I was hosting a Clubhouse conversation about mindful leadership with my friend Emily Campbell. The topic: balancing autonomy and accountability.

Lina Beckman joined—a first officer who'd served on multiple cruise lines, including Disney. Her stories about cruise ship leadership blew my mind.

The Captain's Job

Cruise ship captains create an environment where the crew can deliver peak performance. Read more about what a cruise ship captain does here.

Give Real Responsibility With Support

The most junior bridge member often pilots the ship. This is how they learn. They have close support from more senior bridge members so they don't steer off course. The entire bridge is set up so that crew members can learn how to handle the responsibilities of captaining a ship.

Coach Through Questions

Challenging is a common and necessary behavior on the bridge. Challenges encourage learning. They assume someone will self-correct instead of needing direct correction. Instead of "don't do that?" or "that's wrong!" they might ask "why did you that?" or "do you know what will happen if we continue on this course?" Correction can be given with respect.

It was incredible to hear her first-hand experience of being part of a cruise leadership team. It was obvious from Lina's stories that she is a leader whose goal is to create other leaders. Her experience confirmed many parts of the conversation we'd been having about autonomy and accountability.

What could you change in your work environment to give more autonomy to those on your team? How do you think they would respond?

I knew that my parents could just fix my writing, make it better. But they would ask questions, circle sentences, and challenge my thinking. Then they'd hand the paper back and invite me to do another rev and come back when I had taken it further.

It drove me nuts.

What I didn't understand at the time was just how critical practicing writing would be to my future career. My parents knew how to write—my dad is a professor and my mom is a music teacher. But instead of doing it for me (which would have been easier for all of us), they pushed me to go through the journey myself to learn the art of communicating my ideas.

Writing is a more critical skill than most people realize. You write how you think.

You write how you think.

Writing influences nearly everything you do. And today even those that may think they don't write often use writing more than they realize. Social media posts, text messages, emails, web pages ... the places we can use writing to persuade others about our ideas have 10x in the past couple decades. The stock value of writing continues to rise.

How can you use writing to better think?

🛠 IN PROGRESS

I'm not done with this article yet, but I'm trying to practice the art of shipping more often.

Here are some of the practices I'll expand on to finish this article:

• Journaling as a way to reflect
• Using writing to make meetings more productive
• Writing as a decision-making process
• Top tips for persuasive writing
• Don't know yourself ... know your audience
• The power of rewriting

My favorite example of this principle is a story from the Houston Texas airport.

Many years ago, airport executives had an issue with complaints about the wait at baggage claim. In response, the leaders upped the number of baggage handlers in an attempt to speed things up. And it worked ... at least in making things faster. The average wait time got down to 8 minutes, well within industry standards.

But the complaints didn't stop.

When they dug further and actually spent time with customers, they observed that the issue wasn't just the time it took bags to get from the plane to the belt. It was the wait. The walk from the gates receiving complaints only took about 1 minute. Passengers then spent the next 7 minutes waiting in airport-hell, wondering when or if their bags would ever come.

So the team made more atypical change. The gates were moved further away from baggage claim. The walk time increased 6x.

Complaints dropped to almost zero.

We are ok as long as it feels like progress is being made. Perception often overpowers reality. Passengers should have been happier with a system that didn't make them do more work. But feeling like something didn't take long is more pleasing than something that feels slower (even if it is actually better).

Often, we are like those passengers. We want to feel like something is happening. This is why individuals and teams don't pause to think. It doesn't feel productive. Let's just jump in! One remedy can be activities that help you pause to reflect.

Success awaits the person who stop chasing the feeling of progress and makes a habit of continually adjusting and pushing toward real progress—even if that means sometimes having to wait.

How could pause at times to make more real progress in your work?

In 1910 there were two expeditions that set out to claim they'd been the first ever to visit the South Pole. Robert Falcon Scott set out to claim the honor for England. Roald Amundsen for Norway.

It's a fascinating story given that we rarely have a head-to-head comparison with such similar to conditions to compare different approaches. A few differences in how they approached their expeditions:

• Pace. Scott's team would go for longer many days (9+ hours), but then not get out of their tents on hard days. Amundsen's team went 5-6 hours, around 15 miles, every day no matter what.
• Route. Scott's team took the only route that was known. Amundsen took a new route.
• Rest. Scott was impatient and didn't like resting when it didn't seem like you had to. Amundsen wanted his men to rest consistently, often 16 hours a day in their sleeping bags.
• Transportation. Scott's team brought 4 separate modes of transportation. They found that many didn't work well, but adjusted. Amundsen chose dogs because of experience on a previous expedition.
• Focus. Scott's team was doing scientific discovery in addition to getting to the South Pole. Amundsen's team was focused on one thing alone: get to the pole. Scott kept much better records and photographs.

For those who don't know the story, it might be tricky to tell which approach was better. Look over these again and think about what the outcome may be.

Here's what resulted:

Amundsen got there first.

And tragically, Scott and his team not only lost the race, but did not survive the journey home.

There are more lessons to be learned about goal setting, preparation, and pacing from these two explorers and their teams (read more in these writeups). Jim Collins and Morten Hansen named the steady-pace version of this the 20 Mile March in Great by Choice.

Questions to consider this week:

• Pace: How are you making progress, rain or shine, that gets you closer to your goals?
• Route: What path are you taking and are you prepared? Is there another way to go?
• Rest: Are you burning yourself out in the name of progress?
• Transportation: Are you clear about the vehicle that will get you where you want to go?
• Focus: Are you focused on the right things or is something a distraction?

It's Christmas and I have the usual problem of deciding what to give you. I know you might enjoy many things - books, games, clothes.

But I'm very selfish. I want to give you something that will stay with you for more than a few months or years. I want to give you a gift that might remind you of me every Christmas.

If I could give you just one thing, I'd want it to be a simple truth that took me many years to learn. If you learn it now, it may enrich your life in hundreds of ways. And it may prevent you from facing many problems that have hurt people who have never learned it.

