How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google

Key Takeaways

part of what i think is pretty exciting about product management is you are a leader from day one in product management right and and you know there's leadership all over the place but that's sort of your job you're a leader you don't you don't have any formal authority but you're a leader you're expected to lead over his 14-year career at google ken norton let product teams that build google docs google calendar google maps and even did a stint at google ventures the products that he's helped craft are now used by over 3 billion people today ken is a full-time executive coach specializing at working with product leaders and in our conversation we cover the creative versus reactive mindset why the art of product management is much more important than the science of product management how to get over imposter syndrome the most common pm blind spots how to find a coach and how to know if a coach is right for you and so much more i hope that you enjoy this episode with ken norton if you're setting up your analytics stack but you're not using amplitude what are you doing amplitude is the number one most popular analytic solution in the world used by both big companies like shopify instacart and atlassian and also most tech startups amplitude has everything you need including a powerful and fully self-service analytics product an experimentation platform and even an integrated customer data platform to help you understand your users like never before give your teams self-service product data to understand your users drive conversions and increase engagement growth and revenue ditch your vanity metrics trust your data work smarter and grow your business try amplitude for free just visit amplitude.com to get started have you heard of lenny's job board well if you're hiring or open to a new gig have i got the site for you lenny's jobs.com if you're a hiring manager sign up and get access to hundreds of hand curated people who are open to new opportunities thousands of people apply and i personally review and accept just 10 of them to be part of this collective you won't find a better place to hire product managers and growth people and if you're someone who's looking around for something new join the collective it's free you can be anonymous and hide yourself from any company you can also leave anytime and you'll only hear from companies that you want to hear from check out lenny'sjobs.com to learn more welcome to the podcast ken i am so honored to have you here you're such a legend of product managers in product management circles your writing has had so much influence on so many people including myself and if nothing else you've led to many donuts being purchased by tech companies over the years so thanks for being here well thank you and thanks for having me feelings mutual obviously big fan of your work and all the things you've done for the community and and this podcast which has been fantastic so humbled and excited to be here and yes i i do think that i'm at least maybe partially responsible for the at least a lot of consumption of donuts over these years are you tired of people asking you about donuts i'll never get tired of it back when when well back when we met with people in person you know people would bring me donuts and and never got tired of it and nor did any of the people that i worked with who who got to eat those donuts get tired of it so no i'll never get tired donuts uh someone on twitter asked what's what's like a digital equivalent of bringing the donuts now that we're kind of in a remote world do you have any advice on that that's a great question i don't i'm not even sure if the physical equivalent of donuts is donuts i mean when when i when i came up with that i think it was really to to be a metaphor around being sort of a servant leader bringing you know whatever needs to be done sort of filling the white space filling the gaps um whatever sort of needed to happen so it's not doesn't always have to be donuts um i i did put that question out to some of the readers in my newsletter a while ago it may be early in the pandemic and got a lot of really interesting ideas and um maybe that was at a place where people had a little bit more patience for happy hours over zoom and stuff like that maybe that patience has worn out the idea that i loved the most was was actual donuts there was a pm who um got door dash codes and found local the best local donut place for each of the people on the team and basically sent them a code and said click here and order the donuts to come to your house whenever you want them so um maybe at least partially the digital equivalent of the donuts might be actual donuts decentralized donuts decentralized donuts on the blockchain yeah oh boy let's not go there um i don't know what that is so i was perusing your career path ahead of this chat he had this pretty wild career uh you're an engineer initially and then you were cto at a part of nbc then you're a founder and then you spend 14 years at google working on products that folks may have heard of like google docs and google calendar and google maps and you've also done a bunch of writing and then more recently you've become a full-time executive coach focusing on product people i have so many questions i'd love to ask about your career and learnings along the way and the writing but um i'd actually love to spend most of our time talking about the coaching and things that you've learned through that experience and so i have a couple questions just off the bat what does an executive coach actually do like what kinds of things are you helping people with what does a session look like and then two just how did you decide you wanted to be a coach full-time after leaving google yeah that's a great question and you know i think coaching does mean a lot of different things and it sort of depends on who you talk to it is it is a little bit of a kind of who you who you are your style your approach some people are calling themselves coaches doing more mentoring more