Leadership Success: Are You Earning It, or Borrowing It?

The article argues that leaders should imagine stripping away all organisational advantages such as brand trust, distribution, and authentication, and ask if the product would still attract users on its own in a competitive market. Only then can genuine product driven success be separated from the parent company's halo effect.

1. Five million users

A product review lands on your desk showing five million users, and the team presenting it is proud, rightly so, because five million is a large number by any measure.

Then you look at the parent organisation and find twenty million active customers, with the feature placed prominently inside the banking app in front of every one of them.

The interesting number was never five million but twenty five per cent, and even that figure does not tell you whether those customers chose the product, value it, or would go looking for it if it disappeared tomorrow.

This is the question I keep returning to when I look at product metrics inside a large organisation. Did the product succeed because it is good, or did it succeed because it was carried by an organisation that was already successful?

2. Two products, one slide

Imagine two teams presenting at the same review.

Product A sits inside a bank with twenty million active customers, and when a new feature is placed prominently inside the existing app, five million customers use it. The team reports, quite honestly, that five million people use their product.

Product B is a standalone startup where nobody is forced to download anything and nobody already has an account, and it still acquires half a million customers who found it themselves, installed it, registered, used it, and came back on their own.

On a slide, Product A looks ten times more successful, but Product B may have demonstrated something far more valuable in demonstrating independent demand.

Product A inherited distribution, trust, identity, authentication, payments, an installed customer base, marketing reach, and a privileged position inside an app people already open every day, while Product B had to earn every one of its customers from a standing start with none of those advantages.

So the real question becomes: how much of your success did your product create, and how much did your organisation lend you?

3. The organisational halo

There is a well established idea in psychology that explains part of what is happening here. In 1920 the psychologist Edward Thorndike asked commanding officers to rate soldiers under them on four separate qualities, physique, intelligence, leadership, and personal character. What he found was that the ratings across these supposedly independent qualities were correlated far more tightly than reality could plausibly explain, with an officer’s rating on one trait bleeding into the rating on every other trait, as though the officers were unable to judge each quality in isolation and were instead colouring every score with one general impression of whether the man was, overall, good or poor. He called this the halo effect, and the same halo that surrounds a soldier’s reputation surrounds the leaders responsible for a product, a point worth holding onto for later.

I think this effect scales up from people to organisations. A successful organisation creates a halo around every product placed inside it. A feature inside a hugely successful banking app, retail platform, or social network benefits from that halo before its own product team has done anything at all. The customer already trusts the brand, already has the login, already has the habit of opening the app. Some of that trust and habit transfers to whatever gets placed in front of them, independent of whether the thing itself deserves it.

None of this is a criticism of the product team, but it is a genuine warning about the measurement sitting on top of their work.

4. Goodhart’s problem

There is a second idea worth borrowing here, this time from economics. Charles Goodhart observed in 1975 that any statistical regularity tends to collapse once you place pressure on it for control purposes, a principle now usually summarised as the rule that when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.

Once “users” becomes the number a team is judged on, teams will optimise for users whether or not that number still means what it once meant. Five million users sounds impressive on its own, but five million users out of twenty million people who were simply shown the product tells a much smaller story, and the gap between those two framings is exactly where the metric keeps surviving while the meaning behind it quietly drains away.

This is the mechanism behind most vanity metrics. Downloads, registrations, and total user counts can all grow steadily while telling you almost nothing about whether people are receiving enough value to keep coming back.

5. Inherited success, or earned success

I think this becomes the most useful lens for the rest of the argument, and it is sharper than a simple contrast between succeeding because of an organisation and succeeding despite one. A genuinely excellent product inside a well run organisation can succeed because of both, so the real fault line is not organisation versus no organisation. It is success the organisation lent the product versus success the product created on its own.

Some products succeed largely on inherited advantage. They draw on distribution, an existing customer base, authentication, brand trust, transaction data, marketing reach, notification channels, prime placement on a home screen, existing habits, regulatory licences, payments infrastructure, and customer support that someone else built and paid for. Put almost anything useful enough in front of twenty million existing customers and somebody will use it.

Other products succeed on demand they created themselves. Customers seek them out on their own, tell other customers about them without being asked, come back without a push notification reminding them to, and find workarounds when the organisation makes the experience clumsy or slow. Demand for these products survives poor placement, thin marketing, or outright organisational neglect, and none of that survival was lent to them by anyone.

Those two kinds of success look identical on a metrics dashboard and mean completely different things. And when the organisation itself is exceptionally successful, the two become almost impossible to tell apart from the inside.

6. Take it out of the mothership

Here is the thought experiment I would put in front of any team celebrating a big user number.

Take the product out of the mothership, give it a new name and a new app, and strip away the existing login, the homepage placement inside the main app, the push notifications, the existing customer database, and the trusted brand. Put what is left in an app store next to twenty competitors doing something similar, and ask whether anybody would download it, and harder still, whether anybody would pay for it.

This does not mean every internal product needs to survive independently to be worth building. Integration itself creates enormous value for customers, and plenty of features are genuinely better for living inside an existing app than as something standalone. But the exercise exposes, honestly, what the product team actually contributed on its own.

Perhaps the honest answer is that almost nobody would use it independently, and that is a fine answer as long as the team stops claiming that five million users proves exceptional product market fit. What it actually proves is that the combination of the product and the organisation’s distribution produced five million users, and those are different claims, only one of which is about the product itself.

