02 / commitment

22 Mar 2026

If you have something net new that you want to bring to market and customer success thinks it would really accelerate expansion rates, or the marketing team thinks that signups would be 10X because of this, if you have that cross-functional alignment, and this is where a lot of these lessons don't just apply if you're going into a product executive meeting, but that if you're influencing your cross-functional execs and your cross-functional stakeholders to be advocates on your behalf, I think that we now have more tools than ever to, as product folks, build out the V1, prototype something, build your own app, build the messy version of it, get feedback, iterate, and be socializing that in a way that creates a groundswell of buy-in to the point that the exec can't say no to the funding.

“If you have something net new that you want to bring to market and customer success thinks it would really accelerate expansion rates, or the marketing team thinks that signups would be 10X because of this, if you have that cross-functional alignment, and this is where a lot of these lessons don't just apply if you're going into a product executive meeting, but that if you're influencing your cross-functional execs and your cross-functional stakeholders to be advocates on your behalf, I think that we now have more tools than ever to, as product folks, build out the V1, prototype something, build your own app, build the messy version of it, get feedback, iterate, and be socializing that in a way that creates a groundswell of buy-in to the point that the exec can't say no to the funding.”

Speaker: Jessica Fain
Episode: The art of influence: The single most important skill that AI can’t replace | Jessica Fain (Webflow, ex-Slack)
Publisher: Lenny's Podcast

Jessica Fain

What Jessica said.

If we each think of ourselves as owners and as contributors to the business and as leaders, we will bring those opportunities up as well to both amplify the business or save it from itself.