Ken Norton: evaluation

Transcript context

…This episode is brought to you by Unit. What did Gusto, Uber, Shopify and AngelList all have in common? They've all decided to build banking into their product. According to AngelList head of product, "Banking makes every single feature more interesting. With it, our platform functions as financial mission control for our customers. Without it, we're just another software tool in a big messy stack." Embedding banking into your product not only adds differentiation, but also helps you acquire, retain, and monetize your customers. Unit is the market leader in banking as a service, combining multiple bank partners with a developer-friendly API to empower companies of all sizes to launch accounts, cards, payments, and lending in just a few weeks. Unit is trusted by leading brands such as AngelList, Highbeam, Invoice2go, and Roofstock. To hear more about how Unit enables companies like yours to build banking, visit unit.co/lenny to request a demo or to try their free sandbox. That's unit.co/lenny. For someone that wants to do the work, but can't find a coach, can't afford a coach, is there something people can do on their own that you'd recommend to help them shift their mindset and do a lot of these things that you've been describing? Yeah, it's a great question. Here's the secret about the coaching industry. Anyone can call themselves a coach. It's very democratized. It's great. There's no gatekeepers and barriers and there's no 500 licenses you have to go through. There are tons of great coaches who are at various different price levels, at different levels of accessibility. And so, if you say, "I can't afford a coach," I might challenge that a little bit and say have you looked? The other thing is that you don't need a coach who's done the job before. I mean obviously I've done the job before, so I'm undermining part of my own selling point here. But coaches are trained to coach people on any topic. So when I go through coach training, I can coach you on anything. People can coach you on anything. Sometimes even there might be power in having a coach that's never done the product management job because there won't be any cheating of starting to move into a more of advisor role or maybe as the coach either. There may be, "Well, you tell me what should I should do," and the person would be like, "I don't know. I've never done this job. Let's go back to what you want." So there could be some benefit from that. Again, you don't have to have done that. So I would say coaching is incredibly powerful. I wish I'd had a coach much, much earlier in my career. And so, the answer may be coaching is more accessible than you thought. If not, I think the things that we're talking about here are internal understanding of what matters to you, your sense of purpose, this inner curiosity, and that could be harnessed at any age. So just wondering about yourself at any point in your career, wondering what's important to you. I love doing values work, like, "What are your values? Okay. No. What really are your values?" That's something you can do yourself. That's something you can question. You can read about, you can start to understand. Mentors can be great, especially mentors who are less about trying to tell you the right way and get you to follow directly their path, but are more they're applying some curiosity, asking questions, challenging you in certain ways, being a way that you can bounce ideas off of. Great managers, I think, especially the best product leaders, understand how to put the coach hat on and when it's appropriate to put the coach hat on, and are explicit about that, are like, "Okay, let me take off my manager hat now and put the coach hat on. What do you really want to do, Lenny? What's important to you? What's your career?" And so, I think you can get coaching from everywhere. There's a lot of self-coaching you can do. This is honestly one of the benefits for me having gone through tons of training and coaching is starting to coach myself, like feeling an emotion and asking myself coach questions. Really powerful. That's something you can do when you've had a coach. You can do it when you don't have a coach. You can explore it. myself, like feeling an emotion and asking myself coach questions. Really powerful. That's something you can do when you've had a coach. You can do it when you don't have a coach. You can explore it. So I think this is really all about really being curious and wanting to understand who you really are at the core and what's important to you and what matters. That's something that can be done with or without a coach.…

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