How to lead when you don't fit in - Dave Martin (CPO, Fractional)

Dave Martin has spent more than two decades in product leadership, with a string of C-suite roles, a couple of exits and a book, The Product Momentum Gap, to his name. He is also dyslexic and ADHD, and has built a career while masking the effort it takes to "think normal". 

In this episode he makes the case that the advice handed to neurotypical leaders often fails the roughly half of tech workers who are neurodivergent, and lays out a practical playbook for landing your message, leading the room and progressing without pretending to be someone else. 

Chapters

00:00) Welcome, and Dave's background in product
(02:03) "I've been masking it": faking thinking normal
(02:37) The meeting where your idea is ignored, then credited to someone else
(03:28) AI as a "spell check for influence"
(04:07) The myth that growth requires pretending to be neurotypical
(05:15) Why standard leadership advice fails neurodivergent leaders
(06:45) Executive presence, signal presence and signal drift
(07:57) Is this universal, or specific to neurodivergence?
(09:48) From "dumb kid" to writing C++ at ten
(11:27) When a word processor flipped his Fs to As
(13:24) The trap: leading with detail
(15:42) The boardroom moment that gets you labelled "not strategic"
(17:05) Designing for re-tell: what the room repeats when you leave
(18:19) Three mistakes that kill your influence
(19:36) The CALM framework
(21:32) Authority and the signal prep exercise
(22:14) Three questions: outcome, one-line recommendation, re-tell
(24:44) "Minutes not months": seeding the line that gets repeated
(26:56) Learning: vulnerability and psychological safety
(28:27) Momentum, well-being and burnout
(31:21) Why burnout is a leadership fault
(32:01) Mia's story: the head of product who wanted to be CPO
(34:20) Recognising the trigger and practising signal prep
(37:06) When stakeholders started calling her strategic
(38:31) The opposite trap: abandoning detail entirely
(39:22) Why some leaders step back into IC roles
(41:16) Free training and AI as your spell checker for influence
(42:26) Closing thoughts

Key takeaways
— Authenticity is not the goal; deliberate communication is. Dave's central provocation is that "be your authentic self" assumes everyone in the room thinks the way you do. For a leader who sees patterns instantly and works in deep, hyperfocused bursts, behaving authentically can mean failing to explain the obvious and struggling to empathise with those who need the journey, not just the destination.
— The symptoms are universal, the tax is not. Everybody's message gets lost in meetings. What separates neurodivergent leaders is the cognitive cost of noticing that drift and correcting it. As Randy and Dave agree, the tools discussed here help everyone, but the impact is far larger for those paying the higher tax.
— Leading with detail is the career trap. The very trait that makes someone an exceptional individual contributor, the ability to go deep and surface every edge case, can sink them in the boardroom. 
— Answer a strategic question with edge cases and you are labelled "not executive" with alarming speed, and undoing that label takes months of work.
— CALM is the alternative. Clarity, authority, learning and momentum, delivered calmly. Authority comes from being clear on the outcome and the ask, asking for support and guidance rather than permission, and not feeling obliged to justify every edge case.
— Signal prep is the practical tool. Three questions: what do I need from this room; what is my one-line recommendation; and what will they repeat when I am not in the room. A bonus question for higher-stakes meetings asks what the room feels now and how you want them to feel when you leave.
— Design for re-tell. Dave's example of a leader who reduced a lengthy objective to "minutes not months for our customers", and repeated it, is the clearest illustration. That phrase, not someone else's reframe, is what got repeated in the room afterwards.
— Well-being underpins momentum. Dave nearly named the framework around well-being. Without a sustainable pace, leaders cannot lead, and the unprocessed meeting that keeps you awake at 3am is a momentum problem. He frames widespread tech burnout as a leadership failure, because leaders set the expectation.
— AI is a spell checker for influence. Just as a word processor turned Dave's Fs into As without changing his brain, AI tooling can help neurodivergent leaders translate their thinking into the right language for the room, supporting the communication without doing the thinking or the judgement for them.

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Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. 

Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:00

Around forty-five to fifty percent of people in tech, tech workers as they describe them, are neurodiverse. So I'm dyslexic, I'm ADHD, and I almost certainly have some level of autism. I can list options you've never even thought of because you know I have them thinking. Changes in AI and those that tooling really does help. If that was their pain, just like me as an eight-year-old was spelling, they can have used this tool to help them with their comms. How do you take an authoritative stance? How do you come in with authority? What do I need from this room? Is the first question. The second one, thinking about the destination before the journey. And then the third one is designing for retail, which we mentioned before. What is it they'll repeat without me in the room? Instead of turning up trying to justify why you exist and what you do, you're turning up saying what outcome you're trying to create and what you need to create the trap is going into detail, leading with detail, not translating into the exact language, not defining the signal that you're trying to get across really succinctly and clearly.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Hi Dave, welcome to the Product Experience podcast. How are you doing today on this very hot and humid day in lovely England?