The truth is simply this:

No one owes you anything.

How could such a simple statement be important? It may not seem so, but understanding it can bless your entire life.

No one owes you anything.

It means that no one else is living for you, my child. Because no one is you. Each person is living for himself; his own happiness is all he can ever personally feel.

When you realize that no one owes you happiness or anything else, you'll be freed from expecting what isn't likely to be.

It means no one has to love you. If someone loves you, it's because there's something special about you that gives him happiness. Find out what that something special is and try to make it stronger in you, so that you'll be loved even more.

When people do things for you, it's because they want to - because you, in some way, give them something meaningful that makes them want to please you, not because anyone owes you anything.

No one has to like you. If your friends want to be with you, it's not out of duty. Find out what makes others happy so they'll want to be near you.

No one has to respect you. Some people may even be unkind to you. But once you realize that people don't have to be good to you, and may not be good to you, you'll learn to avoid those who would harm you. For you don't owe them anything either.

No one owes you anything.

You owe it to yourself to be the best person possible. Because if you are, others will want to be with you, want to provide you with the things you want in exchange for what you're giving to them.

Some people will choose not to be with you for reasons that have nothing to do with you. When that happens, look elsewhere for the relationships you want. Don't make someone else's problem your problem.

Once you learn that you must earn the love and respect of others, you'll never expect the impossible and you won't be disappointed. Others don't have to share their property with you, nor their feelings or thoughts.

If they do, it's because you've earned these things. And you have every reason to be proud of the love you receive, your friends' respect, the property you've earned. But don't ever take them for granted. If you do, you could lose them. They're not yours by right; you must always earn them.

A great burden was lifted from my shoulders the day I realized that no one owes me anything. For so long as I'd thought there were things I was entitled to, I'd been wearing myself out - physically and emotionally - trying to collect them.

No one owes me moral conduct, respect, friendship, love, courtesy, or intelligence. And once I recognized that, all my relationships became far more satisfying. I've focused on being with people who want to do the things I want them to do.

That understanding has served me well with friends, business associates, lovers, sales prospects, and strangers. It constantly reminds me that I can get what I want only if I can enter the other person's world. I must try to understand how he thinks, what he believes to be important, what he wants. Only then can I appeal to someone in ways that will bring me what I want.

And only then can I tell whether I really want to be involved with someone. And I can save the important relationships for those with whom I have the most in common.

It's not easy to sum up in a few words what has taken me years to learn. But maybe if you re-read this gift each Christmas, the meaning will become a little clearer every year.

I hope so, for I want more than anything else for you to understand this simple truth that can set you free: no one owes you anything.

The key to this insight is that it's meant for you. This is a powerful message to understand for yourself. The message isn't that you don't owe anyone anything.

You will find more success and happiness when you go through life without assuming anyone owes anything to you.

And this applies directly to our work.

• No one owes you clear career path
• No one owes you role clarity
• No one owes you a closed sale
• No one owes you a political favor
• No one owes you work/life balance
• No one owes you respect
• No one owes you a raise
• No one owes you a seat at the strategic table
• No one owes you ... anything

You have to work for and get each of these for yourself. You are responsible for managing your own life. This may feel stifling until you realize the great truth: You have the ability to choose the life you want.

With great power comes great responsibility. Many have forgotten (or never realized) that we have the power to live however we want. With that power comes a responsibility that means no one owes you anything.

"Among all the HR and training processes we study, the single biggest driver of business impact is the strength of an organization's learning culture."

• Josh Bersin, How to Build a High-Impact Learning Culture, June 14, 2010 (his own blog post, two years before Deloitte acquired Bersin & Associates; the report behind it is credited to David Mallon, and it came out of surveying over 40,000 organizations)

But how do you understand and grow the strength of your learning culture?

This is the first of 3 posts exploring this.

Post 1: What goes into a learning culture? Post 2: What are the tradeoffs of different types of learning culture? Post 3: How can you change your learning culture?

Learning Culture: How your employees learn each day

What goes into a learning culture?

Learning culture brings the challenging need to align three stakeholder groups whose priorities don't fit neatly together. At some point, you need to choose which stakeholder will be the focus. The 3 stakeholders are:

• Learning & Development team
• Business Leaders
• Learners

Truth is, I'm not sure that the perfect balance of all 3 exists. There are pros and cons with any combination. Leave any one group out and you'll see problems. Each organization will have different needs dictating what kind of learning culture will add the most value. For example:

• Compliance driven industries need to put the business first.
• Highly specialized businesses that need unique skills that no one else in the world has will need strong L&D to organize training employees just can't get anywhere else.
• Companies in the most competitive talent arenas can use a learner-focused environment to attract and retain talent.

Example: Google X

"I think being afraid to fail is almost a guarantee of glass ceiling on the success that can be achieved."

• Astro Teller, Google X

In a BBC spotlight, Astro Teller unveiled some secrets of how Google X is run (hint: it's with a learner focused culture).

Googlers at Google X can:

• fail
• choose to leave their manager

Those 2 cultural elements encourage employees to learn. Fear of failure and fear of manager are two main reasons we don't learn. Failure is part of any learning experience. And if you fear your manager, you worry they may think you are "wasting time" when learning, or that they will think less of you if you don't already know something.

The 5 minute interview from the BBC article is great, as is Astro's TED talk about the benefit of celebrating failure.

While X is a unique company project, the concepts they use to pursue success are worth considering when we look at how they have honed their learning culture to match the types of problems they are solving.

Assess your learning culture

So, every L&D professional should spend time evaluating these two deceptively simple questions:

1. Which group is the current focus of your learning culture?

2. Which group should be the focus?

In other words, what problem are you solving? Like a thesis statement of a paper, clearly articulating the problem to solve makes everything else easier. As a product manager, my goal is to center my work around the problem to solve, and it's more difficult to do than it seems. In the interview on the BBC page about Google, the reporter tells Astro that clean water is a major problem. Astro responds that clean water has been mostly solved, and that corruption is the real problem to solve in that scenario. Interesting viewpoint.

