Keith Zubchevich, president and CEO of Conviva, holds that a new CEO scales themselves by discarding the operating framework they inherit and building one that matches their own strengths and weaknesses. He made that change after stepping into the CEO seat in 2021, following more than 13 years as Conviva’s Chief Strategy Officer. Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, identifies Zubchevich’s approach as personal framework design: the CEO builds the operating system first, then trusts it while staying connected to the team level. When Zubchevich required every Conviva team to choose between halving headcount and committing to 5X the prior year’s output, the company delivered both an organizational optimization and a 3X productivity improvement within a single fiscal year. Conviva processes nearly 2 trillion streaming data events daily for brands including Disney+, Hulu, and Paramount+.
Who this episode is for: CEOs in their first few years in the seat who stepped up from a functional executive role and are still running the operating plan their predecessor built.
Key Takeaways
- A personalized management framework only produces value once the CEO stops re-deciding what it already decided, which Keith Zubchevich enforces through a fixed set of weekly, monthly, and quarterly deliverables owed by every leadership team member at Conviva.
- Verification belongs one or two levels below the direct reports. Zubchevich stays out of his leaders’ individual jobs and goes down to the team and culture level to confirm results, satisfaction, and reward are reaching people.
- People, not vision or product, are the binding constraint on scale, because the best idea, best vision, and best product will fail when people do not come along for the ride. Zubchevich names culture as the number one priority between success and failure of a company.
- Ownership expands the day a functional executive takes the CEO seat, running from strategy and vision through final execution, finance, and quarterly reconciliation, with no category of problem routed elsewhere.
- Owning culture personally becomes non-negotiable once hiring outpaces the CEO’s ability to meet new employees. Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach, describes a CEO he coaches who spends the bulk of his time making sure people understand why the company exists and what success looks like.
New CEOs Inherit Every Problem the Moment They Take the Seat
For 13 years as Conviva’s Chief Strategy Officer, Keith Zubchevich worked in what he describes as a very forward looking, very clean environment, where platform incidents and product delays belonged to someone else. That changed with one outage. When a platform outage hit after Zubchevich became CEO in 2021, his first reaction was that the outage was not his problem, and he corrected himself in the moment: “Every problem is my problem.”
The practical meaning is scope. Zubchevich says the CEO owns not just the strategy and the vision, but everything back through final execution and through finance and quarterly reconciliation. That ownership is why he tells anyone considering the seat that it is the hardest job they will ever do, and he ties the difficulty to two specific demands: cross-functional capability, meaning the CEO must know every team and how the teams work together, and personal accountability to the company, the employees, and the shareholders.
If you are stepping up from a functional role, expect the change to arrive as a reflex, not as a memo. The first time a problem lands that you would previously have routed elsewhere, your instinct will tell you it belongs to another team. Zubchevich’s rule is to override the instinct on the spot.
CEOs Build Management Frameworks That Fit Their Own Strengths
Keith Zubchevich, president and CEO of Conviva, names one mistake above all others for new CEOs: “the number one mistake CEOs make is they come in and then they inherit someone’s management framework, their operating plan, and they try and continue down that road when in fact it’s like running in someone else’s shoes.”
The decision rule underneath the metaphor is direct. A management framework must be designed around the specific CEO who will run it, because a framework built for a different leader’s skill set will produce friction the leader cannot name or fix. Zubchevich built his own at Conviva to take his strengths into account and to augment his weaknesses, and he says his skill sets are very different from those of other CEOs, which is exactly why the transfer of someone else’s model fails.
He is explicit that no outside authority will settle this for you. There is no blueprint and no Harvard playbook that requires a CEO to operate a certain way. That absence is the permission. Be comfortable enough to say the company is not doing it that way anymore, then internalize how you want to execute and build the framework to suit you.
CEOs Trust Their Framework by Checking the Team Level, Not the Task Level
A personalized framework only works if the CEO stops re-deciding what the framework already decided. Keith Zubchevich, president and CEO of Conviva, puts it in one line: “So management framework should be personalized and then you trust it.”
Trust in his case is structural. Every member of the Conviva leadership team owes a defined set of deliverables every week, every month, and every quarter. Zubchevich lets that process run without getting into each leader’s job, which is how he stays far from a micromanager while the framework does the coordinating work.
Then he goes down. He moves below the leadership layer into the team level and the culture level to confirm the framework is working in practice, that people are happy and satisfied, and that reward is reaching them. That is the split worth copying: verification happens one or two levels below your direct reports, on outcomes and morale, not inside your leaders’ individual tasks.
CEOs Carry Culture Because Vision and Product Will Fail Without People
Keith Zubchevich, president and CEO of Conviva, names two challenges CEOs face when growing a company past its initial success. The first is holding the vision through adversity while staying agile, because every vision meets a moment where execution does not go as planned. The second is harder. Building a vision is easy, building a deck is easy, and building a product is relatively easy as a single event, but keeping people together through that execution is the most difficult part of the job.
The reason is arithmetic. Scale requires people, so the best idea, best vision, and best product will fail when people are not coming along for the ride. Zubchevich says he constantly carries the questions of how the culture is doing, how morale is doing, and where he sees pockets of people who may be struggling, whether that is a sales team entering a new market or a marketing team trying to dial in a message. Nobody has it easy during scaling, which is why he treats monitoring the human side as a CEO responsibility rather than a delegated one.
