The Leadership Stretch
When I joined Kard a couple of years ago, I was drawn to the promise of innovation. We were an early-stage company, Series A, with a bold mission and a clear sense of possibility. As I dug in, I saw exciting new opportunities everywhere: new ways to apply our technology, new features to unlock customer value, new architectural evolutions to support our long-term vision. It felt like a classic startup moment, full of invention and discovery.
But very quickly, I also saw something else: we were already operating at real scale. Hundreds of requests a second. Billions of purchase transactions analyzed over time. Real infrastructure costs. Real performance and reliability needs. High customer expectations, measured against competitors who had a different product but served the same need. We weren’t just building something new. We were already running a commodity platform.
That realization sent me back into FinOps spreadsheets, tracking cloud costs by hand until we adopted an automated tool. It also reminded me of my work at Heroku, Snyk, and Canonical, where platform leadership meant sitting squarely between two poles: the need to standardize, scale, and commoditize infrastructure, and the parallel need to enable and drive rapid innovation.
That tension has never really gone away. And I’ve come to believe that for R&D leaders—especially in fast-moving fields like software—the most important skill isn’t picking one side of the spectrum. It’s learning how to move between them.
Three Modes of Progress: Explorer, Villager, Town Planner
Simon Wardley offers a model that captures this movement well. In a 2023 post, he describes three archetypes that align with different stages of product evolution: the explorer, the villager, and the town planner.
Explorers thrive in the earliest phases of discovery. They map unknown territory, test ideas, and take risks. Think research labs, prototypes, greenfield projects.
Villagers stabilize those discoveries. They bring them to market, build customer-facing products, and refine the experience.
Town planners industrialize. They turn products into reliable, low-cost utilities. They optimize, standardize, and scale.
These roles map well to product maturity: from invention, to differentiation, to commoditization. And they map well to organizational behavior too: from loose, agile experimentation to systematized, high-efficiency operations.
What resonated most for me wasn’t just the stages—it was the people. Wardley suggests that different people are energized by different modes. Some folks love ambiguity and chaos. Others prefer clarity and control. Some thrive on invention; others on execution.
I’ve often found myself most at home between explorer and villager. I love the early sense of possibility, and I love the moment when an idea becomes real and begins to delight customers. But I get itchy in environments focused solely on squeezing out cost.
Six Types of Genius: Energy, Burnout, and the Project Lifecycle
Patrick Lencioni’s 6 Types of Working Genius adds a valuable layer here. He offers a different framing of work energy, mapped to project lifecycles rather than product lifecycles:
Wonder: sensing potential or pondering possibility
Invention: creating solutions
Discernment: evaluating ideas
Galvanizing: rallying people to act
Enablement: supporting others to move forward
Tenacity: pushing to completion
Lencioni’s insight is that each of us gets energized by some of these stages and drained by others. You might be great at galvanizing, but if it wears you out, you won’t want to live there forever. You might be good at tenacity but find it boring. Or you might get your spark from invention and lose energy when you have to manage execution.
This model gave me language for something I’d long intuited: leadership often means living outside your zone of genius. As we grow more senior, we become responsible for the whole project lifecycle—not just the parts that energize us. That means building teams that complement us, yes. But it also means developing a broader range of fluency.
Leaders Need to Live in All Three Phases
So how do these models connect?
To me, Wardley and Lencioni are describing two lenses on the same truth: innovation requires movement. Not just the movement of ideas from fuzzy to obvious, or projects from start to finish—but the movement of people. The best leaders are shape-shifters. They move between roles.
You can’t just be an explorer. If you never learn to scale and optimize, your wild ideas won’t survive long enough to matter. You can’t just be a town planner either. If you never cultivate curiosity or reinvention, your beautifully efficient system will get disrupted by someone else’s crazy new idea.
And you can’t just outsource the parts you don’t like. That’s a recipe for blind spots, or brittle teams. Instead, leaders need to stretch.
At Kard, we build a rewards infrastructure and demand platform. It connects issuers (like card companies or budgeting apps, who supply access to purchasers), merchants (who fund rewards to drive lift and loyalty), and consumers (who benefit from the rewards). It’s a triple-sided marketplace, and it lives in all three stages at once:
Explorer: New models of loyalty. New redemption formats.
Villager: Great developer experience. Clean operational handoffs.
Town planner: Infrastructure efficiency. Enterprise scale.
I can’t pick one and ignore the others. I can notice which ones bring me energy, and where I need help. But I have to show up for all of them.
Closing Thoughts
If you work in software, you probably live in all three phases too. Even when your product is mature, your go-to-market may be in flux. Even when your infra is optimized, your data model might be evolving. And even if you love one part of the work, the rest still matters.
So ask yourself:
What kinds of work energize you?
What kinds of work drain you?
Where are you being asked to stretch?
Who on your team thrives where you struggle?
Then step back and look at the full map. Not just where you are now, but where your product—and your people—need to go next.
Innovation isn’t a destination. It’s a terrain—one you navigate again and again. And leadership means learning how to move across it, with curiosity, rigor, and energy.