Any time I find projects falling apart, the most likely issue is that we aren't all clear on the problem to solve.

As part of my work as a product manager at Degreed, I put together a 20-questions cultural assessment to help you reflect on what type of learning culture you have at your company.

Here are a few of the questions to help you think about the current focus of your learning culture:

Do business leaders come to you with problems that need solving?

How do business leaders and employees think about L&D? Is it "just training", or more comprehensive?

Do Learners know where and how to access learning at your company?

Do employees volunteer to help lead sessions, and create or curate content?

Do you celebrate learning? How?

Take the questions and spend some time examining them. I'm going to post part 2 about the tradeoffs of each type of learning culture, and part 3 about how you can change your learning culture in the coming weeks, with examples from my experiences as an employee at LinkedIn and Degreed.

The main question to focus on today is, "Where are you and where do you need to be when it comes to your learning culture?"

Originally published on degreed.com

Writing things down brings clarity. Being able to reference them again in the future is a superpower.

Note: This is one reason I personally love using RoamResearch. I can write things down without worrying in the moment how I'm going to find them later. Using Roam was the first time I didn't have to think about where to do something and I could focus completely on that thing.

How to make team decisions

The best teams are deliberate about decision making. They are aware when decisions are made and then know how to understand and take action on decisions.

One way to increase your team's ability to make decisions is to use a decision journal.

A decision journal is a shared document where you keep track of decisions your team makes + data about those decisions.

The journal exists to help two groups:

• The team actively making a decision
• Your future selves (who need to remember what happened)

I've seen (and sadly presided over) many times when a decision was loosely agreed to, but then later it becomes obvious everyone had different ideas of what was actually decided. Writing something down for everyone to see as a commitment will take care of 95% of the "Oh, I didn't realize that's what we meant" issues.

So how do you start a decision journal?

• Start a new document for "Team Decisions" (or use existing meeting documents).
• Every time a decision is made, write down what was decided, some light context, and the date.
• Remember that the purpose is to align everyone on the decision of the moment and help your future selves (and those not in the room) realize a decision was made.

Other suggestions:

• Open the journal as a prompt when setting the agenda for the next meeting and even during the meeting as a 2-minute check-in to align.
• I'm a huge fan of Dropbox Paper. It's lightweight, so you don't worry a ton about formatting. Also, when a change is made, everyone following the doc will get an email summary of the change. It's easy to stay up to date with changes, even when you miss a meeting.
• Identifying when something is decided is itself a valuable step

Potential prompts for your decision journal

"What did we decide?" is an obvious one. Here are other prompts to consider:

• What options didn't get chosen?
• When are we going to revisit?
• What would we want our future selves to remember?
• What tradeoffs did we make? What debt did we just incur?
• Were there any dissenters?
• What predictions do you have about this decision
• What data was used to make the decision?

The ability to recognize decisions and learn how to make better decisions is an important one. Being able to do this well on a team is a rare skill. Let's make better decisions (and then keep track of them).

For readers who didn't grow up following BYU football, Edwards coached the Cougars from 1972 to 2000 and won the 1984 national championship, and BYU is still the last non-power-conference team to do it. He coached Ty Detmer to the 1990 Heisman Trophy, the only Heisman in the school's history, and put a run of quarterbacks into the NFL (Marc Wilson, Jim McMahon, Steve Young, Robbie Bosco). He turned down the Detroit Lions to stay. They named the stadium after him.

Here are 3 lessons on leadership, as told by his former players:

1. Care about Those You Lead

Hear what former players had to say about LaVell:

"The #1 quality that Coach had was a gift to see things that you didn't see, to see potential in you that you didn't know about - He was like the Johnny Appleseed, just spreading seeds of goodwill and positivity"

Steve Young (Deseret News, ESPN)

"He made [his team] better players, but more than that, he made them better husbands, better fathers, better men. That's the trophy - that's the legacy of LaVell Edwards"

Trevor Matich (ESPN interview)

Lavell was personal and compassionate. He could see potential in others and he used that gift to lift others.

Many leaders have the gift of vision. They see into the future. What impact could we have on our employees, businesses, communities, etc. if more leaders used those skills of vision to genuinely help individuals (not just to make money)? This is one of those skills that I know has a positive impact on the bottom line, even though it's hard to measure.

2. Remember that Leadership Impacts Families

"The legacy of LaVell Edwards is not that trophy inside the case. It's that father standing outside the case."

Trevor Matich (ESPN)

Building Mothers and Fathers is the greatest form of leadership. Parents are the real impact in this world. That is where change truly happens - building Mothers and Fathers who can teach patterns of happiness and success to their children.

This past year, I was at an education summit in Washington D.C. The summit brought college deans, educational policy makers, and education tech. entrepreneurs together to talk about improving education. Through dozens of presentations, one factor remained unmentioned: Parents.

After a full day of intellectuals discussing ways to improve education, I was troubled that parents hadn't even come up. Granted, it's easier to talk about new technology or additional funding. Those are quick, external fixes. Changing families is hard. That's what makes LaVell Edward's legacy that much more powerful.

Leaders would do well to consider their impact not just on work or sports, but in the lives of those they lead and their families.

3. Winning isn't the Goal

"LaVell had a pure heart. He was the dream coach of every parent. His example will forever be with me, and I will strive to live a life of love as he always did."

Tom Holmoe (ESPN)

Was he tough? Absolutely. But he was tough for a reason, and that reason wasn't just winning. Winning in sports or business is a by-product of great leadership, but it isn't the ultimate goal. Relationships and serving others brings true happiness. That's why one of the top regrets of the dying is spending too much time on work. LaVell obviously cared about more than just winning football games.

Some might say that it's cute to talk about caring about people and not focusing on winning, but that reality is different. It's easy to talk about this stuff when you are winning. It's true, if he hadn't been a great football coach, he wouldn't have stayed a coach long enough to have this kind of impact on people.