7. Four tests that separate inherited from earned

This is the part most product reviews skip entirely, and it is the part that actually matters. If the mothership test tells you the question to ask, these four checks let you answer it with something more rigorous than a hunch, without turning a leadership review into a methodology seminar.

Remove the promotion. Turn off the notification, remove the homepage placement for a defined window, and watch what happens to daily and weekly return visits. A product that people value keeps a meaningful share of its usage. A product that only exists because it keeps getting pushed in front of people sees usage collapse almost immediately once the pushing stops.

Measure voluntary discovery. Look at how customers actually arrived. How many came through a homepage banner, a forced upgrade screen, or a push notification, against how many arrived by searching for the product by name, following a link from another customer, or typing it directly into an app store search box. A product with genuine pull shows a rising share of the second group over time. A product entirely dependent on placement shows a flat or falling share, no matter how the total is trending.

Measure retention without the prompt. Of the people who chose the product rather than merely encountering it, how many are still using it after thirty, ninety, or a hundred and eighty days, with no reminders in between. Retention that survives silence is the closest thing to proof that a product earned its place.

Ask the counterfactual. Every serious causal measurement approach, from marketing incrementality testing to product holdout experiments, comes down to the same question: what would have happened if this had never existed, comparing what actually happened against what would have happened anyway without the intervention. Apply that question directly to the product number. Not “how many people used this,” but “how much of this behaviour would not exist without it.”

None of these four require enormous investment. What they require is a willingness to measure the thing that is uncomfortable to measure, rather than the thing that is easy to report.

8. Measure what the product earned

Once you accept that raw user counts hide the denominator, it becomes worth building a small model rather than relying on instinct.

Instead of treating users as success, treat adoption as something earned in stages, and be careful about which stage actually deserves the word earned.

Start with exposure conversion, which is simply active users divided by meaningfully exposed users. In our opening example, that is five million divided by twenty million, or twenty five per cent. It is a useful number, but it is not yet earned adoption. If you put something in front of twenty million people and five million click it, that tells you about the strength of the placement as much as the strength of the product.

Voluntary adoption goes a step further and asks how many people chose the product rather than merely encountered it, stripping out anyone who arrived purely because of a forced placement or a default setting, while retained adoption asks, of the people who chose it, how many are still using it after thirty, ninety, or a hundred and eighty days without being prompted again.

Organic discovery asks how many customers reached the product without a prompt, a campaign, or a privileged position on the screen, and incremental behaviour, the hardest and most valuable of the four, asks what behaviour exists purely because the product exists, that would not otherwise have happened at all.

This is where I would reserve the word earned. Earned adoption is best thought of as a small set of dimensions rather than a single formula, voluntary uptake, unprompted retention, and organic return, taken together rather than any one of them alone. You do not need a literal equation on a slide, but the concept matters: exposure tells you how many people were shown the door, and earned adoption tells you how many walked through it on their own and kept coming back.

9. Successful organisations need higher bars

None of this is an argument against celebrating product teams, but it is an argument for making success harder to fake.

A weak or young organisation gives its products brutal, honest feedback by default, since nobody already knows the brand, nobody already has the app installed, and nobody is waiting for the feature to appear. If a product grows inside that environment, something in the product itself is working.

A strong organisation can accidentally hide a mediocre product, purely because its distribution machine is powerful enough to make almost anything look successful. That means the stronger the organisation becomes, the more rigorous its product measurement needs to become to compensate. Otherwise every team eventually arrives with the same slide: millions of customers use our product.

Well, yes, millions of customers use your organisation, and the harder and far more useful question is how many of them use your product because it deserves to be used.

This is also where I would apply a genuinely higher bar rather than a lower one for teams sitting on exceptional distribution. If you already have twenty million customers, a trusted brand, and millions of daily sessions, getting one million people to try something once might be a disappointing result rather than an impressive one. Meanwhile a team somewhere else, with none of those advantages, getting a hundred thousand people to actively seek out what they built, might have achieved something remarkable. The denominator changes the story completely, and it should change how the story gets rewarded.

And the same logic does not stop at products. Leaders inherit organisational advantage in exactly the same way products do. A leader can arrive into a business with extraordinary engineers, enormous distribution, an established brand, abundant capital, and years of accumulated infrastructure already in place. Revenue grows, usage grows, availability stays excellent, and it becomes very easy to conclude that all of this happened because of strong leadership.

But the identical counterfactual applies. What happened because of the leader, and what happened because they inherited an extraordinary machine that was already running well before they arrived. That question is considerably less comfortable to ask about yourself than about a product team’s dashboard, which is exactly why it is worth asking.

10. Stop borrowing success

The shoulders of giants are wonderful places to build from. They hand you distribution, trust, an existing customer base, and infrastructure that a standalone startup would spend years trying to assemble. There is nothing wrong with using every advantage an organisation gives you.

But standing on the shoulders of a giant is not the same as being one, and the two get confused constantly inside large organisations that have already succeeded at something else.

The job of leadership is to separate the success the organisation lent you from the success you or your product actually created. That means asking not simply how many people use the product, but how many chose it, returned to it without being asked, valued it enough to tell someone else about it, and would genuinely miss it if it disappeared tomorrow.

How much of the success did the organisation lend you, and how much did you earn? Until that question has a real answer, backed by something closer to a holdout test than a hunch, five million users is just a very large number.

And the question does not only belong to product teams. If you removed the organisation’s brand, its people, its distribution, its capital, and its momentum from underneath you, how much of the success you currently claim would still belong to you?