advice other people are maybe more like me more peer coaching you know to me i i see executive coaching as a partnership or like creative partnership and it's all about helping my client reach their goals their potential whatever that whatever that means to them right so important thing about coaching is the definition of success does belong to the client i don't have an agenda i don't have a set of things i'm trying to share teach learn it really is fundamentally up to them which means every client is is completely different they have different sense of where they want to go um different barriers that might be standing in their way i my coaching practice i coach the whole person so there is no restriction on what we might talk on what we might work on together it's not limited to products not even limited to work or even leadership um it's wherever they want to go whatever you know change transformation means to them um you know as coaches we bring a bunch of tools to the conversation i you know the most important ones honestly are probably listening and curiosity intuition open-mindedness um really there to sort of help challenge them to see things in different ways help them tap into their imagination figure out when there might be underlying beliefs help them connect dots that need to be connected help them disconnect things that feel connected there's a lot of sort of exploration to it um i it's very jazz like i i my love of jazz has has been shared before but there is a sort of improvisation to it and what coaching is really powerful is you may not necessarily know where you're going when you start and you sort of follow wherever there is meaning and change for for that individual wherever they want to go um and the question around like what brought me into it was was actually kind of interesting and as i honestly working with my own executive coach started to figure out what it is that mattered to me what i liked what my values were what my purpose was started to unpack that i love deeply connecting with people and i love helping people change and grow and the moments when i had the opportunity to do that as a manager as a product leader were the most fulfilling parts of my career and so i started to unpack that and figure out what would it look like if that was what i did and the other part of the journey was for several years at google i worked at gv google ventures google's venture capital arm and i had the opportunity to work with with founders and product leaders in the portfolio and i started to sort of simultaneously recognize the the shortcomings of giving advice because it seemed like you know well i could meet with these folks i could tell them what i did i could tell them what google did and that'll sort of answer all their questions and you start to realize advice is not super not as powerful as you might think it is like it's a little bit like cotton candy doesn't have a lot of nutrition you get a nice sugar high you feel great both sides feel happy but then sort of a couple weeks later a couple months later nothing's really changed and and that's because it doesn't often confront the real problem it often isn't relevant like what worked for us at google may not have worked anywhere else um it may not even have worked at google for all i know i feel like there were years at google where all we were doing was making things worse by showing up and we should just all have gone sat on a beach somewhere and life would the company would have grown even faster so who knows um and so it was sort of these two you know kind of twin pillars of wanting to figure out where i could do what i liked the most and then also recognizing that where growth comes from is less around advice and sort of telling people what to do and more about sort of helping them figure out their own path their own way and then that ultimately it sort of brought me into hey i want to do this full time and and that's what i've been doing ever since when do you find people come to you to get advice and coaching what kind of like what kind of clients do you find you end up working with it's a great question i generally speaking i work with senior product leaders however you wanted to find that typically these are chief product officers vp's product at startups um largely director level and above at big bigger tech companies um some ceos other c-level execs in there i think really anyone that sort of considers themselves in a product leadership role um often they come to me because they're at a there's a career milestone or a crossroads um and it could be that they've now find themselves in the position of being a cpo for the first time um maybe there's a new you know industry change or they've gone from a big company to a startup and sort of a have this sense of you know what got me here isn't going to get me there and that's oftentimes when they reach out for coaching um and and i think my clients are also very introspective and and surrounded by great mentors and advisors and have all sorts of people in their life who can help them but are realizing that a lot of the work is going to be internal work that's going to get them to next level and so this sort of transformation is going to be just as much what i need to do as who i am and that's often when when people come to me you said that a lot of coaching is or the way you coach is about the whole person and i'm curious i don't know if there's an answer to this but when people come to get help and coaching how much of their uh on blocks i guess are like rooted in you know their regular life and versus like skills technical skills and and more like the pme product leadership side if that makes sense yeah i think well let me maybe try to illustrate this with a example from my my my life right now um and and if you'll indulge me i'm gonna i'm gonna go a little bit afield here but i promise we'll do it um so we are teaching our 16 year old son how to drive so he just got his driver's permit um do you remember when you learned how to drive winnie i do yep yeah yeah so it's uh it's scary i don't know