His conclusion is that culture is the number one priority between success and failure of a company, and that inspiration is the mechanism: the CEO must make sure everyone sees the same future, because without it the work becomes a job and people become demoralized. Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach, reports the same pattern in his coaching practice. One CEO Gow coaches, whom Gow calls a black belt in culture, decided that a person hired into his fast-growing company whom he will never personally meet must still succeed on the team, so he owns culture directly and spends the bulk of his time making sure people understand why the company exists, how it works together, and what success looks like.
How CEOs Force a Commitment Their Teams Cannot Reach by Best Effort
Keith Zubchevich, president and CEO of Conviva, treats AI as a revolution rather than an evolution, and separates it from prior platform shifts including PCs, networking, and cloud because of its effect on individual jobs and roles. Headquartered in the Bay Area, Conviva sat inside the early meetups around agentic AI, and Zubchevich converted that early exposure into a mandate rather than a pilot.
He made Conviva an AI first company, requiring every team, every function, and every person to use AI as a core part of the job, not as a sidecar business, a spell checker, or a document creator. Then he removed the middle option. Going into the fiscal year, his leadership team got two choices: “You either cut your team in half, half the number of people, or you give me 5 X your commitment from last year.”
The mechanism transfers to any capability shift, not just AI. Zubchevich says he was never going to hold anyone to those exact parameters. The mandate existed to drive discipline into the two metrics that mattered, number of people and outputs, because people are afraid of things they do not know and adoption curves will otherwise take forever. Setting a target that the existing method cannot reach forces teams to think of the solution in a completely different way, since neither number is reachable by trial and error or best effort. Conviva finished the exercise with an optimization of the organization and a 3X productivity improvement.
The Framework Keith Zubchevich Uses to Scale Himself as a CEO
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| Every problem is now your problem | On day one as CEO, ownership runs from strategy and vision through final execution, finance, and quarterly reconciliation, with no category of problem routed to someone else | When a platform outage hit after Zubchevich became Conviva’s CEO in 2021, his first reaction was that the outage belonged to another team, and correcting that instinct redefined his ownership across the full operating chain for the five years he has since led the company |
| Build the framework, do not inherit it | Replace the predecessor’s operating plan with a framework designed around your own strengths and weaknesses before you try to run the company through it | Zubchevich discarded the model he stepped into, and the framework he built in its place has carried Conviva through five years of his tenure as CEO, producing the leadership operating cadence that made the AI mandate executable in a single fiscal year |
| Trust the framework, verify below it | Let the leadership process run untouched, then go one or two levels down to the team and culture layer to confirm it is producing results and satisfaction | Zubchevich credits this split with letting him lead Conviva for five years without becoming a micromanager, while still locating pockets of struggling people that the leadership layer would not have surfaced to him |
| Culture decides whether scale holds | Treat morale, inspiration, and shared vision as CEO-owned work, because people are the constraint that vision and product cannot overcome | Zubchevich names culture as the number one priority between success and failure, and credits people focus with carrying Conviva through 19 years of scaling and repeated industry transformation to a platform now processing nearly 2 trillion streaming data events daily |
| Force the commitment, let teams find the method | Set a target large enough that the existing method cannot reach it, then let teams redesign the work rather than dabble | Zubchevich’s two choice mandate produced an organizational optimization plus a 3X productivity improvement in one fiscal year, an outcome he says best effort and trial and error would not have reached |
Quotes from This Episode
- “Every problem is my problem.” Keith Zubchevich, President and CEO, Conviva
- “It is the hardest job you’ll ever do, period.” Keith Zubchevich, President and CEO, Conviva
- “There’s no playbook that that that says you have to do it a certain way. Do it your way and make sure it it it works across the team.” Keith Zubchevich, President and CEO, Conviva
- “Nobody has it easy when you start talking about scaling a company.” Keith Zubchevich, President and CEO, Conviva
- “Best idea, best vision, best product fails if people are not coming along for the ride.” Keith Zubchevich, President and CEO, Conviva
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the hardest part of moving from a functional executive role into the CEO seat?
Keith Zubchevich, president and CEO of Conviva, says the hardest part is the expansion of ownership. As Chief Strategy Officer for more than 13 years, he worked in a forward looking role where platform incidents and product delays belonged to someone else. When a platform outage hit after he became CEO in 2021, his first reaction was that the outage was not his problem, and he corrected himself in the moment: every problem is now his problem. Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, frames this as the core scaling question facing any leader entering the seat, because the CEO role runs from strategy and vision all the way through final execution and quarterly financial reconciliation.
Should a new CEO keep the management framework they inherit?
Keith Zubchevich says no. He identifies inheriting a predecessor’s management framework and operating plan as the number one mistake CEOs make, and compares it to running in someone else’s shoes. Zubchevich built his own framework at Conviva around his personal strengths and weaknesses, then set fixed weekly, monthly, and quarterly deliverables for his leadership team so he could trust the process without entering each leader’s job. He tells new CEOs there is no blueprint and no playbook requiring a specific model, so the framework must be personalized first and trusted second.
How can a CEO drive adoption of a new capability across every team, not just engineering?
Keith Zubchevich drove AI adoption at Conviva by removing the option to move slowly. He issued an AI first mandate requiring every team, every function, and every person to use AI as a core part of the job rather than as a spell checker or document creator, then gave his leadership team two choices for the fiscal year: cut headcount in half or commit to 5X the prior year’s output. Zubchevich says he never intended to hold teams to either number, and used the mandate to drive discipline into the two metrics that mattered, number of people and outputs. Conviva finished the year with an organizational optimization and a 3X productivity improvement.
CEOs Work with Glenn Gow to Scale Themselves Before They Scale Their Companies
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach. He coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits, helping leaders scale their companies by scaling themselves first. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
