Noelle RussellChief Executive Officer, AI Leadership Institute · 5x Microsoft Trustworthy AI MVP | 3.4+ million students | #1 Thought Leader in Agentic AI | AI-Powered Revenue Growth + Cost Optimization Expert ✨Best-Selling Author: Scaling Responsible AI | TEDx Sp

People over Product

21 Dec 2025 · 1 min

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1:01

In this brief interview excerpt, Speaker B explains the concept of "mindful leadership," which he defines as prioritizing people before products. Drawing on his experience working with top leadership teams at IBM, Red Hat, Amazon, and Microsoft, he illustrates the principle with the failures of Amazon's Fire Phone and Microsoft's Windows Phone. He argues that when leaders treat employees as expendable in favor of a product, they risk losing talent to competitors, whereas putting people first preserves talent that can later contribute to successful products. Speaker A repeatedly emphasizes the "people over product" mantra, seeking clarification on the outcomes of the opposite approach. The conversation underscores mindful leadership as a talent‑centric strategy that safeguards organizational capability and competitive advantage.

You use an expression called mindful leadership. What the heck does that mean? Because I need to incorporate it in one of my seminars. Yes. Oh, absolutely. What is it? I'm not joking.
So I have had the pleasure of working for some of the greatest CEOs and leadership teams at IBM, Red Hat, Amazon, Microsoft. And the leaders I would classify as good share some certain qualities. Such as? And I've kind of termed them mindful leadership, but things like people over product. Like never putting the product before your team. Like those products come and go. I've watched the Fire Phone disaster. I watched Windows Phone go away and all those people ended up moving into products that became extremely successful for the company. And if you didn't put them first, if you treated them like failures, like the product is, you would have lost those people.
People over product. People over product. If someone goes the other way, product over people, the outcome?
You lose those people and your competitor picks them up and they deliver a product that you thought you'd build.
Stay on mindful leadership.