SPEAKER_02 1:09

Enjoying the heat. Worked outside all today in the sun and uh looking forward to our chat this evening.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

Thank goodness it is in the evening because otherwise we would all be melting. Well, I think I am still melting a little bit, but um so I'll stop complaining about the weather in a very British way. And before we get stuck into our topic, which is one very close to my heart, and I think we'll probably be using me partially as a case study during the conversation, might turn into a bit of a personal coaching session. Uh, give us a quick intro into your background in products, and we're going to be talking about neurodivergence in leadership. So give us a quick intro into kind of how you got stuck into this topic as well.

SPEAKER_02 1:55

Yeah, sure. Um maybe the easiest thing is like, you know, I've spent over two decades in product leadership. Uh I've had a career so far that uh some people might respect, you know, numerous C-suite roles and I um, you know, a couple of exits, wrote a book, The Product Momentum Gap. But the honest truth for most of it is that I've been faking it. Now I've not faked the work, that's been hard graphed, and you know, I've put the effort in. But what I've been faking is thinking normal and trying to act and behave that way. And the more scientific term is I've been masking it. And and I think that's perhaps what will be a good conversation today. You know, and if you mentioned yourself as a great case study, if you you might know the meeting that I frequently use as an example, it's the one where you clearly see all the parts of the puzzle and you clearly see the next action, and you you you want to be able to communicate that and get everybody on board and move forwards, and it's frustrating just the fact we're going slowly, but and you do raise it and you say the thing in the meeting or this with the stakeholders or whatever it is you've got to influence, but somehow you get ignored and nobody hears you. And then 10, 20 minutes later, maybe the next day, somebody else rephrases exactly what you were trying to say, and everybody's like, Yeah, we should do that thing, and the other guy gets all the credit. So, uh, and and why is this so important now for me? I think because AI is so phenomenally exciting as a tool for people who think differently like me. You know, what I think about it is it's like it's like the difference spell check made in the past, and nobody said, Oh, you should just learn to spell, don't use spell check. It's like using it's like spell check, but for influence, and uh that's exciting.

SPEAKER_00 3:50

Hmm, love it. Okay, well, we'll dig into that a bit later. But you kind of mentioned there uh quite a lot around your experience and how you sort of struggled or have masked your way into leadership. So you've written a white paper all about leadership for neurodivergent folk and how we can, I guess, understand better how we approach it and win. It's almost like a playbook for success for neurodivergent folk in leadership. And one of the things I really loved from that playbook is that there's, you know, a misconception that career growth for neurodivergent folk requires us to pretend to be someone else. You know, we often talk about authenticity and leadership, but actually, when you're neurodivergent, what it often can feel like is you have to be authentic at pretending to be neurotypical. Um, and I feel like the understanding of neurodivergence is increasing. And, you know, even as someone who relates to uh autism and autistic traits, and has I have quite a few autistic people in my family, although not uh an official diagnosis, you know, that part of the pamphlet like really, really resonated with me. So but you're saying it's not true. Tell tell me more about this.

SPEAKER_02 5:15

Yeah, I I totally agree about the authenticity, Lily. It's a perfect example. Like the the typical advice for leaders who are neurotypical really isn't always very helpful when you're neurodiverse. You know, if I if I follow being completely authentic, I'm dyslexic, I am ADHD, and I almost certainly have some level of autism. Um that's not diagnosed, the other two things are. And, you know, I think very logically, and I'm really good at seeing patterns and of recognizing what connects to what. And I'm incredibly good at doing hyper-focused, deep work with enormous context. Now, if I was to behave totally authentically, I would assume everybody else can do all of that too, and it's caught up. I struggle naturally to empathize that somebody else hasn't seen the same logical answer and even needs it explaining. It's like it's logical. Why can't you see it? Why would I need why why am we having this conversation? It's so obvious the answer. And you know, clearly that isn't how leadership works. And that if I'd followed that authentic behavior for my career, I wouldn't have been lucky enough and privileged enough to lead great teams and help people do amazing things. But so we have to, I think, take different advice. And the the white paper specifically tries to label some of that and give it a name because I think because it hasn't got a name, it's really hard. We we talk about executive presence quite a lot in leadership. You know, it's a very common phrase, especially in the States, perhaps a bit more than in Europe. And we talk about you know how we'll have authority and how we'll you know lead with uh you know, have authority with our influence and you know have that presence. But for somebody who's neurodiverse, we need to think a little bit more tactical around well, what's the signal that we're trying to give off? What's the signal presence we want and understand that our signal drifts? And if we understand our signal drifts, if we if we are pretty natural and organic about it, we recognize that we've got to do some hard work to stop it from drifting. And recognizing drift is happening, and then we need to correct it is is really the key. And this isn't, you know, this isn't something that only people who are neurodiverse struggle with. You know, everybody struggles with their message getting lost. The difference is the cost to correct it, and even the cost to recognize it is so much higher for people who are neurodiverse, it's almost tax.

