This is the second article in my Pirate Product Teams Series, following The Pirate Code: What 18th Century Crews Can Teach Modern Product Teams.
The first essay explored how pirates built trust and order through shared agreements, and this one dives into the people side. You’ll learn how the structure and leadership of a pirate ship mirror the balance of roles on a modern product team.
The connection might surprise you: both are high-stakes environments powered by collaboration, specialization, and clarity of purpose. And both succeed (or sink) based on how well each member understands their role in the mission.
🧭 The Captain: Vision and Direction
When you imagine a pirate captain, pop culture gives us a certain image — the loud, power-hungry commander yelling orders through a storm. But historically, captains were elected. Their authority was limited, and their success depended entirely on earning the trust of their crew.
Sound familiar?
That’s the product manager.
A captain’s job was to set the course, define the mission, and rally the crew around a shared vision. The product manager does the same: articulating what the team is building, why it matters, and where they’re headed.
A captain’s vision is what rallies the team — it is the North Star. A product manager is similarly creating the vision for how this product will serve and delight users. The product manager is setting the product vision, just as a pirate captain sets the mission vision. The product vision is the foundation of the product but also of the team. It is a guide for all team members and stakeholders, ensuring everyone is working toward the same long-term objective of what the product will become and the impact it will have.
On a product team, a strong product vision guides decisions, aligns priorities, and keeps the team inspired. The best ones share three traits:
Centered on the problem, not the company.
As Radhika Dutt writes in Radical Product Thinking, a good vision should outlive your org chart. It’s about the change you want to see in the world, not your market position.Tangible and visual.
A clear end state that the team can picture — not just a slogan. “Access to the world’s information in one click” (Google’s vision statement) works because you can see it.Meaningful to both team and users.
“Be the best in the industry” motivates no one. “Solve this real, human problem” does.
A product vision should be referenced often — like a compass, not a poster. If every opportunity fits under your vision, it’s too broad. The best visions help you say no as confidently as you say yes.
⚓ The Quartermaster: Execution and Order
If the captain sets the course, the quartermaster keeps the ship afloat. On pirate ships, the quartermaster handled day-to-day operations — provisioning supplies, settling disputes, and ensuring tasks got done.
In today’s product teams, this role often looks like your scrum master, delivery lead, or agile coach. They ensure work flows smoothly, dependencies are managed, and communication stays open.
The separation between captain and quartermaster mattered. One led with vision, the other with systems. This division of duty insures that those two very different skillsets are not in conflict. It is unlikely the person who can think big and broad and set a vision is the same person who wants to manage the minutiae of day-to-day work. A major part of a successful cross-functional team is understanding people’s strengths and letting them play to those. They should understand each other’s work, and respect its place in the team, but you don’t want a visionary captain responsible for tarring holes in the bilge.
The same holds true for product organizations.
The PM shouldn’t be buried in Jira tickets.
The delivery lead shouldn’t have to pitch the long-term strategy.
They’re partners in motion: one scanning the horizon, one checking the ropes.
And yes, likely, if pirate ships had daily stand-ups, the quartermaster would have run them.
🧑🔧 The Crew: Cross-Functional Expertise
Pirate ships were remarkably diverse places. Crews included sailors, navigators, carpenters, cooks, and gunners — many from different nations, languages, and backgrounds. What united them wasn’t uniformity, but shared purpose.
That’s the product team.
Designers, engineers, researchers, analysts, QA — all specialists, each critical to the mission.
No one could do everything, but everyone needed to understand how their craft contributed to the whole. That mutual respect kept ships efficient, and alive.
In modern teams, we sometimes over-index on “T-shaped” skills and forget that deep expertise is valuable too. The goal isn’t for everyone to do everything, but for everyone to see the system, and to understand how their work ladders up to the collective goal. You must respect the skill — or occasionally not the skill, but just the sheer grunt work or heavy lifting — of your teammates and how it helps you and your shared goals.
🤝 Respecting Roles, Building Trust
The real power of a well-run pirate crew — and a great product team — lies in clarity and respect.
When people know who leads, who supports, and how decisions are made, it builds psychological safety. Misunderstanding roles leads to duplicated work, frustration, and burnout.
Think of role clarity not as hierarchy, but as choreography. Each person moves in rhythm with the rest of the crew — confident in what they’re responsible for and supported in doing it well.
So whether your “ship” is a distributed team, an AI-driven startup, or a legacy platform mid-transformation, the same principle holds:
Define your vision. Empower your executors. Respect your experts.
That’s what kept pirate crews afloat — and it’s what keeps great product teams sailing forward.
If you missed the first part of this series, check out The Pirate Code: What 18th Century Crews Can Teach Modern Product Teams, which explores how trust and shared norms shaped pirate culture — and what that means for building stronger teams today.