I'm not saying that this aspect of leadership excuses excellence and hard work. But I have personally seen the emptiness that comes from winning at the expense of relationships. That optimizes the short term at the expense of the future.

"... all that has happened to me in my chosen profession is a mere drop in the bucket compared to the truly important things in my life."

LaVell Edwards, Prepare for a Mission (October 1984)

Conclusion

We often talk about qualities of leadership that, while important, distance leaders from those they lead. The greatest legacies are built by those who can see beyond the bottom line. I challenge current leaders to ask themselves:

• How do I show those I lead that I care for them? Do I show them often?
• What is my ultimate goal as a leader? Do those I lead know that goal?
• Am I compassionate towards those I work with, remembering that I can impact how they contribute to their family?

May we lead in a way that builds people (which in turn builds truly great businesses, departments, products, and football teams).

Additional Reading

• RIP to BYU's LaVell Edwards, who built college football's unlikeliest champion
• Prepare for a Mission (speech by LaVell)
• Manage Compassionately (Jeff Weiner)
• The Art of Conscious Leadership (Jeff Weiner, Wisdom 2.0, 42 minutes)

Fear of failure is the saddest reason on earth not to do what you were meant to do. I finally found the courage to start submitting my first book to agents and publishers at a time when I felt a conspicuous failure. Only then did I decide that I was going to try this one thing that I always suspected I could do, and, if it didn't work out, well, I'd faced worse and survived.

Ultimately, wouldn't you rather be the person who actually finished the project you're dreaming about, rather than the one who talks about 'always having wanted to'?

J.K. Rowling

Ironic that all too often we hold ourselves back from achievement. The #1 regret of the dying is that they didn't live a life true to themselves (Bronnie Ware's own list is the better place to read it).

Failure itself can actually empower us to overcome our fear of it. If you aren't failing, you may be playing it too safe.

The best product teams fail a lot. They experiment, which is naturally fraught with failure. In a world with more uncertainty than ever as the pace of change continues to pick up, we need to understand how to face and overcome failure as individuals, teams, and companies.

3 ways you can overcome failure:

• Think about multiple potential outcomes.
• Have a backup plan.
• Practice being positive.

On Multiple Outcomes

Too often we think of one solution and then fixate on it. Taking time to step back and think about multiple potential problems and solutions can be very impactful. And this doesn't have to take days. Start by taking 5 minutes to list out answers to one of these questions:

• What has been going well? What hasn't been going well?
• Why am I doing this?
• What do I really want? What does wild success look like?
• What are the constraints, risks, or dependencies?

For a bigger list of questions to answer that help move your team forward, check out our guides to design sprints and brand sprints.

On Backup Plans

Reid Hoffman talks about plan A, plan B, and plan Z (worst case scenario) in his book The Startup Of You. When you have a solid backstop, it increases your ability and willingness to take some risk. Many times the worst-case scenario isn't as bad as we initially think.

On Practicing Positivity

Your mindset, the stories you tell yourself, are not only impactful to your actions but within your control. You get to decide what to do when failure (or fear of it) comes calling. How you respond to negative thoughts and events drastically impacts your work, your marriage, and your life.

Practice positivity by gathering positive influences around you, thinking "what good has come from this?", or running a retrospective to get better as a team.

What are you going to fail at today?

"Why doesn't a musician go straight to a 'greatest hits' record and save everyone a lot of time and hassle? Because no one knows anything."

Seth Godin

Success comes through a combination of hard work, perseverance, not running out of money, luck, and experience. But then it's easy for a creator or reporter to claim a simple set of principles was all that was required.

While not wrong, talking about why someone won a single game is very different from winning the next game. So many successful people have far more failure than the cleaned-up press reveals.

I once worked for a company that had a book written about its internal culture. Many of the stories were truthful but highly idealized. After reading about one perk, teammates asked, "Wait, can we really use this perk?"

It turned out that perk was isolated to a small team and far more complicated than the story suggested.

The book claimed the company paid for any employee to have a networking lunch. In reality, this perk applied to only one engineering team, and only when the employee did a presentation back to the team for learning purposes. Cool idea, but oversold in the book.

What you read in the business press is never the full story.

This doesn't mean there aren't good principles to take from reading about other businesses, but realize they rarely tell the complete story.

If you feel down when you see the success of others, thinking they have it all figured out, stop. The appearance of success ≠ real success.

The price of success in one domain can be complete failure in another. Read anything about Steve Jobs as a parent to get one stark example. Same with Einstein as a husband.

In his book The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch states that people asked him how he got tenure so early. He'd offer to share his secret if they came by his office late on a Friday night. Most success is the tip of a very large hard-work iceberg.

Remember:

• Success in a single domain usually has a high price
• Those who are very successful in one domain often pay that high price with poor performance in other domains
• Comparison is toxic, especially comparing your current work to the greatest hits of others
• Keep calm and carry on. You're doing great.

I recently had a conversation with someone managing a large change with the way their company interfaces with clients. The changes will impact the business on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars. I invited them to think about how they could test the changes before making a massive rollout.

They responded with alarm: "Our clients are too important to test something out with. We couldn't let them know something wasn't quite ready! When we make the change, we have to make sure it works!"

I countered that if that's the case (that they can't risk failure when they launch) then more than ever they need to figure out how to test smaller pieces before unveiling everything.

We then had a fruitful conversation about how to test in a way that doesn't jeopardize current relationships (topic for another time).

The tendency to clutch things tightly, not share the journey, and hold your breath when you launch isn't helpful when it comes to solving new problems.

Test before you leap.

As the proverb goes (usually credited to Warren Buffett, though it shows up in none of his shareholder letters):

"Don't test the depth of a river with both feet."

Manu Kumar, founder of K9 Ventures, posted a fantastic Twitter thread about how this very behavior should work when building companies.

"1/ So much of building a product/company is about progressive discovery. You build something, you figure out something else, then you build that, and so on. But you only figure out what to build by taking the first step, which may not always be exactly in the right direction."