SPEAKER_01 7:57

Dave, I want to ask you about that specifically because I was gonna throw uh my my hat in the ring as as not a cynic, but a challenger on this. Um I don't identify as neurodiverse. Um, I may be fooling myself on some of this, who knows? But the things that you talk about in your white paper, the things that we're gonna be talking about today, they're challenges I see much more universally. They are things I see as problems for lots of people. They are real challenges around uh the what you said earlier, uh, an idea that's expressed that is uh success, you know, when I when someone else says they'd never listen to me, and then two days later the CEO comes back and says it, and I said, I say, congratulations, you've successfully made it their idea. That's the win. That's not a failure. You're in a product leadership role, you're never going to get the recognition, and that's okay. Um, I think I can be empathetic about things, but I also struggle with why do some people not get this? Why is this such a challenge? Why is this so hard? I struggle with a lot of the things you talk about, and a lot of the things in the pamphlet seem like just good common sense to me. So what is the difference between this being a more universal thing and this being specific to neurodivergency?

SPEAKER_02 9:13

Yeah, uh I don't think the symptoms are different. Everyone struggles with communication at some point, and that's very natural. And everybody's message gets lost. What's different is how much effort it is to correct it, or how difficult it is to even know it's happening. So it's less about the the and some of the tactics and recommendations and tools that we can talk about to help will be useful to everybody listening. But the impact they'll have for people who are neurodiverse are way bigger. Let me tell a short story perhaps to help. And this has nothing to do with management or leadership, it's just about me as a kid, and maybe that helps you know people understand a different viewpoint. So when I was about nine, about nine years old in primary school in the UK, I was pretty convinced I was a dumb kid. I was dyslexic, not that the school or the local authority recognised that that was a thing, because that was the time of you know, it was the 80s. I now realize, and it took me quite a while to even recognise it, I I actually wrote sentences backwards. My spelling was a terrible mess. And you know, for for my teachers, it was incredibly hard for them to understand anything I wrote down. So clearly, when they looked at it, it was wrong and all my grades were Fs. Interestingly, when I looked at it, it looked perfectly fine. You know, I could read it out loud and not even realize the words were all backwards and messed up. I'd read it in the right order and not know I'd written them down, even reading it back like a couple of days later, realizing it was all messed up. So I couldn't see what I was doing at all, which is a real challenge. Somebody once put me in front of a computer in the late 80s and something clicked, and you know, this was 80s, so DOS and Windows 3.1, and somehow it made sense. And by the time I was 10, I was writing C and knew more about the computers than quite a lot of the adults around me. Suddenly I realized I wasn't that dumb kid that I thought I was. And interestingly, when school let me use that tool of a word processor with a spell check, my F's flipped to A's. Same brain, same kid, just different tools. And I think you know, you could say, well, lots of people struggle with spelling, or lots of people maybe get words mixed up now and then when they're kids and writing stuff down. But the effort to correct it, when you don't know you're doing it, it's almost impossible to correct it. And when you do know, the like the effort to double check and read the thing four or five times, or and you're you read a paragraph and it takes it's so slow to read the paragraph compared to somebody else, the communication you really having to stop before speaking and be really disciplined on listening and thinking about how that's about to sound with way more cognitive effort than someone else. It that's the that's the difference. And it's not that other people don't have the challenge, right? They do, but their ability to overcome the challenge cognitively is so much cheaper. Just so and unless you struggle with it, it's kind of hard to realize the treacle that your neurodiverse colleagues are wading through to just appear the same as you.

