Product leader (Stripe, Twitter, Google, Yahoo) and advisor known for frameworks on product sense and high-agency leadership.
ON TOUGH TIMES AT WORK People are different, and different people need different things to get them through tough times at work — times when work is stressful, or you’re dealing with annoying politics, or just when the motivation tank is running low. For some, it’s energizing
The most important idea that most product people forget somewhere along the way: Everything you do with your product originates in your thinking, so the best (and really the only) path to consistently build successful products is to greatly improve the quality of your thinking.
This happens to smart people because of: 1. Deep-rooted identity of “I am good at product” (vs. “I am good at winning” or something like that) 2. Moral aversion against marketing & distribution 3. A habit of seeking virtue points by proclaiming “I just want to serve my users”
Most mid-career product people who are doing reasonably well make 2 implicit assumptions that affect their quality of life: 1. the ceiling of key product skills is just an inch higher than where they are now (i.e. they’re basically already at the ceiling) 2. the point of any upskilling is to get a…
From coaching 100s of people over the years on career decisions, LinkedIn Envy and the Impact Lie are the root cause of many career regrets of otherwise-smart people. How to avoid such regrets? As with many such situations, the knowledge is the cure:
This is also true in tech careers. A lot of people I speak with are successful by every conventional metric, but they find it difficult to decide what to do next, in their career and their life.
If it is useful to know, this private playlist provides deep, super-candid answers for the following 23 questions, with 1 video for each question: What signals do you look for that indicate a PM is ready to be promoted to the Director level? How do you get better at storytelling? How do you decide…