Jalen Brunson Isn't Thinking About Product Leadership. I Am.
The best leadership is about structure, not heroic.
Last weekend, the New York Knicks won their first NBA title in 53 years. Jalen Brunson was named Finals MVP and scored 45 points in the closeout game (the rest of the team made 49!). The easy story writes itself: the captain who carried his team.
Photo: “Jalen Brunson” by Erik Drost, licensed under CC BY 2.0.
But the most important thing Brunson did off the court was a contract. A year earlier, he signed a four-year, $156.5 million extension instead of the five-year deal worth roughly $269 million he was eligible for. He left about $113 million on the table. That decision kept the Knicks under the league’s spending limits and gave them the room to hold their roster together and keep adding talent.
The defining move of the team’s best player was not heroic. It was structural. He used his leverage to fund the team around him.
That is the part that product leaders should consider.
Leadership is the system you build, not the output you produce
For a while, I have been thinking about the dimensions of product leadership and how unevenly they show up across organizations. Marty Cagan talks about the responsibility of product leaders to provide strategic context and coaching. Shreyas Doshi describes archetypes that highlight where leaders are naturally strong and where they are not. Both resonate because they reflect what I see every day. Product leadership is multi-dimensional, and the gaps are predictable.
I have always been strongest in discovery & definition: identifying and framing the problem, shaping the solution, and driving delivery. I lead with empathy by supporting the team, respecting boundaries, and helping people grow. The pillar I have had to strengthen consciously is the technical one, understanding how we build, how systems fit together, and what the real constraints are. I have not coded hands-on in decades, but I have always known enough to ask the right questions, and I keep pushing that further.
Most leaders are like this. Some are deeply technical but light on product sense. Some are strong in delivery but have never spent real time in discovery. Some set exceptional strategic context, and others assume the team will figure it out. None of that is unusual. Our instincts come from where we ‘grew up’ professionally.
The instinct that hurts teams is the one we tend to admire most: being the person who personally closes every gap. Call it heroics; in reality, it’s one individual compensating for whatever the system does not provide.
The hero move and the structural move
Watch any struggling team, and you will often find one person holding it together through sheer effort. The leader everyone escalates to. The one who personally rescues the launch when it slips. The one whose week away stalls every decision. From the outside, it looks like commitment, and it is easy to mistake for strength.
But individual heroics are a signal, not a solution. They usually mean the strategy is unclear, the system is weak and lacks trust, or the talent around the leader is too thin to carry the load. The hero is compensating for a structure that was never built.
Brunson is the inversion of that pattern. The most visible player on the team made his most consequential move off the court, in a contract he signed a year earlier. By taking less money, he gave the team room to build depth around him.
None of this is an argument against courage. Brunson’s calculated choice took real courage. It was costly and personal, and he made it on purpose. In his words, “I want this team to be together for a long time.” That is the line between heroics and courage. Heroics is a reaction when a system is already failing. Courage is a deliberate choice you make before the moment forces your hand.
The pillars of product leadership reinforce or weaken each other in the same way:
Strategy without empathy becomes brittle.
Discovery without technical depth becomes fantasy.
Delivery without product sense becomes project management.
Coaching without strategic clarity becomes noise.
Strong product organizations do not rely on heroics, they build the structure that makes heroics unnecessary:
Creating strategic clarity so people understand the problems, the bets, and the constraints.
Raising talent density through hiring, coaching, and making the hard calls.
Building a shared language: problem to hypothesis to metric, outcomes over outputs.
Designing the system, not just the skills. Incentives, team structure, autonomy, and culture matter as much as individual competence.
For Brunson, raising talent density was not an abstraction. He paid for it out of his own pocket.
Why this matters more now
AI is sharpening the point. The individual output that used to make a product leader look indispensable is exactly what AI now drafts in minutes: the strategy memo, the PRD, the research synthesis, the board-ready deck. As that work commoditizes, what remains is the work you cannot automate: the judgment to design the system, raise the talent around you, and set the principles a team aligns to. AI is a lever, not a replacement for accountability. The edge shifts from the output you can produce to the structure you can build.
So I will ask my fellow product leaders the question I am asking myself: which of your “heroics” is actually a sign that your system is not built yet?
This reflection is part of an ongoing series on building a product culture: how teams think, decide, and build products.