SPEAKER_00 12:43

Yeah, I I have a similar thing which I'll just cover really quickly just to back you up even further. But um, I for a very long time I didn't realize that other people didn't have to think about where to look and when to speak when they were having a conversation, you know, in with the in a with a colleague or in a kind of work work situation. Um, and when I found that out, I was like, oh, okay, there's like conversations must be so easy for you because you're not only, well, you're just there's like a whole load of cognitive effort that you're not having to think about at all. Okay, so let's move on. Um, one of the things you talk about in the white paper is a trap that people fall into, um, that neurodivergent folk, as they're kind of climbing the career ladder and they're finding themselves in leadership roles, there is this trap. Like, what is the trap and what does it lead to?

SPEAKER_02 13:40

I mean, this is the same for everybody, not just people who are neurodivergent. Back to Randy's point. But the on this topic specifically, when you're neurodivergent, some of the things that you find easier, some of the things that come incredibly naturally, make you a really good IC, a really good individual contributor, depending on what it is you're doing. And you know, like the fact you can go, if if you're ADHD like I am, you can go into this hyper focus, really down a rabbit hole into detail so easily. And you know, I have before now have worked all through the night, not even, you know, I've looked out the window, oh, it's daylight. Oh dear, you know, I should have gone to bed without even really even recognizing time was passing because I was so focused on the thing I was doing. It's so easy to do that. It's it's which makes for certain work um you can be a phenomenal IC. You can because you can have that focus and lock everything else out. My my family always laugh because if we watch telly, I'm so focused on the tell. The doorbell can ring, people can come and go, I won't even notice because I'm watching the film, and that's what I'm doing, and that's what I'm focused on. I don't see anything else. Equally, at other times I have the opposite problem. I my race, my head, my mind is racing ahead, so far ahead, it's really hard to have the now conversation because I'm already you know three conversations forwards, or things may have been totally different. But the trap is really around the fact that as an IC who's neurodiverse, there is a very good chance, not always, that you have gained credibility as a professional and achieve whatever all the great things you've achieved because I've been able to go deep or because I've been able to focus or whatever, or some attribute to do with your neurodiversity. And normally it's around detail with the people that I coach and work with. They're they're really good with detail, and that that doesn't work well in the exact setting. You go into the boardroom for the first time and get asked a question. If you respond with some weird edge cases and loads of detail because you're trying to demonstrate you're credible, like that's credibility. I've looked at all the edge cases, you know, I'm a safe pair of hands, I've considered all the potential options, and I can list options you've never even thought of because you know I have done the thinking and I've done that hard graft. Unfortunately, that just loses the person in the exec room. They sit in there going, I have no idea what this is about. And what you get labeled as very quickly, and it's shockingly quickly, you're labeled as not executive or not strategic. And then you've got to do a lot of work if you're gonna progress in that business with the same stakeholders, for them to rebrand you as somebody who is executive and is strategic, because they see you as just the details person who can go and get the job done, not the person that's giving them a clear message with a clear decision to be made and leading the room. So the mistakes that create the trap is going into detail, leading with detail, not translating into the exact language, not defining the signal that you're trying to get across really succinctly and clearly, and not leaving the room. And perhaps the easiest way to describe it is if you go into a stakeholder meeting of whatever level you happen to operate at, and you haven't already thought about what the retail is, what is what do you want the room to say when you're not in it? When you leave? What do you want them to say when you're not there? That's the retail. If you haven't planned the retail, you're not leaving the room. You're just being reactive to their to what to how they behave. And you know, if you've been that person, and I definitely have too many times, you know, you you open with a bunch of detail instead of the ask and decision. You explain all this stuff, you give so much information, the people in the room are grasping trying to understand it. So they ask questions, trying to understand. You, of course, see those questions as challenge, you see those questions as somebody challenging your authority and credibility. Like, I'm telling you all the detail. Why are you asking more? Right? How much do you want? You know, so you then feel like I'm not being I'm being challenged, I'm not good enough. And suddenly you end up in this terrible emotional place. And I'm speaking from both personal experience and from coaching leaders who've told me that's the pain they feel. And obviously, they can get over it. We can work through that and come up with tactics to help.

SPEAKER_01 18:19

Dave, I was just uh hanging out the other week up at Agile Manchester with another uh podcast guest, Kirsten Mann, and she did a great talk about what you need, what is the board expecting of you? What do you do when you go into the boardroom for the first time? What do you need to know? So and it was very, very similar. The the three mistakes that kill your influence that you talk about, very, very similar to what she said, which went over really well with a room full of people. So just backing up neurotypical, neuroatypical, neurodivergent, doesn't matter. But overcomplicating with detail, leading with high output, will recognition, jumping to fix-it mode, those were pretty much uh different words, slightly different tone, but pretty much the things she was pointing out as some of the key mistakes she sees people make time and time again. So let's let's skip past that for a moment and let's talk about what is it that extraordinary leaders do differently? What are the things that we can all focus on and say this is the these are the things that you as you're making a jump from IC to leader, or as you're trying to up your game as an IC to get to leadership, what are the things that you need to, the tricks, the the tools, the the different behaviors that you need to adopt to get people to take you seriously?

