Paige Costello: recommendation

Transcript context

…I want to come back to the coaching topic. I had a few questions there that I moved off of, but I feel like that's a rich area of exploration. You mentioned Intuit. You worked at Intuit. Intuit is famous for having a really good APM program and really good training for product managers. What did you take away from that experience that you bring with you to coaching or even I think there's an APM program at Asana, too? Intuit had excellent training programs, the APM program and their manager training. So, on the PM front, the biggest thing that they taught was around customer centricity, and it really started with the founding of the company. For anyone who works at Intuit or has worked at Intuit, they know that there's this story about Scott Cook watching his wife balancing her checkbook at the kitchen table, and staring at it, and saying, "There's got to be a better way, a software." So it was very typical for the product training at Intuit to be all about like, "How do you actually watch customers using your product or just doing the things they do, collecting the artifacts, knowing the workarounds, and using that experience to build opportunities for surprise and insight that then you can capitalize and create products around?" They also are very specific about how they define durable advantage and think about, overall, the product process from a place of customer insight through to the market landscape. So the PM program there was absolutely super thoughtful, especially for taking someone who has never PMed into being a super skilled PM. They also have a wonderful manager training program, and I think the biggest thing that I took away from their manager training was really on the feedback slide. So delivering feedback is something that I think everyone benefits from, but for managers, it's so much more critical because if you don't do it, and you don't say what you mean, and you don't do it in a way that it can be internalized and acted upon, you really don't set up your teammates, your teams for growth or success in their careers. So their program for helping you think about like, "Okay. I'm going to convey this feedback as situation, behavior, impact. The situation is on Tuesday in that meeting at 3:00. Behavior, you interrupted me while I was saying this thing. Impact, made me feel like you weren't listening to me or made me feel like your voice was more important than mine, or impact, blah, blah, blah." It doesn't matter what the impact is because the way you've set it up is it's a subjective observation. It's not what the camera recorded, it's what you experienced. Therefore, it is true and valuable feedback, and it gets the conversation started such that you can then talk about next steps. That format and framing really helped me understand that delivering feedback isn't about being right or about getting the right information to the other person. It's about sharing the impact of different decisions that they're making. So, especially if you have to give feedback about, God forbid, what someone wears to the office, or how do you feel their work is, or how they're communicating or their body language, having an enough support where you can be really clear about what you're intending and the spirit behind that, but that it's formalized enough that people can really engage with it has been enormously helpful, and I still use it today. It's interesting how some of the most impactful training is such soft skills.…

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