if you you know how your your parents might have felt but uh nope i don't know how it is on the other side of it it's a whole new journey and look he you know he's a smart kid he's he's caught you know he's gonna do great but it helped me actually think back to when i learned how to drive and actually what i think is maybe a little bit more important here is before you learn to drive and so if you think about it as a when you're a kid you just cars just go places like you get strapped in and you you just wait and you you get impatient and then eventually you go somewhere and you're not even consciously aware of the concept of driving just cars just happen and you're sort of you know not even aware of it um as you get a little bit older you start to become curious you start to figure out oh you know that wheel has something to do with it you turn the wheel maybe you start to understand there's pedals um but it also just seems really simple right just like you get in the car and you drive it and you go somewhere um maybe as you get older you you end up maybe even been a little bit of a smart aleck about how easy it looks when you start talking to your parents about like oh it doesn't look hard i can do this now suddenly you're behind the wheel of the car this is this is my my son is doing and wow is it different than you thought it was going to be right is it way more complicated um you have to remember check your mirrors you got to look before you turn you didn't even you didn't even know what that sign meant you didn't know what those stripes meant it was just overloading with complication and your your sort of internal mindset for confronting this challenge is not going to suit you right the way you used to sort of approach the world um and maybe put it in like product leadership product terms everyone around you has got some real pithy advice about the things you're forgetting to do sort of like hey you forgot don't forget to check your mirror um everyone's got a framework right it's like you know ah do you know about the ten and two framework wait what's the ten and two frames oh you just put your left hand on the ten your right hand on the two o'clock that's that's the only thing you're missing here's here's a great you know medium post about that and then you're like that's not the problem this is the problem is i might i have not adapted to the complexity of the world around me right and so there is this sense that you know what is interesting about driving is the world hasn't gotten any more complex like driving's always been driving but now your place in the world has shifted such that the internal meaning making and self-complexity that is required requires a complete reboot of the of the internal operating system in order to allow you to to thrive there and so you know when you when you talk about this kind of question of you know how much of this is skills how much of this is tactics how much of this is learning versus how much is internal growth the answer is it's both but the shift that is required is very much around how your inner self can make meaning and respond to the demands of the world around you so that you can succeed and thrive in this sort of this mindset shift that happens um you know the skills matter but by this point you're sort of beyond the place where you've learned the skills there's mastering the skills but there is the sense of um you know what developmental psychologists call you know sort of self-complexity the ability to sort of respond and adapt to that and so i think we go through a lot of those shifts in our career right the driving example is simple um actually probably too simple because the world is actually getting more complex for those of us that work in product i mean every day something changes it forces us to to respond and adapt so there aren't even rules of the road in product um but i i think this is sort of what we're talking about this question of the internal operating system i've developed my ability to to restructure it such that it i can succeed given the demands that have been placed upon me what an amazing analogy uh totally hits home in a good and bad way this is a it's a really good segue to something i wanted to chat about something that we we talked about before the recording which is uh what you're finding to be one of the bigger unlocks for your clients and it's also a concept that you've been spending a lot of time refining and your fighting is helping people shift uh and specifically around shift their um leadership mindset and so i'd love to just hear you talk through your thinking there yeah it it does sort of lead into this and you know maybe another analogy that might that might work for your listeners if you think about you know product management your your career arc and sort of where you are challenged from a mindset perspective you know in some ways it does feel like the the early part of your career you're learning to play a video game right there's a hopefully there's a tutorial like your first job is you know sort of learning the rope somebody teaching you you maybe have managers that are you know giving you simple little missions that you can succeed at and if you fail the consequences aren't bad and you sort of like it does feel like a little bit and i've talked to you know i felt this way but talked to a lot of people or in their career it does feel like you're trying to learn the rules of the game trying to figure out the physics and you want to run up the score and you get better at playing the game you know you fail but you start to develop some confidence that when you fail you'll learn from it you'll get better you get really good at the game right you get promoted you get rewarded you unlock new levels teach other people how to play the game you start to feel really awesome about yourself um but then suddenly you're put in a place where you realize that the rules of the game aren't so black and white there's a you know maybe there's like there's there's a long delay now between when you get to see what you did and the score of it um things