Is your boss (accidentally) killing your best product ideas? How to handle your hippo

“A fallacy of workplaces is that senior staff are better at everything than the people who work for them. This is false in many ways, but creative intuition might be the most false.”

Scott Berkun, Author of The Myths of Innovation.

Ever worked with someone who couldn’t innovate their way out of a paper bag?

Or maybe a leader who gets overexcited about the latest trend from a conference, completely detached from what your customers actually need? Or your product roadmap?

We’ve been there.

Senior leaders have the greatest influence on a product’s direction and success. But more often than not, they come up with the worst ideas.

Harsh? Maybe. But time and time again, it proves to be true.

As Dom Price from Atlassian put it in this podcast on team culture:

“The best ideas don’t come from the most senior people. There is no correlation between tenure, age, or any other kind of traditional seniority measures and great ideas. In fact, I think there might be a reverse correlation.”

The longer someone has been in a business, the more blinkered their perspective can become. And the further they are from the frontline, the less they understand their customers’ problems.

Great ideas are built on customer insight and observable problems—no matter how rough they seem at first. But beyond generating ideas, the real challenge is whether product management and strategy can co-exist with top-down leadership.

Can you middle-manage your way to innovation?

There is often a disconnect between what gets people promoted and what makes an effective product leader.

Scott Berkun, author of The Myths of Innovation, explains:

“To rise in power demands good political judgement, yet innovation requires a willingness to defy convention. Convention-defiers are harder to promote in most organisations, yet essential for progress. To assume senior staff are the best at leading change is a mistake.”

It all comes down to an unconscious bias in the way organisations are organised.

In most businesses, decision-making favours the HiPPO—the “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion”.

The result is that brilliant ideas can fall by the wayside, whilst the HiPPO’s weak product ideas are automatically taken forward, only to flop because customers didn’t want them in the first place.

This is so embedded in the fabric of how most companies operate that most leaders won’t be able to spot (or avoid) derailing products because they themselves are fundamentally part of the problem.

The end result is that teams become demoralised and stop contributing their (better) ideas because they’re never chosen. As Gartner Analyst Mark Ruskino notes in this ZDNet article on how businesses kill innovation:

“You’re doing middle-management and you’re trying to be kind to people, so instead of saying, ‘No, we’re not going to do that,’ you say, ‘We haven’t got the resources right now, but we’ll take a look next year.’”

The issue? These “next year” ideas never resurface. Teams quickly learn that their input doesn’t matter, so they stop sharing ideas altogether. A culture of risk aversion takes hold, where innovation gets sacrificed for predictability and product management and strategy suffer.

The management mindset vs. product leadership

Most organisations were built on a management style designed for factories, rather than creative thinking. Traditional leadership is about predictability, efficiency, and control. But innovation requires experimentation, adaptability, and customer insight.

It’s human nature to fall back on what you know; so few managers may realise that their experience works against them when it comes to developing products.

In Gartner’s report on Taking Digital to the Core, Graham Waller writes:

“Behaviours honed in a more industrialised economy—such as a desire for certainty, a love of detailed plans, and a penchant for control—can be the enemy of key future digital business success factors: innovation and speed.”

Cutting risk and focusing on quick wins may make sense for traditional management. But in product management and strategy, that mindset is a recipe for failure. True product leadership requires iterative thinking, bold experimentation, and an environment where failure leads to learning, not blame.

Reframing product leadership

To drive innovation and build products that solve real problems, we need to redefine what leadership looks like in product management and strategy:

• Experiment with new product leadership approaches like this framework
• Rethink how success is measured to prioritise long-term impact over short-term wins
• Improve idea validation processes to focus on customer-backed insights.
• Create a culture that rewards innovation rather than punishing failure

Innovation happens when teams collaborate, iterate, and refine—not when a single executive dictates the roadmap.

But, in the meantime, how do you handle your HiPPO?

Saying no to a senior leader’s bad idea is difficult, especially when they have more power than you. But it’s essential to do so.

Janna Bastow, founder of Prodpad, shared her approach in this blog on managing your boss. She stopped responding to individual requests and instead made everyone submit their ideas into a shared backlog:

“This was the great equaliser in a workplace where our HiPPO believed he could shoot me an email to push his pet ideas onto our product roadmap. I didn’t want him or anyone to email me with their ideas anymore since this reinforced the false notion that I alone held the power of the product decision.”

With ideas in a transparent backlog, the entire team could evaluate them objectively. It quickly became clear which ideas deserved attention—and which should be left behind.

A tool like Distiller can help product teams apply the same principle. It enables teams to evaluate ideas free from bias, ensuring product management and strategy decisions are driven by real value—not the loudest voice in the room.

Need fresh, politics-free ideas?

If you’ve been in your role a while, you might suspect blind spots creeping in. Or maybe you’re new to an organisation and want to shake things up.

Either way, attending our ManyHands event can help.

It’s a practical and collaborative event that results in fresh, fully validated product ideas that are designed to drive impact and keep innovation on track.