-- Manu Kumar, January 31, 2020 (cross-posted on the K9 Ventures blog)

I invite you to consider these questions to help you to better use progressive discovery:

• How can we mimic reality to see if this will work?
• What would be the first indication that this is working?
• What's the biggest pain point we can start with?
• Can we start smaller?
• What's our most pressing constraint?
• What can we fake before we build, to gauge reaction first?
• Can we try one before we have to do them all?
• If we can't test on real customers, can we role-play or test internally first? Dry-run?

When you need to make an impact fast and/or when the stakes are high, figure out a way to prototype and test.

I went through a quick grief cycle:

• Denial: "No, that can't be right. Product management is the best job ever."
• Anger: "My job wouldn't be so hard if sales would stop asking for so much and eng would just build what we ask for the first time."
• Bargaining: "Maybe I should just have engineers build whatever the customers want."
• Depression: "Man, my job really stinks."
• Acceptance: "Ok, this is a stressful job. What am I going to do about it?"

The harsh reality? Product management is a hard job.

Many people don't realize how stressful product management can be. In fact, most product managers I have frank conversations with are unhappy and stressed out.

Past research completed by Pendo also supports this sad truth. In their 2019 State of Product Leadership report, they shared that their survey respondents gave the job an NPS of 3. Apparently, this problem is quite widespread throughout the PM field.

So, why is a product manager's job so hard? Here are just a few of the reasons:

• You're frustrated and stuck because leaders and stakeholders aren't aligned
• You feel like you can't make progress because priorities keep changing
• Decision-making feels impossible because you're trying to appease everyone
• You (and your team) get burnt out from shipping features that don't seem to create the desired change
• All of these only add to your stress, pressure, and (for too many) hopelessness

Getting and keeping teams aligned, carving out space and patience to explore, understanding what people really want, and delivering value worth paying for are all difficult to achieve.

And when all of this is executed poorly, teams take too long and end up building the wrong thing. This leads to a vicious cycle of reducing team autonomy, which only leads to more of these same outcomes. Combine these mental stressors with the tedious work you can find yourself stuck with, and the job becomes a drag.

How Can You Make Product Management Less Stressful?

So, how do we even start to make this better? If you're experiencing these stressors, here are three things you can do to change your mental operating system:

• Plan to fail
• Accept that scrum doesn't work
• Realize you aren't the CEO of the product

1. Plan to Fail

Most of your ideas are bad. In fact, the best teams assume this out of the gate. Armed with this knowledge, teams change the way they operate and communicate. If most of what you produce will fail, you'd better figure out how to learn quickly what will and won't flop.

However, timeline-driven feature development is a classic sign of not planning to fail. Design sprints are popular because they take you from conjecture to actual prototype in the hands of real users in just a few days. But the goal isn't to hit a deadline. It's to learn.

This is less like planning a known route for a road trip (which you can predict with reasonable certainty) and more like playing a game of poker. If I asked you to predict which hands you will bet on and which you will fold on before the game starts, you won't have a clue.

Like product management, poker is a game of probabilistic thinking. As information changes, you adjust your actions. You learn throughout the game. Your role as a product manager is to help your team place the right bets and fold when needed.

2. Accept That Scrum Doesn't Work

The way we measure success on many product teams isn't helping. For too many, agile = scrum. And sadly, scrum has created well-intentioned but ultimately poor measures of success. Story points, velocity, burn down - it's too easy for teams to make the meetings and shipping the focus.

When outputs (rather than outcomes) become your main measure of success, you'll find a number of poor practices:

• Decreased autonomy
• Decreased creativity
• PM as order taker - "Build this"
• Changes without impact
• Wasted time, money, and energy

Scrum can be used well, but it's just one tool among many. To avoid some of these pitfalls, ensure you have a proper product roadmap (that isn't just a Gantt chart of features). Also, focus more on the values of agile product management than on the mechanics of scrum.

3. Realize You Aren't the CEO of the Product

The article in which Ben Horowitz made famous the idea that a good product manager is the CEO of the product has been updated.

The man who coined the phrase openly acknowledges that it probably isn't relevant for product management today. So why does this myth persist?

Many are attracted to product management from the siren song of power. "If I'm the CEO of the product, I get to call the shots." Unfortunately, that's rarely, if ever, true. This leads to unmet expectations and frustrating experiences.

Also, the "product manager as the CEO" myth has attracted a number of arrogant PMs to the field. As teams realize that concepts like leadership exchange and true collaboration are not only possible but extremely effective, arrogance becomes more and more of a hindrance.

But if you aren't the CEO of the product, then what are you?

You're more like a pirate captain or American football quarterback. After all, product is a team sport. You don't have complete control. You have to get buy-in and work with and through others using influence without authority. While you do call some of the plays, you don't call all of them. And sadly, you are often blamed when things go wrong.

Unlike a CEO, you don't manage the budget or the team, and you can't hire or fire whoever you want. And you normally have many other stakeholders and leaders who have to buy in or sign off on your decisions.

This is the single biggest issue causing angst for product managers and product teams. It doesn't matter how good your idea is if no one wants to follow you.

This is true for internal teams (developers, designers) as well as customers. It's less about being right and more about bringing people along.

Originally published on ProductCraft.

So we went outside and walked around for 15 minutes.

Everything suddenly felt different. We were able to talk openly about what was tough, figure out some solutions, and walked back in the house ready for the next challenge.

Walking isn't a problem-solving technique we always think of, but it should be.

Why Walking Meetings Work

Executives and product managers usually have a lot of meetings. Product managers are a hub between design, development, sales, marketing, and customers. All too often we get into a habit of taking every meeting sitting down.

While some meetings need a presentation or require a large group around a table, there's room for creativity in other meetings—especially 1:1s.

The Benefits

Fresh environment, fresh thinking. Some of my best work meetings have been walks. Your environment impacts your thoughts. Fresh air brings fresh ideas.

Research backs this up. Studies show that walking leads to more creative thinking and higher engagement.

