Hilary Gridley: evaluation

Transcript context

…No, there's so much power to this. As you talk, I'm like, "Wow, there's so much value here." Because not only is it, you talk about how this is the source of a lot of burnout for a lot of people where they're just so frustrated, the CEO or the chief product officer, designers just like, "I hate this." Why are they just asking all these ridiculous things, keeping the bar way too high? It's just nothing's ever good enough." But not only does it help you feel better about their asks, because you can understand where they're coming from, it also helps you be more effective and helping them change their mind potentially and see a different perspective because now you see the data that informs their perspective and you could help adjust that or kind of poke at it like, "Hey, are you sure this is true? Are you sure I don't know, they're a competitor and this is how they see it. Maybe it's not. Let's look into that a little deeper." Yeah, it's really interesting. At my last company when I started reporting to the CEO, they found various coaches for me to work with, and one of them was the former chief product officer at Coinbase who's gone to found Bridge, which is just that apart by Stripe for a ton of money. One thing that he said to me that really stuck with me is when you're reporting to the CEO and as a chief product officer, the big mistake that people make is they think that the game is all about getting what is inside their head and influencing the CEO, influencing the people around them to make it so, and if you go into the role trying to do that, you're going to fail because actually what your job is to do is to understand what the CEO's vision is and what they care about, again, sort of how they think about things and figure out how to operationalize that in a way that results in the best possible manifestation of it in the form of product. And that was just such a radically different way from what I ever thought my job was. Again, to go back to sort of the fiction example, you kind of come up thinking you're the protagonist. And you can be the protagonist in your life. You can be the protagonist in the story of your family, but in the story of your work of a company, you are probably not the protagonist. And as much as it can feel kind of weird to say that I genuinely think some of the best advice I've got in my life in terms of things that have just not only transformed how I see the world and how I act in it, but just my own sense of happiness is you're not special. And I used to spend so much time and energy just being like, "Oh, people don't see it my way and I have to convince them. And when you're in an organization, it's an ecosystem. Right? It's an organization full of people who are all trying to work together to get a thing done. And if every single one of those people is operating from their own protagonist viewpoint of "This is how I actually see the world, this is what I think we're here to do and I need to convince everyone around me at all times," it becomes extremely inefficient. It becomes extremely painful, because everyone's just fighting all the time. And so in some ways it feels like you're kind of, it sounds almost defeatist. I'm always worried about the sounding. I'm just like, "Yeah, just do whatever the boss says." And that's not how I feel at all. I think it's incredibly important to bring your skills and your talents and your perspective to the job you have and really your taste and your craft and all of these things. But I do think this idea of understanding how to build a shared mental model of everyone together that definitionally cannot be defined by your own narrow perspective, actually just makes work a lot better for everybody. So then a lot of people, like you said, I love that you went there, is just like if you're, because it could sound like, okay, your job is just to execute what the CO tells you. There's no value to your insights and perspectives, and you're just get out of the way. You're just get everyone to do the thing the CO wants. Where do you... I guess, in your experience or just advice on where's the fulfillment for you then as a CPO or example or a director of product where it's not that fun just to be there executing a CO's vision and not have any input?…

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