I’ve been talking to a lot of product people recently, and something has come up again and again. I think a lot of people think about product development as a kind of puzzle. I need to figure out what people want, and then figure out the puzzle, and then when I have a solution, I’ll show people and they’ll love it, buy it, and step 3: profit.

My advice always seems to trend in the same direction, though. You need to get feedback early. You need to be able to change direction quickly, and make those changes not painful for your team. You need to discard ideas that aren’t working without a second thought, and know high-level what you’re doing so that you can keep your balance.

I’ve been thinking about how to describe this – at one point I thought the phrase “inertialess” was a good descriptor of what I was looking for. Because it’s about being able to change direction quickly and painlessly, and “subtracting weight” made a lot of sense. The less work you can do before you test, the faster you move. The less painful it is to throw it out when needed. The fewer plans you have, the fewer minds you need to change. But keeping a strong “north star” of what you’re doing allows everyone to understand where you’re all headed.

And it occurred to me this morning there’s a better metaphor for it. You and your audience?

It’s a dance.

You’re working with them, trying to develop a shared understanding of this thing you’re doing. You’re leading them, but you’re responsive to their movements and their needs. You don’t dance in heavy shoes, because you need to be able to change directions fluidly. You need to be able to take in information from everywhere, and your hands, feet, head, body all need to be paying attention and in sync with your partner. The more you understand what you’re doing, the more your body is able to “do the work” and the less you have to think about it.

It also frames some of what I think of as the inevitable “herky-jerky” changing of direction during the early stages of the process as a bit more elegant, and fluid. Yeah, at the start you lurch around as you learn the song and the moves. But as you get more skilled, you’re changing a lot, but you’re doing it in concert with your audience, not *against* them. The more fluid and harmonious you can be, and the less you think of it as an antagonistic process, the faster you’ll learn, and the more graceful you’ll be.

I’ve been trying to think of a reason to write my experience with this process down – and it’s been hard to come up with a framing that makes sense to others. Inertialess made sense to me, I have a mechanical engineering background. But I don’t think it made sense to others – at least not in an intuitive, friendly way.

Does this make sense to you? I know that’s a leading question at the end of this post, but I’m curious what you think.

I’ve generally found when people come into some level of power, they fall into one of two distinct camps.

I think to some degree, everyone has a bad manager at some point in their career. Someone who yells at them, doesn’t support them, makes them to things they should be doing, takes credit for their work, whatever.

Camp 1 are the people who decide, “When I get power, I’m never going to let the people who work for me go through the kind of crap I went through.”

Camp 2 are the people who think, “Now it’s my turn.”

I’ve worked with a *surprising* number of Camp 2 folks, and it’s universally an awful experience. The crazy thing is how *easy* it is to be a Camp 2 person. These are folks who hear about voice actors arguing for royalties and saying, “Well none of US get royalties so fuck them,” instead of “Yeah, it would be great if we all benefited from the hard work we put in, we should fight alongside them!”

They’re folks who say, “I paid my dues.” They’re folks who say, “It’s always been like this.” The cycle of abuse, I believe, perpetuates by *default*.

It takes a lot of thought, a lot of effort, and a lot of conscious dismantling of ingrained expectations and reactions to create something better for others that you *didn’t get to experience for yourself*. But the result is that you make things *better* for people. You can take a terrible industry and make it *good*. Maybe even great.

Don’t be someone who takes the easy way out. Don’t be someone who perpetuates abuse and unfairness because you were lucky enough to cross over the other side of the equation.

A lot of times, when I’m mentoring folks, they’ll approach me with some binary choice that they’re struggling with. Should I do X or Y?

I’ll ask them to talk about each choice – what are the upsides, the downsides, etc. and there are obvious good and bad things about each choice, and it’s clear why they’re struggling.

But I’ll ask them a question, and it’s a surprisingly simple one, and the answer will often become instantly clear.

Here’s the thing – yes, there are good and bad elements in each choice. But “good” isn’t enough reason to do something. It has to be good AND aligned with your goals. While both choices often have equally good things, one choice is often significantly more aligned with the person’s goals. So the question is this:

“What do you want?”

