Jessica Fain: preference

Transcript context

…So there's a bunch of tips here that I want to summarize for how to set yourself up for success. One is what you just described, which is just think about how do they respond best? What kind of setup do they respond best to? Is it a presentation? Is it a here's what we recommend, here's three options. Is it data, something else? So there's just understand, here's what this person likes. They want a five minutes fast conclusion. Why? Then there's your advice of ask people that know them, what is top of mind for them right now? Because they may be like, "This is the big bet we're making right now. If it's not aligned with that, they're not going to care." So it's like either ask them or ask people around them, what's top of mind for them right now. And then there's this idea of simulate almost, simulate them, feed all the previous meetings with them into say a Claude project or something like that, create a little GPT and run your idea by them. And like, what would you say? I will tell you, I am not a big fan of the what's top of mind for you question. This is a hot take because I think that what often people do is they think through their top priorities, their top experiences. If we were trying to do a research study to understand the day-to-day lives of our users, we probably wouldn't say what's top of mind for you. We'd say, "Tell me how you spent your day." We'd say, "What's the most urgent priority for you right now that you're really scared about messing up? What pressures are you facing?" And so I think there's ways for us to ask much more interesting questions of our executives. I recently did this with our CEO. I said, "Tell me what the board is pushing you on because everyone's got a boss. And even a CEO who seems so powerful and competent and sure is getting pressures, right? What are you seeing as the key inputs to your success?" The other thing people don't realize is execs want to be successful too. They want to be good at their jobs. And how can you help them? In the best case scenario, your incentives at a local team level or product organization level really closely align with their incentives that you're working on something that really matters to the company. If you're not, you really should be having that conversation because you'll be in misalignment from the start. But if you actually have alignment, point out that alignment. How is the metric that they're trying to move, the OKR they're responsible for, the board pressure that they're under going to be improved by the thing that you are proposing and how do you get there together? So I think that one of the things people really miss out on here is what are the success criteria for an exec? And how do you model your world to amplify that success so that both of you can be more successful? Okay. And that is such an important lesson before I follow that thread. Just to clarify this question of what is top of mind, your advice was ask people around them, what is top of mind for them? Don't ask them directly this question.…

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