start to behave in unexpected ways um the physics start to get weird you're on a level where you're floating i don't know what the right metaphor is here but you start to recognize that this there's been this huge change and the most frightening part about it is you look around and everyone is looking at you like you're the designer of the game and you thought you were playing and that's often what it feels like when you when you move into a leadership role and you know to come back to this sort of sense of like what got me here is not going to get me there and and sometimes you know i work with a lot of leaders and sometimes that's come with like a pretty significant cost right this this this juxtaposition you know maybe your happiness your health your marriage there's there's been this sort of existential crisis of i don't know if i love this anymore maybe it leads to burnout maybe it's not even that dire it's just a sense of like well i'm looking around and i need to be something i need to unlock something else to continue on this on this path and and there is a sense of sort of stuckness that that comes from that and um what i've come to realize is this is a the precipice of i think this pretty fundamental concept in in leadership and i'm not the you know i'm not the originator of this so this has come up again and again and again it's not new it's going to sound familiar it's not even it's like the the flood myth from gilgamesh showing up and you know all this sort of oral histories of the world right it's not new um conscious leadership group uh organization that i'm a big fan of they call it above the line versus below the line um brene brown calls it daring versus armored leadership sage versus warrior even in the world of sports there's like playing to win versus playing not to lose it's sort of this concept that's come up again and again uh and leadership circle calls it creative versus reactive and that's the term i'm gonna use i like that and here's the the distinction very simple are you responding to the world from a place of fear where you see problems and threats um you want to be right you want to be liked your defensive sort of in inward approach or are you responding the world from a place of openness possibility curiosity passion growth purpose right very simple concept pretty much everyone understands to me right makes sense everyone also then immediately says a couple different things that sounds amazing i'd rather i'd rather have that or here are moments when i felt that um but that's usually followed up by a couple of questions i don't know if that works it doesn't sound very effective is it possible you know is it is it is it possible and then how do you you know how do you do that and the effective part is is as actually a question we can answer which is yes it is it is more effective um uh bob anderson bill adams are two management scientists um who've who've written extensively done the whole bunch of research and um they have looked at every possible dimension you can imagine of success both leadership capability they've looked at you know revenue brand you know profitability everything and it's shown yes create this creative form of leadership is in every possible way positively correlated with success and reactive leadership is is negatively correlated so yes it works um yet according to their research research some 70 75 percent of leaders are primarily operating reactively so most leaders are are operating from a place of fear reacting seeing problems and threats and that's because that other question how do you do it is such a hard one to answer um and it's not an easy thing that you since kind of flip a switch of and it sort of goes back to this notion of like redesigning that internal operating system so how you confront the world how you what underlying belief systems and assumptions you have that are causing you to operate from that place can you ask a quick question just to clarify yeah the two sides what's what's kind of a sign that you're in the reactive side of things i i think one thing you said is you're worrying a lot about how people think about you and make sure that they like use their anything else that's like gonna tell a listener like oh maybe i'm falling into this trap yeah the you're you've nailed it which is that fear like operating from a place of anxiety right um there are different ways depending on our our mindsets our approaches i like the word postures because it it seems to to click different sort of ways that we retreat into this reactive mode um fear anxiety is the way right it's sort of like that's how you know you're just like oh i'm bullying i'm below the line i'm just like i'm seeing problems i'm seeing threats our brains are hardwired to do that right so it's not like that's wrong um these are brains that were that learn to do that you know i don't know in the on the tundra like being chased by by wild animals right so this is this is our is our our normal way of being there might be different desires and needs that force you to to operate that way you know we think of there's really sort of three three of these postures and anybody is probably more than one of them so this is not pathologizing this isn't putting you in a box but one probably one of these will resonate more than the others wanting to to be approved wanting to be loved wanting other people to like you right this was me or my early part of my career same um yeah so this is you know you kind of like heart type right it's sort of what sometimes called move toward other people um a lot of that came from my environment right i was coming up with product management no one necessarily knew what the job even was and i had no authority and most people could just ignore me if they wanted to and so i sort of had to meet other people's expectations please them want to be accepted by them seek their approval and it was sort of this what we call a complying approach and here this is why this is so vexing is it actually worked really well right it was pretty effective other people liked working with me i