Blow up the Hierarchy: Why Building Teams Around Value Creation is the New Competitive Advantage

In this episode of the Team Lab Podcast, we sit down with Greg Petroff to discuss why traditional hierarchies often hinder work and how leaders can transition toward value-driven, outcome-oriented teams.  

Greg is a veteran design and technology leader who has driven major organizational  transformations at companies like GE Digital, Google, ServiceNow, Compass, and Cisco Secure. He's a founding member of Design Executive Council, and advises organizations of all sizes on how to rethink workflows and team agency through the lens of new technological capabilities. In his public work – from Substack essays to podcast interviews – he’s a leading authority on how the nature of work is evolving.

In this conversation, a common theme emerged: there’s no more important task than removing obstacles and friction from your team’s path, and that includes helping to optimize focus and time management. Greg shares his insights on everything from protecting your team’s "organizational calories," and the importance of flow states, to how Gen AI is shifting the boundaries of product development.

Conversation Highlights

• Outcome vs. Output: Customers buy outcomes (goals accomplished), not outputs (lines of code or feature velocity). Teams that own an outcome have more agency to satisfy customer needs with the "least number of most useful things".

• The "One More Thing" Trap: Leaders must publicly declare what they are not doing. Adding "one more thing" to show performance consumes vital organizational "calories" and prevents the completion of higher-priority work.

• Above the Line Prioritization: Borrowing from the Amazon model, teams should prioritize outcomes and assign resources until capacity is reached. Anything "below the line" is not touched until a higher priority is completed.

• The Power of Flow States: High-quality creative and technical work requires uninterrupted blocks of time—ideally two-to-three-hour periods—to reach a "flow state". Constant meetings disrupt this state and leave teams exhausted rather than accomplished.

• AI as a Boundary Disruptor: GenAI tools are allowing roles to merge; designers can write front-end code and engineers can draft requirements. This requires a new "social contract" where teams are adaptive and collaborative rather than protective of their specific silos.

• Reversing the Double Diamond: Historically, organizations spend too little time on discovery and too much on execution. Greg argues for a large first diamond (discovery) and a small second diamond (execution) to ensure you are solving the right problem in the simplest way.

Connect with Greg

• LinkedIn: Greg Petroff

• Substack: Improbable Futures — Greg's newsletter exploring the intersection of design, technology, and the future of work

• Threads: @gpetroff

Resources 

• Two-Minute Fridays: Have each employee and leader record a two-minute video detailing what they did, what they planned to do, and what they were proud of.

• Leadership Club: Set up a structured monthly meeting for "leaders of leaders" to set their own agenda and discuss what they want to learn, giving senior leadership visibility into "facts on the ground".

• Career Mapping: Actively help employees identify what gives them energy, explore how those interests, skills or strengths map to their existing growth path or another path within the organization that might better align.