SPEAKER_02 19:35

I think some of the key things, the key thing, something I call calm leadership. And CARM is just a short acronym. It stands for clarity, authority, learning, and momentum. And obviously, we want to do it in a calm way. We don't want leaders who are panicked and crazily emotional in a negative way. And that's being calm is harder than it sounds sometimes. One of the things you just mentioned about being clear in that room in that meeting, on your feet, thinking on your feet, can that can be really challenging for some neurodiverse folks where the neurotypical might think a bit clearer. And it's really blurred in our industry, according to Microsoft, the research they've done around 45 to 50 percent of people in tech, tech workers as they describe them, are neurodiverse. So it's in some in some businesses, it'll probably in tech, it'll probably be almost typical to be neurodiverse. So it's incredibly blurry lines. So I think it's most important we just think about if these tools and techniques we're about to talk about feel like they could be useful for you, instead of worrying about whether you've got a label or not and whether you're this or that, just try it out and use it. And if it helps, fabulous, you know, and if it doesn't, well, you know, not to try again. They aren't they aren't very they don't take very long normally. Um, so we want to be calm, we want to be make sure we're always being clear, we're leading with authority, we're open and vulnerable to learning, and we're we're doing whatever we do in a fashion that allows momentum, and and that really includes not just us, but our teams and well-being, to make sure that we're we're not emotionally draining ourselves and some of that emotional tax we talked about earlier is so crippling for some people, it really does impact momentum and causes a huge amount of burnout in in neurodiverse folks.

SPEAKER_01 21:29

One of the one of the calmly one of the hardest parts of that you do you talked about clarity, but one of the hardest parts of that is is authority. How do you take an authoritative stance? How do you come in with authority?

SPEAKER_02 21:42

So let's think about a simple exercise called signal prep. It's built on three three easy steps, and it's there to create that signal presence. And you know, authority can very much be achieved by having that clear presence, being really clear what it is you're trying to achieve, really clear what it is you want. And uh really clear what the ask is and really clear what you know where where we're going next. Far less asking for permission, but asking for support and guidance rather than uh approval. And the signal prep approach is just three simple steps to help people. Um the first one is thinking about making sure we think about the outcome over the update. So maybe you're used to turning up to some sort of status meeting, for example, and it's tempting just to share progress. The first step is less about sharing progress and thinking more about what's the outcome I'm trying to achieve. So the question we would ask and try and answer it to prep is what do I need from this room? And think what do I need to tell them in order to get the thing I need. So, what do I need from this room is the first question. The second one is thinking about the destination before the journey. So, and that's easy to write, you know, technically it's easy to explore, it's not so easy to do, but it's answering the question, what's my one-line recommendation? And the value of having it is one line, I'm sure you'll say it in a meeting in many more words than one line. But the value of having it in one line is when you get that challenge uh and somebody asks some awkward question or something, and it's totally curveballed. It's really the recommendation you want to come back to. And that's about authority, being like, that's great, I hear what you're saying, this is the recommendation, and not being tempted to necessarily have to justify every single weird edge case that somebody might bring up unless they really demand it, being able to just come back with what the core recommendation is and bring it back on track to your message. And you can't do that and think on your feet. It can be really hard to do that without having that clear what is that one line just to help you go back to it. So, and it's not difficult to prep this, especially with AI tools helping you. I've got a co-work plugin for Claude to that's open source. Anyone can just download and install to help with this. And then the third one is designing for retail, which we mentioned before. What is it they'll repeat without me in the room? So we've got three key questions to answer. What do I need? What do I need from this room? What's my online recommendation? And what will they repeat without me in the room? Now, if you've got a bit more time to prep, you can do that in 10 minutes. If you've got a little bit more time, the bonus question is what's the emotion of the people in the room and how do you want them to feel when you leave? But that's a little bit more involved and not something we're going to probably be able to do for every single meeting. But for the big ones, we should. You should think that through. It's good stakeholder management. So just thinking through those three questions will automatically land you in the room with more authority to the question, Randy. You'll automatically walk in instead of saying, hey, these are all the updates and things we've done, you're talking about the outcome you're creating and what you need this room to do. You know, this is the great work we've done, and what we need is this room to approve XYZ decision or whatever stage gate you have, or whatever it is that you're talking about. And this is the recommendation. And framing it and phrasing it in a way that would be easy for them to repeat when you're not there. You know, for example, you know, simple example there. I was in a session the other day, it wasn't my meeting, I was coaching somebody else, and I was in the boardroom as an observer. And the person I was coaching reframed, you know, talked about the objectives they wanted approving and some funding for it and change of structure, reframed, but they reframed at the end, you know, quite a lengthy explanation and objective to three simple words. It's about minutes, not months for our customers. Minutes, not months. And they said that phrase two or three times towards the end, and that's what got repeated when they weren't in the room. So they were set seeding that thought, and that's all that's leading with authority. You're leading the room, you're giving them the recommendation, and instead of turning up trying to justify why you exist and what you do, you're turning up saying what outcome you're trying to create and what you need. That total different kind of leader. It's completely different.