listened to them and i sort of considered everyone's needs and and made sure everyone felt heard but there came a point where i started like i gave away so much power that you know it was hurting me when it came to purpose and and execution and decisiveness and so again these aren't these aren't bad there's under usually underlying tendencies that are very good it just starts to have a cost as you as you become more senior it's like the gears start to kind of grind to a halt a little bit um another way is a more of a needing to be right sort of head type protecting one's own ideas sometimes called a move away from type distance arrogance criticism sort of retreating into your own ideas and head and then the other is you know will will not be a surprise is the more controlling you know my way of the highway autocratic will move against wanting to win wanting to be number one wanting to excel sort of wanting dominance wanting control this would be another tendency um often one of those feels natural to you and another one feels just so complete credibly distasteful that you can't imagine possibly operating that way and this goes into sort of the underlying beliefs part you'd asked you know you if you had told me early in my career when you saw me being passive and people-pleasing like that yes you just got to stop caring what other people think ken you gotta you gotta start being you know you gotta be more pushy um people did say that to me it was pretty common probably in my my performance reviews very common you know even people worked for me were like you need to push back my only archetype for doing that was the autocratic controlling type i was like i don't want to be like that that guy's a jerk he's that's a that's a fascist i don't want to be a fascist i do care about other people and so most many of our are examples and archetypes are these sort of equally ineffective reactive ways of being and so no wonder i didn't want to be like that because that's also not very effective either yeah but there was a sense for me of redefining you know this is where coaching is powerful is this what are the underlying assumptions and beliefs that you have that are causing you to fall back on some of these fundamental ways of operating um and not let go of them right because the answer for me wasn't stop caring about other people i wasn't going to do that that's a value of mine it's part of who i am but take the caring about other people the empathy the connection and direct it in a more creative way where you're operating now from a place of purpose and vision and not reacting and protecting and defending and wanting to be you know liked um for me the key to that was letting go of needing to be liked and redefining it as as an admiration that takes place over time so rather than i want to leave this room with everyone liking me i started to realize i want to be the type of leader where a decade later people say i would work with that guy again in a heartbeat and that was part of the the unlock for me again i care about other people that's that's a natural sort of gift that underlines it but it's a redefinition of how that serves me if that makes sense say someone's in that first bucket and and i i was definitely in that first bucket like and i still like want people to like me and i still probably have flaws there but say air pm and you're like oh man that's exactly how i am acting right now uh it sounds like is the corvette just like a mindset shift going from any people to like me to what you just talked about of like okay i'm gonna shift to i just want them to respect me over time and and is that kind of the core of it i know it's probably not that easy but how how should someone behave if they're in that bucket right now yeah it's not it sounds easy right and this is part of what's hard about this it always sounds easy when you describe it having gone through the journey right sort of like you know you know talk to somebody on the summit of mount everest and they'll be like yeah you know well i could just climb this mountain that's how i got here and you're like okay wait that's not that easy um and again it is very individualized i think there's an appreciation that you have to understand what is what is holding you back and this is a lot of the work that i'll do with my clients is what is a sort of underlying expectations what are these underlying beliefs um i believed that my style was incompatible with being a leader right i would have said i can't be a ceo because you know i'm not tough enough right i'm i'm not i'm not strong enough i'm not commanding enough i can't command a room and it's like okay what what is the underlying belief i'm making about what leadership is there right there's an archetype that i have in my mind that is incompatible with this this way and so there's a need to confront that okay what makes you believe the only type of leader is the leader that can that orders people around maybe that's all i've ever seen um maybe i don't believe it's possible to be any other type of leader um maybe there's an inner critic that is like convincing me that that that's not who i am and so part of it is this sort of redefinition of what is leadership need for you for you authentically what would it be like in my case to lead with purpose and be decisive and lead with vision and to have other people felt like they're being brought along and listened to and participated and create safe spaces for other people to like that was the sort of question there um and it and it took people challenging my point of view took working with a coach asking me questions forcing me to see places i'd made connections that the connections don't really need to be made there's a lot of instruments and tools we work within coaching there's three 360-degree assessments that are very helpful here that will start to help you understand hey here are places where you're operating reactively here are places where you're operating really create creatively um because by the way most people are you know part partially somewhere in that journey it's a