Everything You Create Is A Product

I’m obsessed with office reception. 

I've come to realize that I’m a product manager. The org is my product. The employee is my customer. If I facilitate the creation of the right DNA and structure. the team is freed to be their creative best in service of their customer, knowing that the resources, infrastructure, and long-term personal and professional development they need to be their best selves are the very foundation upon which they sit. I find this work utterly delightful.

I believe every employee should consider themselves a product manager. I don't quite agree when Marc Pincus says every employee should be CEO of something or when Ben Horowitz says every product manager is a CEO. CEOs have absolute authority. Product managers, on the other hand, are part of a larger collective, and when plugged together allow one plus one to equal three. Product managers, like CEOs, must champion a big vision, but they must also focus on executing short-term strategy and getting the details right while obsessing over what their customer will do. 

“What am I obsessing over that will embody the company’s values and continuously lead to new customer delight? ”

Reception, for example, is one of the most important products your company produces. Every morning it sets the tone for your employees' day. Every day it sets first impressions for every prospective employee that visits. Since talent is the key asset that feeds your company’s growth (not to mention your biggest expense), how can you not obsess over reception?

My former colleague Blanche is a brilliant product manager. She understands that reception reflects the brand in countless ways. She groks the big picture and sweats the details. Everyone is greeted warmly and their needs attended to. The desk is picture perfect uncluttered, chairs aligned, curtains drawn, light bulbs working, books straight, drinks stocked, packages out of sight. Reception’s personality and aesthetic matches the brand and the company's customer service orientation, and thus sets the right tone for everyone who comes through those doors. 

Take a moment and ask yourself these questions: What is my product? Who is my customer? What am I obsessing over that will embody the company's values and continuously lead to new customer delight? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you won't achieve peak performance, for without the answers to these questions, how can you think big, think small, communicate effectively, prioritize, forecast, execute, and measure?

Everything you create is a product and every product has a customer for whom you must deliver value – regardless if you work in devops or marketing, sales or SRE, customer service or design, human resources or engineering. Therefore, everyone is a product manager. They just haven’t all realized it yet.

(I really am obsessed with office reception. I had all our entryways repainted at least once a year. Perhaps no one noticed besides me, but I doubt that. Details matter, which is why customers delight in them.)

On Self-Awareness

“What is your damage, Heather?”

— Veronica Sawyer

Those of a certain age <ahem> will remember this comeback from the halls of high school. The question, however, is critical. Those who achieve self-awareness likely have spent a significant portion of their lives exploring the answer.

Jim Collins discusses the role of self-awareness in leadership in his seminal book Good to Great. “Level 5 leaders [Collins' highest order] are a study in duality: modest and willful, shy and fearless.” Leaders able to project conviction yet be truly and constantly receptive to dissent and ideas from throughout the organization cannot exist without high degrees of self-awareness. 

“Without knowing your damage, you may be capable of determining what makes you tick but you will be blind to what makes you react.”

Self-awareness is my number one predictor of future success because it essentially predetermines one’s capacity for growth. Combine self-awareness with exceedingly high levels of intellect and curiosity and – BOOM – you’ve got a winner on your hands. Add experience and the necessary winning personality to the mix and you should do all you can to prevent the candidate from walking out the door. But please don't break the law like Veronica and J.D. did.

Without knowing your damage, you may be capable of determining what makes you tick but you will be blind to what makes you react. If you’ve often found yourself angry, defensive, or aggressive, there is a deep seated fear that is being triggered. Walling it off may have saved you as a child but it’s limiting you as an adult. The truthful exploration of your joys and traumas, your desires and needs, and your habits and peccadillos is necessary to understand why you do the things you do. 

Collins posits that great companies "became relentlessly disciplined at confronting the most brutal facts of their current reality." I say this is true of great leaders as well. I devote considerable energy to this exploration. The mind doesn’t want to walk down these unpleasant avenues. The psyche is built to defend itself. Reflecting on your shortcomings is a choice you must make. How can you improve a habit if you don’t understand its origins? You empower yourself to internalize life’s lessons and achieve new levels of personal and professional success if you can closely and critically observe yourself, particularly when you are exposing the raw wounds of the damage holding you back. 