SPEAKER_00 26:15

I love that. And it's it's pretty simple. Pretty simple set of steps and and and playbook, which is you know, which is also great. It's not, you know, it's not overtly complex. It's not like you know, a load of detail that you have to go through. It's just, you know, and yeah, three questions.

SPEAKER_02 26:33

I'll cowork plugin that helps and like reviews it and asks like who are you talking to and suggests how that might sound to that role or that person, like you're talking to CFO. They're not gonna you've just talked about XYZ, they don't know what any of that is, and suggests different phrases for you to reach your own, get your own, it doesn't give you the words, it's helping you work out the best words.

SPEAKER_00 26:56

Yeah, yeah. And so moving on to part three of uh calm, C-A-L-N, learning, in case anyone had not picked up that clarity, authority, learning, and momentum. Spell out calm. Um, so learning, um, how do we get better at um I think you kind of covered this, or you kind of touch on this as like being open to learning in that uh leadership environment.

SPEAKER_02 27:25

Yeah, there's I think there's two angles, depending on the perspective. If we're thinking about ourselves, it's about being vulnerable and showing we can make mistakes and we'll when we'll learn, you know, the whole kind of um strong opinions loosely held. Yeah, we have no problem in recognising the evidence and then changing the direction. Uh and that's you know that vulnerability is really crucial and holding the hands up. Oh, yeah, we got that wrong, we've learned. You know, we can't make we can't learn without making mistakes, so accepting it. On the other angle, when we think about who we're leading, it's so crucial to create that environment and culture for our teams so they feel like it's safe to learn and they have space to do it. Uh, you know, that we might think as learn as being pure L and D. And right now with AI, the people need time to do that. But equally, it can be simple as you know, the experiments we're running a product function, learning what works, what doesn't, but accept encouraging people and creating that environment where people can do that.

SPEAKER_00 28:29

Um, and then the final one was momentum. So, what does this look like?

SPEAKER_02 28:34

Very much. I if I put W at the end, it wouldn't have spelled calm. So I wanted to put well-being at the end, but uh momentum is very much tied to well-being. How are we able to keep that? Whatever pace we're running at. And initially, I think it's important to think of it for ourselves and then of our team's secondary. We have to look after ourselves as leaders first, or else we can't lead the people around us. We're not effective. If we're running at a pace that means we are we can't sustain the effort, we're we're gonna run into some problems, and that's where burnout comes. Like, you know, are you on your phone? What's the first thing you do in the morning is that you look at your phone before you go out of bed and check Slack. That's not very that's not very sustainable momentum. I mean, there's all sorts of all sorts of things to discuss there about your cortisol levels and what you're doing to yourself that's a very negative. So it's a we want to operate at a sustainable pace. Of course, there'll be pipe peaks, you know, and spikes when things are crazy busy, but we need a sustainable pace, otherwise we can't need others around us. And especially I think for somebody like me who's dyslexic in ADHD, I've got to I need a little bit of time to do things like planning the signal prep we just described, or reflecting on a meeting about what it actually meant rather than what I took away. Because if I don't do it then, if I don't force myself to do that, I will wake up at three in the morning and think about that meeting and be worried I should have said something else and all sorts of worries and concerns. And I've had people tell me that they've had that for like months about one meeting, they've remembered one word they said, and like, oh, I should have answered that question differently, and it's kept them awake for literally months, they keep coming back to it. Everybody has that, but not necessarily clinging on to it for so long. Making sure we're creating space for us to decompress and get over those things and get you know, put them put them to bed rather than then keep us awake in bed. Um, and then obviously the well-being with our team. You know, if we once we are in working at a pace that and a level that we can sustain, now we're set up to succeed and help our teams, and we've got to make sure they do the same and we're not expecting the uh unachievable. And you know, if you think of people like Lenny's workforce, tech workforce survey, he ran them, was it two years ago now, I think. The I might have got the time wrong, it might have been last year, but the percentage was enormous of people reporting they were suffering from burnout or had suffered with burnout within 12 months. There was some, it was I can't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, but it was almost like two-thirds of the tech workforce. It was enormous. And I looked at that and think, well, that's a leadership fault. Because we set the expectation.

unknown 31:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:28

It didn't help those people behave differently, and that's partly our job.