developmental process and to start to be able to get the feedback the dopamine hit of seeing when i do it this way it actually it's more effective and it doesn't cost me as much and i'm happier and i'm enjoying it i'm seeing that it's working um is oftentimes a big part of this because there is this disbelief that it won't work right the number of times when i'm with a client and coaching and say well what if you what if you did do that and they go well it just won't work you realize that there is this sort of this this wiring in there that needs to this is what i talk about this sort of operating system it needs to be rejiggered to start to make sense of what if it did and how might you know the point you just made about how um you can realize that you can be successful in a lot of different ways and you don't have to be this one archetype of a leader this really resonates with my experience i actually had an executive coach for a few months and that was probably the biggest unlock for me we did the strengths exercise which a lot of people do and the main thing that she helped me see is like you can do all the things that you want to do through the lens of the strengths that you have and not have to force yourself to be good at these other things because there's many ways to accomplish the same outcomes that's exactly right and then once you start to understand that you start to develop a better way of finding the right place the right environment the right role um you know when we talk began the conversation you asked me what brought me into executive coaching you know i would feel these these sort of i would i would describe it as flying too close to the sun in my career right where i would i would have a team i'd be managing a small team i would love it i would enjoy it and then suddenly my team would grow i'd become more senior than i felt comfortable being and then i felt like i wasn't getting to do the quote unquote real work anymore and then i would be just completely disheveled and dissatisfied and then i'd go try to go find a smaller team or even stop being a manager and and it was a very meandering reactive path it was like i was eventually every so often i was catching a wave and i knew what it felt like to be on the wave but i didn't know what the characteristics of the wave were and then through coaching i was like i love connecting with other people i like helping people grow i like helping challenge people i like i like helping right and then and then i was like what are those parts what if i unpack those oh that's why i loved managing that team of five because i got to do a lot of it that's why i hated managing a team of 35 because there's no time for it and then you start to say okay what if rather than you know just randomly meandering through my career i actually elevated needing to connect wanting to be helpful you know and then you're like what would it be like if i went to the helping professions right it's it's just a reframing of you know move through your career in a way that seems externally to fit some definition of success and to start to define that internally right and that is the very definition of the reactive versus creative mindset reactive allowing the world to to to set the expectations and try to try to meet them versus tap into what your real true sense of purpose and vision is and then use that to navigate the world it's interesting that so much of this is just mindset it's not like learning and you skill as a leader or product manager it's like just seeing yourself in the world differently and all of a sudden you kind of unlock your career is that is that what you find absolutely and that's why you know i think so much of the focus on the skills the frameworks you know it it can be limited as you as you develop these these capabilities because it's inner work right we're talking we're where we're talking about is this is this is all me um now that's empowering um there's empowerment to be able to say you know i i want to change something and it doesn't involve a whole bunch of other people convincing and persuading of you know getting into an executive relations all me but it also in some ways makes it harder because because it is all you um and this is you know in coaching it's all about you it's all about that who am i what matters to me what underlying belief systems inner voices are challenging me in ways that i want to be challenged what is my unique um often i mean i love the word authenticity it's like you're just talking about like what is my authentic way to lead and then how do i i center that rather than trying to fit into someone else's definition of what leadership might be and you may you may recognize i can't be that authentic way of leader leader at this place or in this place type of company but i know how to find it and i'm going to go find it do you have any more examples of either someone kind of uncovering this about themselves or another mindset shift that you can make in one of these other buckets similar to kind of the idea of i'll think about people liking me over the long term versus immediately yeah you know it it it really does vary you you start to pick up on that shift when it it's less of um how you know the the the goal is being defined externally and more more of the goals being defined internally right so you know you'll have a conversation with somebody new to coaching and those and you'll say what do you want you know and they'll be like well i want to i want to get promoted to vp okay why because i want to because i want to be a vp right it's like what's important about being vp well because and eventually the answer is well because it's there right and that's the the thing that i'm supposed to do and then you start to notice the shift and it starts to become more of you know well because really what i love is you know what's important to me is creativity and you know when i when i want i want more creativity in my life and i want more um you know ability to uh challenge other people right and so you start to kind of descendants a little more from in