Too much unexplored damage and, one way or another, your behavior will change to the point where it's noticeable to others. If you aren’t self-aware, it means your mood is being affected by something you don’t know (or want to know) is bothering you. If you are self-aware however, you are constantly practicing being your best self and rising to the occasion. If one is conscious as to who they are, how they think, and what they fear, they have the tools to affect their own change. Self improvement is impossible without self awareness. 

“The mind doesn’t want to walk down these unpleasant avenues. The psyche is built to defend itself. Reflecting on your shortcomings is a choice you must make. ”

Self-aware teams persevere through adversity and learn at ever increasing rates. Self-aware managers know how to build effective teams because they challenge their teams to become ever more aware of what motivates and stifles them (collectively and as individuals) and thus their decision making. A highly functioning team knows who each team member truly is, how they think, and how the combos of those thinking modes interact. Highly functioning teams have the courage to own their behavior and they use this collective self-awareness to be the change they wish for. Smart, curious, self-aware teams can achieve any goal and carry out any plan.

I've previously written about wanting to build heterogeneous teams of people who are continuously exploring their gifts and their shortcomings and building each other up as a result of those explorations. How do you identify these candidates? Brains and experience and niceness can all be tested. Here are just a few of the questions I mix into a 60-90 minute conversation that I believe expose a candidate's level of and capacity for self-awareness:

• What's the single most important thing you do every day?
• Describe a time you felt you were right but you still had to follow someone else's directions.
• What were you doing the last time you looked at a clock and realized you had lost all track of time?
• What business do you fantasize starting?
• What would you most like to learn working at MyCo that will help you in your future after MyCo?
• Where do you not want to be in five years?
• What would you say is the biggest misperception people have of you?
• Without thinking quickly name three reasons why I should not hire you.
• Tell me about the last time a co-worker or customer got angry with you. What happened?
• What do you enjoy most about working and what do you enjoy least?
• Are you nice? When are you not nice? Tell me about the last time you were not nice.

Self-reflection can take place anywhere at any time. I’m getting better at the habit of writing a few things down when I’m feeling agitated and reacting emotionally. It’s difficult, and the answer isn’t always there. But growth starts with asking ‘Why?’. If I can learn to spend more time seeking to understand rather than to be right, I’ll end up understanding and being right more often.

You Deserve

You deserve to surround yourself with a team that has the right culture, one capable of moving with urgency to solve problems that create new opportunities. You deserve to be part of a team that enjoys helping each other become increasingly successful.

You deserve to work with folks with little tolerance for politics and posturing because it undermines the culture that can drive success. You deserve leaders that welcome mistakes but hate needless surprises.

You deserve the trust and freedom to speak candidly and honestly, and to count on your colleagues to do the same. You deserve teammates that feel a huge obligation to hold themselves personally accountable for everything one does. Teammates that take responsibility when something goes right and when something goes wrong.

You deserve leaders who provide creativity a nourishing environment largely free of the constraints of time and capital. In return, you deserve an org that never uses creativity to create excuses.

You understand that every penny of cost or expense of a business is paid for with customer revenue. You deserve to be compensated richly for teamwork and performance, and understand that the cost of paying an underperformer to leave is demonstrably less than the cost of keeping them around. 

You deserve a team that knows that nothing is more important to the right culture than the customer, no matter what burning fire comes up.

You deserve to be part of a team of such character.

On Candor

Build a culture centered around speaking the truth, and you create an environment that nourishes courage, encourages risk taking, and regularly pushes your business through new thresholds.

Look into the companies you admire and you'll notice candor sits at the core of the culture of these great organizations. Without it, ideas are squashed before they see the light of day, while those ideas that do surface don't face hard questions from day one. Candor is also the one problem solving technique that works in any situation. 

“Candor is the one problem solving technique that works in any situation. ”

As a COO I am constantly collecting information across the organization, strengthening the decision making ability of the executive team and gathering the data I need to build and iterate the systems, processes, and organizational structures necessary to support rapid growth. By bringing what is seen and thought throughout the org into the light, decision makers are best informed as to the risks and opportunities they face.