Removes hierarchy. When you physically remove hierarchy (no one at the head of the table), it's easier to have a real conversation where participants contribute equally.

Builds alignment. Doing something together gets you aligned. When you do something at the same time as someone else, even if you aren't in agreement, you're aligned physically, which naturally makes it easier to align in other ways. That helps teams move fast.

Many empowering experiences use synchronized movements: from worship to raves, yoga class to sex. Physical synchronization can also make you more persuasive (mirroring is a powerful interview technique). Walking creates this synchronization in an appropriate way at work.

When Walking Meetings Work Best

Use walking meetings for:

• 1-on-1 conversations
• Problem-solving discussions
• Getting aligned with a colleague
• Building relationship and trust
• Breaking through stuck thinking
• Catching up on how things are going

Don't use walking meetings for:

• Large groups (3+ people)
• Screen-sharing or presentations
• Detailed note-taking sessions
• Bad weather (though some walk anyway)

How to Start

Most people haven't tried walking meetings. They say yes immediately once you suggest it.

If you're calling the meeting: "Want to walk and talk instead of sitting in a room?"

If someone else called it: "Would you be open to taking this outside? I think better when I walk."

During the walk: Keep it casual. No agenda pressure. Let conversation flow naturally.

Next time you need to have a real conversation, take a hike. Literally.

Not exactly what you want to hear from your boss.

I was early in my pursuit of a career in product management. Looking back, I really didn't have much of a clue what I was doing. But I wasn't being equipped and enabled - instead I was told I wasn't enough.

I walked out of that 1:1 furious.

That experience could have been crushing except for the reframe I decided to take.

I decided to ask myself, "What can I learn from this?"

I vowed to never limit someone's potential in my mind. I would take seriously the responsibility of managing others. I also committed to double down on building pm skills so that I could accomplish my future goals.

Reframing can change a miserable experience into something desirable. My friend, Rob Callan, shared his thoughts on LinkedIn about reframing.

How we frame situations matters, especially when we're doing hard things.

If you're on a team and you feel enthusiasm stalling for a new project, try focusing instead on what people can learn, achieve, and become - that's a lot more compelling than focusing exclusively on the tasks themselves.

Many years later I am grateful I took the attitude I did. I've been a successful product manager at multiple hyper-growth companies. And now I enjoy teaching product management as part of what we do with clients at Sprintwell.

The biggest piece of advice I give to recent college graduates is to optimize your career for learning. Choose a job where you will learn the most.

For a tough situation at work or in personal relationships, my invitation is to ask, "What can I learn from this?"

In my career managing teams from a single employee up to 80 people, I've found a few things that work (and many that don't). Two quick notes before we jump into the model.

• Realize delegation isn't just on/off. Delegation is a continuum. From "Not delegated" all the way to "I don't even need to think about this anymore".
• Misalignment is a common, but painful problem at work. Most issues with delegation come when an employee and their manager aren't on the same page.

Here's a model I've found helpful for delegating that enables leaders + employees to align and do more work that matters without friction.

5 Levels of Delegation

1. Do what I say
2. Research
3. Approve
4. Report Back
5. Delegated

Level 1: Do what I say

This is when a leader tells someone exactly what to do. This is required when someone is just starting out. This isn't great when it becomes ongoing micromanagement. It's not scalable.

That said, this is a good place to start as a leader. If you can't tell someone how to do something, you likely don't know how to do it (or haven't experimented enough to find out what works consistently).

Level 2: Research

This is getting a task to go learn about something and come back and share what you found. No decision-making enabled yet but can be very helpful to a leader who needs to get information for a decision.

Level 3: Approve

This is the most common delegation level. Go make a decision, but I have to give the go-ahead before you move forward. This comes in a lot of flavors from very top-down to fairly light approval.

Level 4: Report Back

This is where things really start cooking. Go research, make a decision, move forward, and then let me know when you did. This is a good place with a lot of autonomy.

Level 5: Delegated

This is full delegation, where even reporting back isn't necessary. Full trust is extended to handle the decision, situation, or task at hand.

Becoming aware of this model is a good first step. Once you know where you're at with various parts of your job, think about how you could change.

Questions for leaders:

• How do you delegate?
• Where are each of your employees with various tasks?
• Are you giving enough direction when needed?
• Are you giving enough autonomy when needed?

Questions for individual contributors:

• How do you uplevel?
• Could you go from a researcher to seeking approval? (one of the places you can control the most)
• Are you on the same page as your leader about what level is expected from you?

Delegation is painful when the leader and the employee aren't on the same page.

When a leader expects level 4 and the employee thinks level 2 is all that's needed, that's going to be hard. Visa versa is true as well.

Knowing how to delegate turns someone from working in their business to really building a business. The best leaders are masters of delegation and can focus on deciding what work needs to happen vs doing the work.

Learning how to delegate, especially to executive admins, is one clear way for leaders to unlock massive gains in their own productivity. If you're making over $50/hr, you should be delegating lower-level tasks out ($10-$20/hr tasks).

I've personally gained 15+ hours each week by delegating things to my executive admin (research tasks, content prep for social media, hr admin work ...) and my children (household chores, encouraging them to take more ownership of their education + hobbies).

What have you found works well for delegating?

The cost of saying yes

To start, humans are horrible at predicting the future. We like to pretend we know how long something will take, or how much it will cost, or what impact it will have ... but we don't. Let's stop pretending.

Most people rely on opinions to predict the future. These are typically random in terms of their likelihood to succeed.

Good teams use past data to predict the future. This is better than opinion alone, but still often wrong. When you're dealing with the new and different, past data isn't an indication of how something new will perform.

So how do you deal with predicting the future? The best teams predict a little bit at a time and then verify.

Long term visioning isn't bad. Too many people assume that agile means no planning. That's junk. You have to know where you're headed. But the typical pitfall is to spend way too much time planning for a future that doesn't exist. It's a trap to plan too much detail too far out. It feels productive because you're doing something. But as soon as anything changes, you can take all of that spent time and throw it in the trash.