then from out and that's where that shift is and you know the journey is is different for for everyone um and i think ultimately this is part of why quite frankly coaching may not be right for everyone right it may be um you know if we go back to that video game analogy if you're looking for someone to just teach you the tutorial so you can learn how to play the video game and there's you know this jackass like me saying next to you and saying what's important to you about playing this video game you're going to be like just how can you tell me how to hold the controller can you stop um so it's not always right it's a place where i think oftentimes people recognize that you know they've gotten all the advice all the frameworks all the rules all the tricks all the tips they've learned that they've mastered it they've tweaked it they've optimized it they've recognized the shortcomings they've customized it and the emergence that's required for them to get the next level is just going to come just as much from inside them as it is from outside if not more and that's that's when that ship is made and that's called mentorship right i think um for people that are just looking for actual concrete advice on how to do a thing is that right versus coaching i think so in and you know this is where the words are squishy because i i there are a lot of people who are mentoring who are also stepping into a coach role occasionally um you know there are plenty of you know managers who are great at coaching you know as necessary so these sort of skills run the gamut but it's a question of how much are you looking for someone to tell you the right way versus how much do you believe that there even is no right way it's ultimately going to have to be your way and that's a different place a different point in your career different different levels of journey as part of why i tend to work with probably more senior executives because they don't they're not looking to me to tell them how to do the job they've already learned how to do the job there's just something deeper that's going to need to break through from that this episode is brought to you by unit what did 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a coach doesn't can't afford a coach is there something people can do on their own that you'd recommend to help them kind of shift their mindset and do a lot of these things that you've been describing yeah it's a great question i think you know here's here's the secret about the coaching industry anyone can call themselves a coach like there's no it's it's very democratized it's great like there's no gatekeepers and barriers and there's no like 500 licenses you have to go through um and and there are tons of great coaches who are at various different price levels at different levels of accessibility um and so you know i would if you say i can't afford a coach i might sort of challenge that a little bit and say you know have you looked the other thing is that you don't need a coach who's done the job before and and that's another i mean obviously i've done the job before so i'm sort of undermining part of my own selling point here but um coaches are trained to coach people on any topic so when i go through coach training i can i can coach you on anything people can coach you on anything and sometimes even there might be power in having a coach that's never done the product management job because there won't be any any sort of um cheating of like starting to kind of move into a more advisor role or maybe as the coach either there may be no will you tell me what should i should do and person be like i don't know i've never done this job let's go back to what you want um so there could be some benefit from that and again you don't have to have done that so i would say coaching is is incredibly powerful i wish i'd had a coach much much earlier in my career um and so you know the answer maybe coaching is more accessible than you thought um if not i think you know the the things that we're talking about here are internal understanding of what matters to you your sense of purpose this sort of inner curiosity um and and that can be harnessed at any age so just sort of wondering about yourself at any point in your career like wondering what's important to you you know i love doing values work like what are your values like okay now what do you really are your values right like that's something you can do yourself that's something you can kind of question you can read about you can start to understand mentors can be great especially mentors who are less about trying to tell you the right way and get you to follow directly their path but are more they're sort of applying some curiosity asking questions challenging you in certain ways being a way that you can bounce ideas off of great managers i think especially the best product leaders um understand how to put the coach hat on and when it's appropriate to put the coach hat on um and are explicit about that i sort of like okay let me let me take off my manager hat now and put the coach hat on you know what do you what do you really want to do lenny like what's important to you what what's your career and so i think you can get coaching for every work um there's a lot of self-coaching you can do um there's a lot of this is honestly one of the benefits for me having gone through tons of training and coaching is like starting to coach myself like being like feeling an emotion and asking myself coach questions really powerful that's something you can learn you can do when you've had a coach you can do it when you don't have a coach you can explore it so i think this is really all about really being curious and wanting to understand who you really are at the core and what's important to you and what matters and that's something that can be done you know with or without a coach are there any resources that um you love for even either the values work or kind of learning these questions ask yourself we can put them in the show notes if nothing comes to mind immediately but is there something you recommend