SPEAKER_01 31:31

Dave, I'm really glad you went with the COM acronym. But had you done uh well-being instead and flipped learning and authority, you could have done Claw, which would have been very of the moment. So probably not very Googleable, but yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:46

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would have definitely lost my position in Google.

SPEAKER_01 31:51

Anyway, um, one of the things I really liked about the white paper is it's not just theory. You talk about it practically, and uh you you mentioned someone who you call Mia uh in this. Tell us a little bit about her and about her journey and how you worked with her.

SPEAKER_02 32:08

Yeah, so Mia was a uh head of product. Um she's a real person, just her name isn't Mia, just because you know, coaching is a very private thing. She she knows I'm writing about her, but preferred her name wasn't actually in it. So I do have a permission to discuss it, just not a permission to name her. And uh she initially she had the ambition to want to be a CPO, desperately wanted to be CPO, hugely ambitious, incredibly clever lady, super clever. Um, but her environment was of such where people around her decided she wasn't executive material. People didn't believe that she got this label that I mentioned earlier, and and the specific label was you're not strategic enough, which made very little sense to Mia, because she saw strategy very clearly, like very logical, very black and white, and could easily see how things fit together and how you know tweaking a lever here was going to impact something you know three years down the line and the impact it would have on enterprise value and all sorts of things. But the but for whatever reason her stakeholders didn't see it in her, so it wasn't a capability problem. She had the capability, which is lucky because I don't train strategy, so I couldn't have helped her, and though I'm sure many wonderful people could have. What she had was a communication and influence problem. Her message wasn't landing, so she was really struggling with that signal drift problem. She was, for whatever reasons, and there were many, um, but she she was going into detail. She felt very intimidated by one of the other stakeholders, a very commercial person. And she was struggling to put commercial numbers on some of the initiatives, which is often a challenge in you know, in product, especially B2B with long sales cycles, it can be harder. She was struggling to put that commercial angle on. Um, and regularly feeling a bit of imposter syndrome in those sessions. They would ask certain questions, she would feel on the back foot, she would panic, and things would go a bit downhill. Over a period of time helping her, we dealt with the imposter thing. We really focused on signal presence and recognizing where the drift was happening. And just that, I mean, if anybody's ever done therapy and see something called cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, which is commonly used for things like anxiety and depression and all sorts of other things. The first part in all CBT training is recognize seeing what's happening and being able to spot it on the trigger, see the find the trigger moment for you to then do something to change how you react to the trigger. So the first thing, very similar to that, and not purposefully, but it was similar, is recognizing that trigger. When did it happen? And then being able to reflect on it and explore why it happened and what went wrong in a in a very clear way, so that we can then plan and give ourselves the reason, the motivation to do. So that signal prep, Lily, you were like, Oh, it's only it seems really easy, just three questions. There are loads of things that are really easy, and we decide not to do them for lots of reasons, mainly toil. Like, we're busy people. We've got loads of you know, probably got you've probably had hundreds of emails, loads of Slack messages, ballpapers to review, presentations being demanded, a bunch of staff with heaps of demands. Finding that just finding 10 minutes can feel like an inordinate amount of effort and feel toil. And what we're good at if we're efficient is we try and avoid toil and still get the same outcome. So, you know, by not doing that prep, that's what she'd been doing. So by recognizing that trigger, recognizing when it had happened and the cost when it had happened, gave her the motivation to when when she knew this something was coming up where she should prep, gave her the motivation to make sure she did do the prep work, even if it only took 10 minutes to make sure she actually did it. Because we're not all super disciplined, I'm definitely not. The heaviest weight in the gym for me wouldn't be the door. So she we got the trigger and recognized. We had a simple task, a simple initiative, signal prep to go through, and a few other tools and techniques, and then she practiced it. And we practiced it first on small meetings that weren't big to see the difference, so the stakes felt lower because it was scary and worrying. Like, really, is this going to make a difference? You know, people the people have fears. So we practiced on some areas where it felt safe and the fears were low. And as the confidence grew, she naturally, without any need for me to encourage, started using the same approaches in higher state meetings and really started to enjoy the outcomes. And it took maybe two, maybe three months max for stakeholders to see a difference and start to say recognize her as strategic and the words and the vocabulary of how she was going to describe change. Um, and for her to see words she had said being repeated back, that retail, instead of somebody else pitching the same idea in a different way and getting listened to, which was a common problem and something she was struggling with. Instead, you know, getting hearing her words retold is a very different experience to hearing somebody else pitch your thing completely differently to you, but you know it's your thing. That just feels like plagiarism. Um, and not coming from the boss down, but from peers is very different experience. So uh yeah, that that was the journey. And you know, she's done phenomenally well, um, hugely successful in their scaling up now, and she's leading their international growth, which is awesome.

