Vlad Loktev: preference

Transcript context

…... pissed off? And then the other question I'll just throw in, you can take them however you want, is, what's your heuristic on how much people should like you as a PM? Because you touched on people don't need to necessarily love you. For saying no, first, you can't just be dogmatic and just say no for the sake of saying no and just disagreeing with people. You have to listen. For me, the framework that I've always used was inquiry versus advocacy. I don't know if you remember, we've talked about it in some contexts, where basically a lot of people approach a conversation with a point of view and they begin advocating immediately, meaning, "We should do this." Or, "No, we should not do this." Me, I always took the opposite approach, and I still do. I inquire first. I dial up inquiry, I tone down my advocacy, meaning I am going to respect the other opinion. I'm going to ask a ton of questions because I fundamentally believe maybe there's something I don't know and there's information that I need to understand to make a better decision. In the beginning, dial up inquiry. And then once the person that you're talking to feels heard and you actually have absorbed information, and maybe you changed your mind, maybe not though, that's when you begin to advocate. Oftentimes you just come into these conversations where everyone just advocates, advocate, advocate, advocate, and you're talking past each other. You're not even reflecting on what the other person is saying. Sometimes when I talk too much, I tell myself, "Wait, inquire. Dial down advocacy. Just take a breath, take a moment, take a beat, and actually ask some questions and see why the other person feels so strongly." I think that's such a good specific thing you can do because I think a lot of people want to do what you're doing. They're like, "Okay, I'm going to listen. I'm going to ask questions." But then they get a reaction. Someone's like, "Hey, we need to change this thing on the landing page." And you're like, "No, that's a terrible idea." Or, "That's going to take all this time. It's going to throw off a roadmap." And there's this bodily, "Oh, no, I need to stop this thingy." And so your advice here is pay attention to, am I talking too long? I guess, is that the advice? Am I talking too long? Am I saying too much? And start just inquiring instead.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.