Some teams spend a lot of time thinking about features that won't get built for 6+ months. And by that time everything will change (ex. COVID19).

But that isn't all. Even the things you are building today have great cost associated with them.

The iceberg

Kris Gale (VP of engineering at Yammer) shares a story about how he built a feature in a single hour, but over time spent 40 hours of his own supporting it, plus 40 hours of other people's:

This probably took me an hour to implement, test and deploy back in early 2008. I have easily spent 40 hours of my time -- and, necessarily, 40 hours of others' time -- over the intervening 5 years explaining this feature and its justification. That's a 40x communications overhead just to carry the feature, even before we consider its impact on people once they get into the code.

The one cost engineers and product managers don't consider

There are tons of hidden costs when building features. You see the 'half day to build'. What you don't see is:

• QA + Debugging
• Deploying
• Internal Communication + Meetings
• Marketing
• Rework
• Support + Maintenance

This means that prioritization decisions are easily 10x more costly than they may appear. The importance of knowing if what you're building is actually working cannot be overstated.

How do you know if something you built has worked?

A pervasive issue with most teams is measuring impact. Measuring takes time and many teams lack the maturity and discipline to measure and iterate. This ends up killing startups and slowing enterprise teams to a crawl.

I'm not going to go into specifics on which measurement frameworks are best for product teams, because the individual metric itself doesn't matter as much as the mindset you take. The best teams are incredibly clear about what they are trying to achieve. They understand and fix problems with religious zeal.

My biggest suggestion: Answer the question "How will we know if we are successful?" This is critical to do for your overall product and for key features. Then WRITE IT DOWN. Product roadmaps, done well, contribute an incredible amount of clarity about the Why, What, and How of achieving your team goals.

"Are we there yet?" should be a daily question. Over-communication is a superpower when it comes to setting and using strategy.

When you are focused on measuring your progress vs activity, you realize that when you aren't making progress you need to adjust.

This is why humility is the most underrated skill for product managers (and leaders in general). When you are humble, you can admit something didn't work. In a world where many people believe the lie that the product manager is the CEO, it's the type-A talent who are used to making things happen that sign up as PMs. Product managers aren't a group of people to sit and bide their time.

But the exact thing that attracts PMs to the field also fuels the feature factory.

The factory and waste

The majority of new features don't accomplish their goals. All too often the reaction to underperforming features is to try to build more. The first option considered should be "Do we even need this?"

90% of a product manager's job is to find pain and reveal the truth. Asking why, observing behavior, and testing solutions are of utmost importance as PMs seek to understand the truth.

We waste time, money, and energy when we let shipping something new overshadow finding and addressing pain. This is only made worse because what is easy to create is hard to maintain.

My (painful) story about waste

I remember getting handed a mockup for a new section of the app I was managing. It was beautiful and got lots of instant ahs and oohs. The idea seemed cool and executives were drooling over it. The design had been created outside the normal team process by a design leader, but other executives seemed to like it so they didn't care.

What was easy to design was hard to build. When we broke down features, it was going to take 6+ months to build this new chunk of the app (given the reality of other work the team was already committed to and refactoring that would be needed). The team (myself included) had a ton of questions about if this design would actually accomplish the goals we wanted to achieve. But it became clear executives didn't want much discussion.

"Don't ask questions, just build it."

I'm sad to say that I caved. I didn't push hard enough on questions like "How can we test this?" or "What aren't we sure about." Sales liked it and a few current buyers said they liked it, so the executive team was sky high about it.

How the product was wasteful

We ended up building it in 4 months through painful negotiation (the initial mockup was incredibly feature-rich). What is easy to slap on a design (seconds) can be very painful to build.

But a weekend design that took 4 months to build isn't even the worst part. The worst part was the maintenance.

After the build, not only did adoption not take off like predicted but then we had all sorts of maintenance issues:

• Bugs to squash on these new pages
• More complex data to maintain
• Heavier UI with more options for users
• More for sales to demo
• Internal questions to answer about the new feature

And all of this for a feature that the team had no direct user feedback about. I'm kind of embarrassed about my part in this, but I hear stories like this on a weekly basis in my conversations with product managers.

The main issue

Now, this story could be me griping about how I was pressured to build something, and executives should trust their teams and not force things to be built. While that is a topic worthy of discussion, here's the main issue: I stopped advocating for users and just built something I knew was unlikely to work.

As a product manager, even when proceeding under executive order, you can still be an advocate for the user, you can still find creative ways to get user feedback, you can still push to release iteratively and gather data and feedback while you do that.

Your job is to obsess about your users. Do not get sucked into only building and forget why you were hired.

How you can stop the waste

How do you know if something is working? Ask yourself: What does success look like? Then think about the smallest way you could test that.

Being able to plan, test, and take action is one of the greatest skills you can develop as a product manager. It's one reason a design sprint is a powerful recipe - it takes you from idea to user-vetted prototype in just 5 days.

One reason this is all so challenging is that most of the cost is invisible. Invisible cost kills companies. Wasted time, money, and energy add up. When you aren't moving rocks (or doing other menial work), what impacts productivity is hard to see.

Make the invisible visible.

It's why the best product managers aren't just 1.5x or 2x better than counterparts, but up to 100x better. The difference between an incredible PM and a mediocre PM can be seen in the impact to users and the business. Looking at what features shipped the difference isn't that stark. Look at what happens to your business and to your team, and you'll see the impact.

Ask yourself more often how to stop vs start.

• "What can we say no to?"
• "What can we stop doing?"
• "Which backlog feature or feedback can I not worry about right now?"

The best product managers can see what others can't. While this includes seeing problems and inspiring a product vision, we should work harder to see the truth about how much building something actually costs. Don't build just anything ... take time to build the next right thing.

Years ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about fishhooks or clay pots or grinding stones.

But no. Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal.

A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts, Mead said.

