Harry Max
Executive coach, consultant and product design and development leader, and managing partner at Peak Priorities.
“He said, 'Free telephony.' It was like two words. And he didn't go into how they were gonna operationalize that from an organizational point of view. But you could extrapolate from there in both directions, right? Both internally and externally.”
Traction Heroes · User Experience · November 2026
Context
Jorge Arango asked whether a vision should cover the world outside the organization, not just its structure. Harry Max answers with his early work with Skype's founder CEO, whose two-word vision still told people what to build and what it meant for customers.
Transcript
Yeah.
…picture that you’re drawing when you’re making one of these mind maps, is it somehow inclusive of the world outside of the organization? Or is it just merely let’s capture a s- you know, a, a picture of how the organization is structured to affect, uh, whatever change we want to make in the world?
I think in an ideal case, it would include the stakeholders and constituencies, internal and external, I think about the work that I did very early on with Skype, and Niklas Zennström, the, the CEO— founder CEO, would express his vision. He, he, he did it so simply. He said, “Free telephony.” It was like two words.
Right.
And he didn’t go into how they were gonna operationalize that from an organizational point of view. And he didn’t really talk about how-- what, what that was gonna mean at any level of detail for the industry or for, you know, the s- the, the stakeholders or the customers or external folks. But you…
Yeah, the value there is you are able to both see the forest and get very close to each tree Mm-hmm. so that you can… You, you-- Uh, and I’ve worked with software applications like that. One of my favorite is, uh, called Tinderbox, which is also a Mac applic-- It’s a Mac-only application. Um, and…
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