powerful ones are timeless — they won't change in 5, 10, or 20 years.

Jeff Bezos talks about this often. At Amazon, customers will always want faster delivery. Ten years from now, it's impossible to imagine someone saying, "I love Amazon — I just wish it were slower."

Timeless needs create a north star. They keep teams honest when tradeoffs get hard. And they turn customer obsession into a durable strategy.

3. Invent solutions on their behalf

Creating impact for customers requires a final shift: from listening to deciding.

You absolutely must listen to customers to understand their pain. But it is not their job to design the solution. That's yours.

Customers will never stop suggesting features. Many of them will be good. And there will always be reasons to say yes. But always saying yes leads to the slow death of the product:

Great products aren't built by stacking good ideas. They're built by nailing the two or three needs that matter most.

That requires saying no — a lot.

It requires conviction to ignore reasonable requests in service of a clearer whole. It requires taste to distinguish signal from noise. And it requires the courage to invent on the customer's behalf — especially when the right answer is quieter than the loudest request.

Customer obsession isn't about building what customers ask for. It's about deeply understanding their world, identifying the needs that actually matter, and then building the right solution to help them win.

Delta Force teams don't just care what they build. They care deeply about how it's built.

This is one of the most misunderstood ideas in startups. Craft is often dismissed as polish, aesthetics, or something you add "later." That framing is wrong.

For high-performing small teams, craft is a force multiplier.

It's how excellence gets encoded into the system — so speed, quality, and trust compound over time instead of slowly decaying.

What does it mean to obsess over craft?

It comes down to three things:

1. Build systems that compound (craft as leverage)
2. Earn customer trust through every detail
3. Set a bar that attracts and retains exceptional builders

1. Build systems that compound (craft as leverage)

Craft isn't polish. It's leverage.

When teams don't care about craft, they move fast at first. Shortcuts feel efficient. Rough edges are tolerated. Velocity is high.

But over time, the system starts to push back. Architecture frays. Cognitive load increases. Progress slows — not because the team got worse, but because the system did.

Craft flips that dynamic.

When you obsess over foundations — clear design systems, thoughtful architecture, clean abstractions — everything new becomes easier to build.

This matters even more for small teams. You don't have more people to throw at problems. You either build leverage into the system or you stall.

My teams have a few controversial policies to ensure were building with craft. One of them is zero tolerance for tech debt.

Tech debt isn't neutral. It's anti-leverage. Today's shortcuts become tomorrow's bottlenecks.

The cost isn't paid once — it's paid every day in slower builds, fragile systems, and rework that drags the team backward.

Great teams treat architecture like great athletes treat form. It's what allows them to move fast without breaking.

We reject the idea that speed and quality are tradeoffs. In reality, quality is what allows speed to compound.

2. Earn customer trust through every detail

Craft isn't just how you build the system - it's how customers experience it. Customers can tell when something was made with attention, respect, and love.

High craft signals "we thought about you." There is nothing that builds trust faster than making customers feel that consistently.

This isn't just about surface-level aesthetics. It's about the thousand small decisions that show you care: smooth interactions, thoughtful error states, features that hide complexity and feel intuitive. Customers notice.

We reinforce this with another controversial policy: zero tolerance for bug backlogs.

Most teams accept a "healthy backlog" of bugs. What that really means is customers are experiencing constant paper cuts.

We don't accept that. Zero bug backlog does two things:

1. It preserves trust. We don't whittle away customer trust with 1000 tiny frustrations. The product is consistently reliable.
2. It forces higher standards. You build things right the first time — because cleaning it up later isn't an option.

This sounds slower, but it's not. It eliminates the endless cycle of rework that kills momentum and demoralizes teams. There is nothing more soul sucking that spending all of your time fixing bugs.

Every interaction either builds trust or erodes it. Craft is how you build that relationship.

3. Set a bar that attracts and retains exceptional builders

The best people are allergic to mediocrity.