-- Ira Byock, in his book The Best Care Possible: A Physician's Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life (Avery, 2012). Emphasis added. (Mead herself is almost certainly not the source: the story's earliest known appearance is Dr. Paul Brand's 1980 book Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, published two years after she died, and the trail ends at Brand's memory of her. I'm keeping the story and crediting it to Brand and Byock, who are the people we actually have it from.)

Too many workplaces are like the animal kingdom - everyone is only looking out for themselves. People (and especially leaders) ignore anyone who isn't immediately valuable to them. Just look for people treating others like objects to be used instead of people to be cared for, and you'll know civilization (or as we commonly call it at work, culture) is lacking.

But, when people begin to care about each other, we see a number of wonderful behaviors and outcomes.

So, what does it look like to "heal broken femurs" at work?

• Listen early and often to users. Observe what they do. Care about solving their real problems.
• Get to know your coworkers (in Atul Gawande's checklist work, complications and deaths dipped 35% when surgical teams introduced themselves by name first — introductions were one item on a 19-item checklist, so I won't hand all of that to the introductions).
• Celebrate professional and personal wins.
• Never push a 1:1 multiple times.
• Make sales a conversation vs only trying to convince. Help your prospects and they will treat you well in return. (thanks JaRell McIntyre)
• Create leave policies that put people and family first.
• Compensate employees fairly.
• Share information as freely as possible, both at the company level and the team level. Information scarcity used as a way to build power destroys many teams.
• Do things that don't scale. Especially early on.
• When you're networking, don't think "can this person help me?" but think "how can I help this person?" (thanks Steve Arntz)
• Put barriers around your work, especially if you're a leader. Your family and your team will thank you.

Caring is both the right way to treat people and a powerful competitive advantage.

With more information available than ever before, people want to work for companies, leaders, and managers who won't leave someone with a broken femur to fend for themselves.

What have you been learning about? I ask this of my kids every dinner and love to hear from other avid learners. Today I'd especially love to hear stories about how you've seen the advantage of "caring for broken femurs" in your work.

But later is a trap.

Take email for example. If you don't have a good system for processing email, you can end up spending much more time handling the email than if you'd just responded the first time or added something to your todo list.

I regularly see people who open emails a lot of times (sometimes over 100).

Why are they opening an email over and over again?

It's because they don't have a good way to deal with something the first time. Think about how much time is wasted opening emails multiple times, reminding yourself about what it is, then saying "ah, yeah, I need to do that sometime … but not now". Inbox zero (Merlin Mann's term, and his talk is the one I keep linking here) is a powerful tool because it's about handling email in your inbox once.

Other times that doing something right the first time pays off:

• When you're reading, capture highlights
• When you're building a new product, talk to users upfront
• When you're putting things away, pick two things away
• When someone on your team doesn't know how to do something, show them how
• When you have a small task (less than 2 minutes), do it now (David Allen's two-minute rule, which is about finishing now, not James Clear's version about starting a habit)
• When someone needs to be corrected, tell them
• When something is broken, fix it

There's a universal truth here: it's easy to think we will return and take care of something, but the reality is that's difficult to do.

Doing something right the first time can actually be a great shortcut.

What have you been learning about? I ask this of my kids every dinner and love to hear from other avid learners.

In physics, Escape Velocity is the speed something needs to be traveling to break free of a planet.

In work, escape velocity is the velocity something must have to sustain on its own. The speed and direction required to escape the former state. This concept applies across many aspects of work:

• Venture Capital: A startup needs investment to get enough speed to make traction in the marketplace
• New Team Formation: A team needs enough of the right skills and capacity to be proactive in their work vs being buried in responsive firefighting
• Onboarding: New employees need knowledge and support before they start making a meaningful difference in their work
• Customer Acquisition: Potential customers have to see enough value in a new offering to make a purchase and switch from an old product
• Ideas: Without initial support from a strong sponsor, it's difficult to get ideas going in a large organization

The momentum of the past is powerful. This is why starting new things is hard. And that's exactly why you need speed to escape.

Getting enough speed for escape velocity in your work requires focused, upfront investment of time, money, or energy.

If you don't get enough speed in the right direction, you will just fall back into the status quo.

This is one reason you should do things that don't scale at first. Putting extra initial effort into something can accelerate that idea enough to get escape velocity. After you "escape" is when scaling matters.

It's also why the focus described in Essentialism (the concept and book by Greg McKeown) can be fuel for helping your work pull away.

When you're just starting out, do anything you can to put extra effort into getting enough focus and speed to get things moving.

What have you been learning about? I ask this of my kids every dinner and love to hear from other avid learners.

But it's after the article that caught my eye this time. At the bottom of that article Paul writes:

Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.

He reached out to 5 people to ask for feedback. 5 people!

And when you think about it, of course he did. This has become an oft-shared essay. Great thinkers don't only have great thoughts, they know who can help make them better.

Asking for feedback is critical for many parts of work:

• Developers review code
• Product Managers review problem statement, roadmaps, research, stories
• Designers review product statements, sketches, mockups, and prototypes
• Teachers, speakers, and comedians review new ideas and lessons with smaller initial audiences
• Managers review strategy documents, pitch decks, and business plans

Whether you create documents, decks, speeches, lessons, sketches, or prototypes, reviewing with others makes your work better.

Complex problems of the future will be solved by teams, not just individuals. It's important to know how to ask for feedback and have the humility to make meaningful changes. The quality of your work is directly impacted by your ability to request feedback, listen to critique, and figure out what to change.

One other benefit of seeking feedback is the fan base you build in. Those who help will want to see you succeed. They will be more likely to share your work and celebrate as you move forward.

Questions to consider about feedback

• How much work should you do before you request feedback?
• Are you humble enough to be told your work isn't great? (or as some say, your baby is ugly)
• Who in your circle of work gives great feedback?
• For a current problem you're solving, who would be best to solicit for feedback?
• How can you get better at using feedback in your work?

What have you been learning about? I ask this of my kids every dinner and love to hear from other avid learners.