How to build a team that can “take a punch”: A playbook for building resilient, high-performing teams

Hilary Gridley, head of core product at Whoop and former senior director of product at Big Health, discusses how product leaders can build teams that can absorb setbacks and tackle hard problems. The conversation covers reframing criticism into concrete action, sharing mental models of how leaders think, building habits through reward loops, protecting time for rest and creativity, and using AI to accelerate learning.

01Key learnings

• When you feel criticized, skip litigating what others think and instead take one small action that demonstrates the opposite of what you fear they believe.
• Use behavioral activation: act first on a small, concrete step, since action tends to lift mood and break negative spirals rather than waiting to feel better.
• Speak up in meetings with valuable input; fear of saying the wrong thing is the main blocker, and building the skill to take a punch reduces that fear.
• Make the mental models of key leaders explicit to your team by sharing what you heard, how you interpret it, and what you'll do differently, so people stop needing approval for everything.
• Use 'magic questions'—state your hypothesis as a fact ending in 'Do you agree?'—to surface someone's mental model faster than open-ended questions.
• Treat your CEO's vision as the frame to operationalize rather than a battle to win, while still advocating your view with strong arguments and humility when you disagree.
• Build habits through consistency, low friction, and powerful, immediate, emotional reward loops rather than accountability or education alone.
• Model and ask about the activities that bring your team joy outside work, since creativity and recovery make people better at their jobs and sustain them under pressure.

02Frameworks mentioned

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