As a leader my responsibility is to tell hard truths to my team and to my CEO. I can only do that when folks truly believe that I have their best interests at heart and my intention is to push them to being their better selves. 

Below follow some of the principles for candor I have imparted to my teams, principles I do my best to follow in order to create high-performing environments built on reservoirs of trust.

Pursue Self-Awareness

A culture of candor can only exist when the example is set from the top. There can be no space between what we say we value and what is actually demonstrated. It therefore necessarily starts with my being self-aware and confident enough to discuss what I'm good at and bad at. That builds trust. It continues with openly assessing how my decisions and choices pan out, and sharing the lessons I'm learning along the way. If I can't manage myself, how I can manage others?

Self-awareness is my number one test in interviews. I want to build a team of people who are continuously exploring their gifts and their shortcomings. Since the best teams are heterogeneous, candidates who know their strengths and weaknesses help me build a team of diverse skill-sets and life experiences. These same people understand what motivates their decision-making. As in everything hiring related, you must identify what you want your company to be and then hire the folks with the DNA to make it so.

Admit What You Don't Know

I have one cardinal rule: If you don't know, say so. There is no crime in missing a deadline, screwing up, or being wrong on an educated assumption. The only sin is not admitting what you don't know and trying to fudge your way through it. Unknowns and uncertainty are everyday facts at a high-growth company. You will never be penalized for not having learned something yet. 

Be Vulnerable

To learn from your mistakes they must be put on the table to be discussed in the light of day. Vulnerable leaders who repeatedly demonstrate an ability to candidly assess and discuss their own weaknesses and failures build powerful bonds with the teams they lead. Similarly, vulnerability builds trust between teammates, and trust ensures strong, long-lasting relationships characterized by the strength to persevere through the inevitable roller coaster that is startup life.

It's not a weakness to show weakness. The fear of failure gets in the way of creativity. Once you accept perfection is an impossibility and that you don't need it to be successful, you will start risking more to achieve more. You'll discover step functions in your performance and results, proving yourself infinitely more valuable than conservative Joe Perfect ever could be. 

Create a Safe Environment

I want – no need – truth spoken to power. Sometimes it hurts and sometimes it takes time to process. But it's never not worth it. When tough news is delivered plainly the problem gets addressed faster and we can all get back to building and doing what we do best. As a leader, set the example. When your teammates take the same risk, reward them.

A safe, candid environment brings more ideas into meaningful conversations. The key skills needed to create a safe environment for your team are (1) to listen, without judging or feeling judged, (2) to be critical, without being judgmental, (3) to propose solutions, rather than simply criticize, and (4) to disagree, without making the other party defensive. Without these your candid culture will devolve into an intolerably competitive one. 

Be Nice

Candor can be the most powerful instrument in your toolbox, but don't be a jerk. Blunt isn't the same as candid, and you have to have a strong EQ radar to deliver the right message in the right way to each person you interact with. Otherwise the message gets lost due to the messenger. Being candid is about being open with your cares and concerns, and giving advice with pure intentions. We are actually showing respect when we assume someone has the strength to hear the truth and the character to learn from it. 

Tell a Story

You can't deliver all of the news to all of the team all of the time. Sometimes taking the time to craft a story with meaning from your raw data or feedback is essential to getting your message across. Everything in life starts with communication. Be sure to get the right information to the right people at the right time in a manner they can digest. 

Have Courage

We all desire to surround ourselves with exceptionally smart and curious people driven to succeed and unafraid of obstacles. That's the primary appeal of startups for me. Let your team know that blowing smoke up your bum isn't what you need to be the best leader, and certainly isn't the key to their achieving their goals and ambitions. 

Invest in the work necessary to build a candid culture by setting an example every day at the top and rewarding model behavior at all levels of the org. Reinforce that the courage necessary to speak one's mind is strength you want to invest in. You will unlock ideas and your talent will have the best chance of reaching their potential.

On Heartbreak

Two choices, same message, both true.

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

— Winston Churchill

“It will all work out in the end. If it hasn’t worked out, it’s not the end.”

— Unknown, via my wife