Not just in the choice, but in general. What is it that you’re trying to do? What’s important to you? What do you need right now? What are your goals? Some people will spend a lot of time considering a job because it pays well, but if you ask them if they care about the money… they quite *suddenly* realize they don’t. They make enough. But they’re trained to chase the money, because there was a point where it *was* critical, and they haven’t stopped to think about whether that’s still the case or not.

But if you ask them what they want, and they say, “I want to fight for our climate future,” or “I want a job where I’ll be challenged and grow,” their choices become a lot clearer.

Take a moment and ask yourself what *you* want.

Good isn’t context-independent. Bad isn’t either. When you try to make a choice based on “good” too many things are good in too many ways, and paralysis occurs. If you think about what you want, you know *which* good to pursue, and *which* bad you need to avoid. Sounds simple, and it is. But it takes a second to step off the treadmill and think about your goals. It’s worth it. If all you do is focus on the treadmill, you’ll run in the same place the rest of your life.

Give it a shot.

One of the things I found most challenging about being in a position of hashtag#leadership was fighting instinctive reactions when responding to bad news or crises.

My instinctive reaction to responding to an engineer who pushed a change that broke a critical element of the game? “What the fuck? How did this change get through? Why did you push something like this? How come it wasn’t tested? Who fucked up?!”

And every time I was told some sort of terrible news, that *is* how I responded.

Inside.

On the outside, my goal was to respond positively. “Okay, how do we fix this?” To take any idea of frustration or anger, any desire to point fingers, assign blame, yell at folks – push that all aside. “How do we fix this?” and get moving.

The person who’s bringing you bad news? They feel as bad as they possibly can. (Even if they don’t, don’t worry about it for now – but chances are if you’ve hired well, this person already feels like shit.) By telling you something bad happened, they’re *absolutely doing the right thing*. This is the thing you want to encourage almost more than anything. That you can be trusted to receive bad news well. Because when you’ve managed to gain that level of trust, people won’t hesitate to tell you everything.

If, on the other hand, you yell at the person, get frustrated that something’s gone wrong, you know what happens next time? That person hesitates. They try to cover things up. Because they correctly *don’t* trust you, and know that they’re going to be hurt, humiliated, may lose their job, etc. And that means that problems will *fester*. That’s much worse, and that particular response? That’s your fault.

Yes, you will need to hold people accountable. You will need to figure out what caused the problem and how to address it. And most likely, you’ll find something systemic went wrong, and not some individual doing something genuinely stupid. So fix the systemic thing. That’s also your fault, and in this situation the one who gets held accountable is you.

Or maybe someone is being careless and sloppy. Have the discussion with them, privately, *after* the crisis is resolved. When your emotions are calm, and you can assess the situation without being riled up in the moment.

How you respond in times of crisis – those first moments define how the situation gets resolved. It defines how people will trust you (or not) in the future. That response is the foundation of the hashtag#culture that you’re building, and one of the biggest elements of the psychological safety that is critical to proper creative hashtag#collaboration.

Stay calm. Push those initial feelings aside. And get to fixing things.

Sometimes worse is better.

When you’re developing something new, remaining flexible is one of the most important things you can do. You need to always be able to respond to new information, and to let go of your preconceptions of how things should be.

This means you need to test ideas early, and discard them easily. But that’s not what most people do, because it’s not what most companies or managers incentivize.

You’re often told that your ideas need to be bulletproof. Or that if challenged, they need to hold up. You need to account for every possibility or circumstance. Your ideas must be robust, and well-thought-out.

I disagree.

That’s not to say that you should throw out every garbage idea under the sun. You need to make sure your ideas are worthwhile. But as a team, you need to be able to hear ideas *before* they get polished. This has myriad positive results – it lets rough gems grow better, faster, and it lets interesting failures get discarded early. With good ideas, it lets people “get in on it” early, contribute, and buy-in much, much faster. And it lets you throw out ideas that won’t work without building up a huge emotional investment/attachment to the concept.

Your team needs to understand that this is how it should work, and as a leader, you need to foster a culture that can hear things “rough” without being critical or dismissive because of that roughness.

But if you can swing it, and get your team on board, your work will improve much faster.