Toggle between wonder and rigor. Not a super power or innate skill.
Create space.
Inquire, improvise, and use your intuition.
Natalie Nixon on LinkedIn’s “Hello Monday” podcast.
Reminds me of E. O. Wilson, “Think like a poet, work like a bookkeeper” and Ernest Hemingway, “Write drunk, edit sober.”
I joined project management expert, friend, and coworker Cesar Abeid to talk about leadership, remote work, product/program management, and more on his “PM for the Masses” podcast, episode 137.
🎧 Listen here: Remote Leadership at Tumblr, with Lance Willett.
Enjoyed the discussion! Topics include:
About PM for the Masses:
Besides sharing their own expertise with me and the audience, we try to understand the recipe for their success and do what us project managers do best: break their success down into manageable chunks and see how we can take similar steps.
— Podcast host Cesar Abeid
This is a talk I delivered for ProductCon September 2021 about balancing change and continuity, titled “Your First 90 Days: Listen, Learn & Act.”
When facing change, how to make your first 90 days matter by staying alert and ready to listen, learn, and act. Working to find the gaps and fill them to find success from day one.
Download the slides:
Description: Change is inevitable! Product leaders often deal with change and uncertainty in our jobs and across our careers. A constant feedback loop of learning and action.
How you start matters. The best of the best build on basics when taking on a new role or stepping up to lead a key project.
Books mentioned: The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins; Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan; and A Sense of Urgency by John Kotter.
Event details: Thank you to Product School for the invitation to share this important topic with an active community of learners. The virtual conference platform used Hopin with 4,000+ live viewers at a given time for the sessions (around 20,000 total).
Want more? Watch all the videos from ProductCon September 2021.
Related:
Inspired by John Kotter in A Sense of Urgency (2008), read from the local library in March 2021. 4 stars on Goodreads.
What URGENCY is not:
Versus what is TRULY URGENT:
Tactics to make a sense of urgency into a daily habit:
A true sense of urgency is about starting today; grab opportunities and avoid hazards, and shed low-priority activities to move faster and smarter, now.
John Kotter in A Sense of Urgency
Stuck? Go back to the reasons you started. Try a different angle. Keep moving, even with small wins, to generate momentum. Be opportunistic.
My take? True urgency means to stay alert, bring outside oxygen in, address both heads and hearts, and prioritize movement towards what matters most. Ready to move faster and smarter.
This guideline pops up often inside Automattic via folks like Matt, or me, on internal memos when discussing how best to balance product planning, strategy, and execution. With a bias toward action, we aim to learn more quickly by launching directly to users and customers.
Source: I first saw this message in 2015 via a tweet by Luke Wroblewski.
Luke later shared a poster version on Twitter in 2016, which I purchased for my office Zoom background (buy on Startup Vitamins).
DJ Patil, US Chief Data Scientist during the Obama administration tweeted an expanded version in 2017:
Here’s the full text from DJ’s hand-written note on White House stationery.
Dream in years
Plan in months
Evaluate in weeks
Ship dailyPrototype for 1x
Build for 10x
Engineer for 100xWhat’s required to cut the timeline in half?
DJ Patil
What needs to be done to double the impact?
I love this philosophy for product strategy and execution because it puts the right balance on each activity.
Dreams take time and effort to accomplish, and a clear product vision means looking ahead enough to inspire and motivate people to join the mission.
When we don’t know an accurate launch date at the beginning, monthly plans split the work into smaller projects and tasks that’ll bring improvements out to the public quicker. This means we learn faster, measure the immediate impact of a launch, and track usage as close as possible to real-time.
Speed matters in marketing, business, and product development. Sometimes we aren’t confident the current change is the right one, yet shipping before we’re fully confident leads to a smarter set of next changes — informed by the people using the product.
Ship daily, measure weekly, and plan in months to find out what works sooner than later.
🚀
Enjoyed this timely and practical organizational leadership guide from McKinsey.
Key elements include priorities, roles, time, and energy.
Deliberate calm: How to steer into the storm.
Bounded optimism: How to mix confidence and hope with realismAs human beings, we can practice integrative awareness before, in, and after the moment.
Six steps:
Leadership in a crisis like this is an enormous responsibility, yet it can also be seen as a great privilege. Integrative awareness keeps leaders centered in the storm, giving them the focus they need to take care of themselves and the people and organizations they lead.
Lead with purpose!
Grief is inevitable. Unresolved grief doesn’t have to be. To overcome grief, leaders must become consciously aware of the problem; accept the pain of the loss; and take actions to first let go of the past, and then to find new meaning from the experience.
Via The hidden perils of unresolved grief (McKinsey)
The outward shift described here resonates with me as an action I can take every day. Under my control to break the inner gaze — the running loop of emotions in my mind — with frequent pauses to stop the cycle. Like an athlete would: train, play, rest, and recuperate to replace depleted energy. Same thing, but mentally.
Opening up emotionally allows those who have suffered from unresolved grief to restart the process of bonding with other people. As their focus shifts outward, their internal dialogue shifts from defensive to positive. This brings calm, clarity, gratitude, and even playfulness.
Thought-provoking prompt from McKinsey for anyone feeling overwhelmed, grief-sick, and exhausted: Hidden perils of unresolved grief. Food for thought for leaders and our teammates alike. “Grief can be a creative force that turns loss into inspiration.”
When analyzing my work with teams, projects, and my own contributions I often try to find the bottleneck in the system. What’s blocked? How could we move faster? What’s are the important decisions?
Kathleen Eisenhardt is a professor at Stanford University who dives deep into these questions, and more. Below are two examples that share insights from her work around complex systems, decision making, and how simple rules can make all the difference.
Kathleen Eisenhardt: What Are Simple Rules? — We’re more likely to remember and act on 2-5 simple rules.
Kathleen Eisenhardt: Effective People Think Simply — You can make decisions faster when the rules are simple.
Start from both ends — open versus closed, and structured/complex versus chaotic.
What are the likely scenarios?
Questions to ask:
You can make decisions faster when the rules are simple.
“Stopping” rules are the hardest to learn. People are good at starting! Bad at stopping.
One of the biggest mistakes business people make is staying in something too long. A stopping rule helps you get out of that.
Kathleen Eisenhardt
Involve people around you to determine the rules — they shouldn’t just be from the top.
I hope you learn as much as I did from Kathleen Eisenhardt’s work.
I love this “SOUL-mate decision-making framework” shared by Aman Bhutani, CEO of GoDaddy. How do you know if a current, or new, role fits well?
Something you want to do.
Opportunity to help people more than yourself.
YoU should bring something special and unique to the role.
Learning is key, there has to be something you’re learning in the role.
Hat tip: Matt.
The S is for Something you are hungry for (not just interested or passionate about – truly hungry for). This will make sure you wake up every morning ready to succeed in the new role.
The O reminds you that there should be opportunity for everyone and not just you. Successful people do a lot of things right, and luck plays its part, but they also ride waves.
The U means that YOU must bring something special to the table. There must be a reason you are a match – you should have a competitive advantage over others.
Finally, L is for learning. If you are not going to learn anything, don’t take it. Remember that this often comes from the people just as much as the role itself.
Aman Bhutani on Twitter
Paraphrased from Nancy Pelosi’s 2020 commencement address as Smith College (emphasis mine).
During this crisis and in the days, years, and weeks that will follow, the world needs your leadership too,” Pelosi said to the graduates. “Our goal as leaders is to shorten the distance between the inconceivable to some, but inevitable to us … Because Smithies are relentless and persistent, I’m confident in your ability to do so,” she continued.
Boston.com
The Sensible Leader 