They've worked in codebases held together by duct tape. They've shipped features they weren't proud of. They've watched teams rationalize corner-cutting — and then spent months paying the price.

High craft is how they recognize their people.

When someone sees clean architecture, cohesive design, and zero tolerance for sloppiness, they don't just think "this is a good product." They think "these are my people."

Craft is a signal you send. It tells A-players: we don't accept shit here. We don't normalize broken things. We build systems that make tomorrow easier, not harder. We're here to build a product that is truly exceptional.

Once you have a few people who operate this way, it becomes self-reinforcing. Standards rise through osmosis. People push each other not out of competition, but out of shared pride in the work.

This creates a beautiful flywheel: High craft attracts A-players. A-players raise the bar. Higher bars attract better talent. And on and on!

When you've built a Delta Force — exceptional people with great energy, clear alignment, deep customer obsession, and high craft — the final principle is simple: get out of the way and let them cook.

You don't put training wheels on a Ferrari. And you don't smother A-players with process. The best people don't need or want to be over-managed. They need time, space, and trust to build.

This doesn't mean abdicating leadership. I'm still in the trenches with my teams — coding features, reviewing designs, debating tradeoffs, unblocking decisions, pushing for clarity when things get muddy.

What it does mean is being incredibly intentional about how much structure you introduce.

Process isn't the enemy. Bad process is.

A common misread of this philosophy is: "no process."

That's not right. The goal isn't zero process. It's the minimum effective process.

There's a great line from Travis Kalanick that captures this perfectly: "The fewest number of rules while staying out of chaos."

That's the balance.

Too much process creates drag — approvals, handoffs, and coordination layers that slow everything down.

Too little process creates chaos — unclear priorities, duplicated work, thrash.

Great teams operate in the narrow band between the two.

We introduce structure only when it increases speed and clarity — and we cut it the moment it slows us down.

Learning to let go.

In the early days of Owner, I ran a tight ship.

I was obsessed with velocity, and I thought the way to maximize it was control.

We had strict deadlines. A rigid process to ensure everyone was working on the highest leverage thing. Constant check-ins to make sure everything was moving at the right pace.

Over time, I realized something uncomfortable: I was the bottleneck. My grip — which I thought was increasing speed — was actually suffocating the team.

As I started to let go, something magical started to happen.

Speed multiplied. Without the overhead of process, approvals, and check-ins, everyone could focus purely on building. Decisions that used to take days happened in minutes. Work that used to require coordination just flowed. The team moved faster than ever — not because I pushed harder, but because I stopped getting in the way.

Vibes soared. People spent their time building and creating impact instead of sitting in status meetings or waiting for approvals. That shift was energizing. They felt trusted. Ownership deepened. They saw their work ship fast and make real impact. The team felt alive in a way it hadn't before.

Quality improved. This one surprised me. I assumed less oversight would mean lower quality. The opposite happened. When people had time and space to cook without artificial deadlines, they took full ownership. They weren't cutting corners to hit dates. They were building things they were genuinely proud of. The work got better, not worse.

It was an amazing learning experience for me. Now my teams operate with a lot of trust, and very little process.

How we operate now.

We have very few meetings. Two mandatory meetings per week — 1.5 hours total. The first is a weekly standup on Mondays, where we align on top priorities. The second is a demo day on Fridays, where we demo, celebrate, and iterate on all the cool stuff we've been building. It's my favorite part of the week.

We don't do deadlines. My philosophy is to hire people with an innate sense of urgency, and then give them the time and space to cook. Deadlines often lead to corner cutting. Our job as a product team is not to deliver X feature by Y date — it's to deliver something truly exceptional that deeply satisfies our customers' needs.

By removing deadlines and the need for control, you give teams the trust to deliver something truly excellent. The best people will deliver excellence, and they will deliver it fast.

When you've built a Delta Force, your job isn't to control. It's to unleash. The best work happens when you let the best people cook. Remove the friction. Strip away the process. Give them clarity, and then entrust them with time and space. Then watch what happens.