Ken Norton: recommendation

Transcript context

…Awesome. We will link to all those in the description of this podcast so folks don't have to Google around. I have a couple of more coaching questions before we move on to a few other topics. One is just what are you finding are the most common blind spots for product people in general? How are people shooting themselves in the foot most? Oh, that's a great question. I think probably the number one category, I'm not sure it's necessarily a problem, but maybe category or problems, is ... And this is, I think, great lesson for people earlier in their career, is how much all of the challenges that senior executives are dealing with come down to people versus product. So it's like it's fun to think about designing products, optimizing, doing user discovery, and testing what, but it's like you sit down with an executive and it's all about people. That's the hard part. It's about persuading people, getting groups of people to want to work together, trying to figure out how to deal with difficult personalities, figuring out how to set a vision and articulate a vision, create an environment where people can collaborate and play. And so, I think this category of blind spot often is people being confronted with that without having been intentional about thinking of it as a skill or an area that they needed to work on, needed to improve. Part of what I think is pretty exciting about product management is you are a leader from day one in product management. There's leadership all over the place, but that's your job. You're a leader. You don't have any formal authority, but you're a leader. You're expected to lead. Guess what? The hardest part about being a leader is when you don't get to just rely on the formal authority. So you're getting to practice all the hard parts about leadership from day one, because you're nobody's boss. You get to sharpen those skills, develop those intuitions, get better and better at that, so that when you do someday, if this is right for you, become someone else's boss, you've already been able to lean into that. And so, the people side of this is such an incredible aspect of what product management is. What I find, and this may be a category of blind spots, is people realizing that when they're put in a position where they're expected to have impact and realizing that they haven't developed the skills, they haven't developed the capability to actually be able to manage and work through all these people, which is ... How do you actually get better at that or develop those skills?…

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