[btown]

This post is really, really refreshing to read. As a startup founder I empathize deeply with how difficult it is to "actively seek out dissent." Product pipelines move quickly, teams need to feel they can have initiative to deploy things independently from the rest of the org, as a cross-team leader it's unhealthy to squash that initiative... but at the same time you need to set boundaries about when something needs consensus.

IMO this is why it's vital to have Core Principles at a company (in this case, "user trust" might be a reasonable wording), both at a product level and a meta level, about how the world needs to see the company and the company needs to see itself. And when any employee, no matter where, feels something might breach Core Principles, it should be a five alarm fire that the C suite should know about and react to (or delegate said reaction), and if it turns out to be a misunderstanding, that employee should not feel they expended any political capital in escalating their concerns - at worst they might just require more context about why something is either a non-issue or necessary (which in this specific case doesn't apply), and leadership should be excited to see them growing by asking those questions. Ideally, it's as easy and low-risk as submitting an internal bug report.

Of course, I can imagine this stops scaling at some point. FAANG need very different approaches to this problem, and that's probably an entire business school class to answer. But I feel any smaller organization with a focused product can move in this direction!