people check out um yeah there's some great books maybe i'll i'll use this opportunity to throw out a couple suggestions i guess we can look into the show notes um brene brown's uh dear delete it's a good book and she actually even has a whole section in there around values sort of confronting her values i'd like her approach there's some free resources on her website um i love conscious leadership groups work here the 15 commitments of conscious leadership book is fantastic there's a and you don't even need to to buy the book there's a ton of stuff on their website jim detmer um diana chapman and um kaylee uh warner klemp are the authors of that book and that's all about a lot of the stuff we've been talking about and and there's they're the ones that have the sort of above the line versus below line that fits into this sort of creative versus reactive um standpoint um those are all fantastic um if you want to go deeper into more of the the the management science behind it if you're like me and really curious about the psychology and the met in the management science i'm bob anderson and bill adams book mastering leadership creates the sort of um uh the entire sort of system integrated system around creative versus reactive um and and sort of as a teaser they identify five levels of leadership of which reactive is the second creative is the third um so beyond that you get into integral and unity so if you're looking to unlock the advanced um stages beyond creative there's a lot of great stuff in there and that's where all the research comes in as well um from an adult development standpoint um robert keegan is sort of the the godfather of the adult stage development work and the sort of meeting making that that underlines a lot of this here's a great book called immunity to change if you're if you're curious about that awesome we will link to all those in the description of this podcast so folks don't have to google around i have a couple more coaching questions before we move on to a few other topics um one is just what are you finding are the most common blind spots for product people in general like how are people shooting themselves in the foot most ah that's a great question um you know i think the the probably the number one category i'm not sure it's a necessary problem but maybe category problems is you know and this is i think great lesson for people earlier in their career is the how much all of the challenges that senior executives are dealing with come down to people versus you know product right so it's like you know it's fun to think about defining products optimizing doing user discovery and you know what testing what but it's like you sit down with an executive it's all about people right that's the hard part it's about persuading people getting groups of people to want to work together um trying to figure out how to deal with difficult personalities figuring out how to set a vision and articulate a vision create environment people can collaborate and play um and so i think there's you know the sort of category of blind spot often is people being confronted with that without having been intentional about thinking of it as a skill or an area that they needed to work on needed to improve um and part of what i think is pretty exciting about product product management is you are a leader from day one in product management right and and you know there's leadership all over the place but that's sort of your job you're a leader you don't you don't have any formal authority um but you're a leader you're expected to lead and guess what the hardest part about being a leader is when when you don't get to just rely on the formal authority so you're getting to practice all the hard parts about leadership from day one um because you're nobody's boss right and you get to to you know sharpen those skills develop those intuitions get better and better at that so that when you do someday if this is right for you become someone else's boss you've already been able to lean into that and so the people side of this is is is such an incredible aspect of what product management is and what i find it you know in this maybe a sort of a category of blind spots is people realizing that when they're put in a position where they're expected to to have impact and and realizing that they haven't developed the skills they haven't developed the capability to to actually be able to to manage and work through all these people how do you actually get better at that or develop those skills i know it's maybe a too big a question but what do you what can people do to realize like now that they know this is maybe a big blind spot what should they do yeah i just think of recognizing it's part of the job it's important and you know this is maybe i came up at a certain time where it was often just dismissed as soft skills right it's just like you know soft skills are helpful but like they're not actually something you want to work on something you train not something you and um you know this is just as important right this is the equal you know i i wrote a piece recently about the art versus the science the art is communication collaboration the more sort of fuzzy softer skills people stuff um and it's an elevation of that being just as important if not more important over time as all the sort of skills techniques tactics you know managing a backlog all that kind of stuff right do you have to do and you should invest in that the same way you invest in their skills so if you you go off to a training um to learn a technique for doing you know i don't know some sort of technical uh you know dashboard analysis um why don't you go to training to learn how to have difficult conversations because there's some great training about there about having difficult conversations or do some training about storytelling right these are all really really important factors that start to come into play and what i what i would recommend is just appreciating that these are going to really really matter and practicing and then valuing them and not thinking of them as something