SPEAKER_00 38:06

That is really awesome. And how lucky she was to have you to who had you've I feel like you've kind of unpicked and deciphered all of this complex stuff for us and like given us a real playbook for how to approach it. So um, yeah, if any of this resonates with any of our listeners, you should definitely check out the white paper because it is super helpful and it's a real quick read as well. Um, we probably have time for just a couple more questions. Uh, it's funny because I feel like one of the mistakes that you talked about was like overcomplicating with detail. And I do wonder whether I certainly, in my history of uh professional career, have gone the other way and have just gone, I'm just not gonna bother with any detail because no one pays any attention, no one understands what I'm talking about, and no one really cares. Um so I think there is, you know, there's that real risk as well of just going completely in the other direction and just being like, what's the point in all of this? So I love that it's you know, it's a very sort of tempered, calm, as you say, approach to leadership. But the other thing I thought was interesting as well about what what we've talked about um this evening is I have seen a lot of people who to me, like in in my exchanges with them, seem very competent, confident, like know what they're talking about. They've gone into leadership roles, and then they've gone back into the IC role. And I feel like perhaps, you know, if they'd had this playbook, that may not have been the case for them. It's like they've gone into a leadership role and then felt like somehow that hasn't been a good fit.

SPEAKER_02 39:51

Yeah, that I mean that's really common. And I I think it's really important first to recognise that's not a bad thing if that's if you, you know, tried out leadership and thought this isn't what I thought it was, this isn't for me, then you know that's that's wonderful. Well done that you've learned that. Well done, you've had the uh the guts in some cases to go, you know, growth doesn't personal growth doesn't just mean a job title that's more flamboyant. I I can grow in different ways as an IC. So I think it's wonderful. And we're seeing more IC career paths now as well in more and more companies, which is even more exciting. But if you drop back into an IC role because you felt like you struggled too much and the paint, it was too difficult for reasons like we've described, like your communication wasn't landing, you didn't feel you had the influence for whatever reason you ended up feeling perhaps um with no authority and just like you were taking orders. All of those things are really the same problem, disguised in different ways. And you know, if that was the case, rather than I didn't in, you know, budgets and setting objectives weren't my thing, I'd rather get my hands dirty and make the thing. You know, if those things, if it was the actual issue, was the comms side, then it would be great if people can you know check out the white paper, we do some free training. Anything that we I write a substack thing that's free, there's no money anywhere on it to uh so that we're full of examples and tools and suggestions to try and help you because it's a crying shame. And I think the changes in AI and those that tooling really does help. I I think it's absolutely really important that people recognize if that is if that was their pain, just like me as an eight-year-old with spelling, now they can have use this tool to help them with their comms and not to do the thinking for them, not to do the judgment, but to help them with the comms. And if they think of it as I can use AI to be my spell checker for influence, then they really do have an opportunity to level up a lot easier than somebody else in the same position just 18 months ago, in fact, when these tools weren't as proficient. So uh yeah, don't don't let there's no reason now if you've if the tools are available for you and you can use them in your workplace, because obviously not everyone can, um, then there's no reason why you can't help use that as help and support.

SPEAKER_00 42:25

Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Dave, for joining us and talking us through all of this. Um, I really hope that yeah, it resonates with some people and they take advantage of all of this knowledge and and use it because it's fantastic. And like Randy was saying, it's a great toolkit for for everyone. Um, so yeah, if you're struggling with leadership in any sense of the word, then uh check it out.

SPEAKER_02 42:51

Great. Thanks.

SPEAKER_01 42:52

Thanks, Dave.

SPEAKER_00 42:53

The product experience hosts are me, Lily Smith, host by night and chief product officer by day.

SPEAKER_01 43:00

And me, Randy Silver, also host by night. And I spend my days working with product and leadership teams, helping their teams to do amazing work.

SPEAKER_00 43:09

Luran Pratt is our producer, and Luke Smith is our editor.