How to unlock your product leadership skills

Ken Norton, a former Google product leader (Google Docs, Calendar, Maps) who now works as a full-time executive coach for product leaders, discusses what coaching involves, the creative versus reactive leadership mindset, and common product leader blind spots. The conversation also covers imposter phenomenon, how to find and evaluate a coach, and his thinking on 10x bets and hiring product managers.

01Key learnings

• Executive coaching is a partnership where the client defines success; the coach brings listening, curiosity, and challenge rather than prescriptive advice.
• Advice often delivers a short-lived boost, like cotton candy; lasting growth usually requires confronting the underlying problem and beliefs.
• Leadership shifts are largely internal: reframing your operating system matters as much as learning new frameworks once you reach senior roles.
• Notice whether you lead from fear (reactive: seeking approval, being right, or controlling) or from purpose and curiosity (creative), and recognize that creative leadership correlates with success.
• Redefine people-pleasing goals: swap wanting everyone to like you in the moment for wanting to earn long-term respect and admiration from colleagues.
• Many product leadership challenges are people problems, so treat communication, collaboration, and difficult conversations as trainable skills, not soft extras.
• Use inner-critic techniques like naming the critic or treating its voices as board members, and be wary of dismissing systemic bias as individual imposter syndrome.
• Evaluate a coach through a free session and ask candidates how the company defines a product team; hire for whether the person can actually do the job, not just pass interviews.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.