Anger is one of those emotions we’re taught to see as bad, unproductive, or destructive. We learn to calm down, to let it go, to avoid it.
But what if that instinctive rejection of anger is actually making us less effective as leaders, as coaches, and as human beings?
This is where the work of Phil Stutz, the psychiatrist and author, gives us a powerful reframe.
Stutz is known for his long career in therapy (he began working as a psychiatrist in New York and later in Los Angeles) and for co-authoring books like The Tools and Coming Alive. More recently, his short essays were collected in Lessons for Living: What Only Adversity Can Teach You, a book full of reflections on real human challenges, including one titled The Positive Side of Anger.
Anger as a Signal, Not a Problem
Stutz doesn’t dismiss anger. He doesn’t see it as a flaw in character or something to be sublimated or ignored. Instead, he treats anger as information: a powerful emotional signal that something important is being violated.
When we feel angry, Stutz suggests, it is because something deeply matters to us. It’s a boundary signal, a marker that a value has been crossed or a personal standard has been ignored.
The trouble doesn’t come from the anger itself, but from how we respond to it:
If we suppress anger, it often turns inward as depression, apathy, cynicism, or self-criticism.
If we explode with it without reflection, it becomes blame and conflict.
If we instead own the anger and clarify what it is protecting, it becomes energy for change.
Stutz’s approach here is subtle but powerful: anger is not the problem, mismanaging it is.
Why Anger Is Useful
There are three important truths about anger that come through in Stutz’s writing:
Anger pinpoints what matters most. It’s not noise. It’s a directional signal that something significant for your identity or values is at stake.
Anger holds energy. Rather than draining us, when we own anger and interpret it accurately, it becomes fuel for clarity, resolve and action.
Anger is a stepping stone, not a destination. The aim is not to indulge anger, but to use it to uncover what needs to change and then move toward that change with intention.
In this sense, anger cleans the lens through which we see a problem. It helps us see beyond surface discomfort to structural issues like unmet expectations, crossed boundaries, or values under threat.
How This Applies to Leadership and Work
In organizational life, anger often shows up:
when leaders are exhausted by repeated blocks,
when teams feel undervalued,
when stakeholders ignore boundaries,
or when performance feels misaligned with values.
Too often, leaders either minimize anger or react to it without reflection. The result? Resentment, turnover, disengagement, burnout.
Stutz’s perspective gives leaders a different path: Use anger as a compass.
Ask:
What boundary is being crossed?
What value is being violated?
What concrete action would protect that value?
This shifts anger from a reactive emotion to a source of agency.
The Broader Stutz Framework: Adversity as Growth
Stutz’s book isn’t just about anger. Lessons for Living is structured as a series of essays on universal human challenges: envy, insecurity, bad habits, conflict, and yes, anger. What unifies them is a deep conviction that adversity is not a sign of failure but a teacher.
Rather than trying to avoid pain or conflict, Stutz invites us to face these experiences with curiosity.
A Practical Takeaway
Here’s a simple reframing you can use immediately — for yourself, or with a client:
Anger is not the enemy. Anger is the part of you that still knows what matters and refuses to give up.
That’s not a dismissal of discomfort. It’s an invitation to listen to what’s being said beneath the emotion.
In Practice: A Short Coaching Prompt
When someone says “I’m angry”:
Pause and validate “Anger tells us something matters here.”
Ask the deeper question “What boundary feels crossed?” or “What value is being defended?”
Solicit concrete action “What is the smallest next step that honors that value?”
Move toward ownership “What part of this is in your control right now?”
This turns anger from a stumbling block into a stepping stone.
We’ve all been there: You wrap up a powerful, high-energy, face-to-face quarterly meeting. Your leadership team is aligned, initiatives are clearly defined, and everyone enthusiastically volunteers to lead their respective actions.
You walk away feeling unstoppable… until you get back to the office.
Now, weeks later, you find yourself having to push every team member, individually and collectively, just to get the agreed-upon initiatives to budge. It’s frustrating, energy-draining, and makes you wonder: Why the resistance?
This is where a fun concept from psychology can shed some light.
Introducing: “Musturbation”
Coined by the influential psychologist Albert Ellis in the 1960s, Musturbation is his term for the human tendency to hold rigid, absolute, and irrational demands on ourselves, others, and the world—using words like “must,” “should,” and “ought.”
In the context of our post-QBR frustration, the “Musts” are likely manifesting as:
Your Internal Must: “They must execute on these initiatives without me having to chase them, because they agreed.”
Their Potential Internal Musts: “I must focus on my daily urgent tasks first,” or “This initiative must be perfect before I show anyone the progress.”
The Leadership Lesson: Stop Musturbating, Start Facilitating
The moment we believe our team “must” behave in a certain way, we replace clear, flexible facilitation with rigid, frustrated demands. We assume that agreement in a meeting translates directly into smooth, effortless execution, but that is rarely the reality in complex work environments.
Instead of operating from a place of frustration (“They must do this!”), leadership needs to:
Acknowledge the Obstacles: People return to a whirlwind of existing demands. The quarterly initiative is often a “should-do” competing with daily “must-do’s.”
Translate Agreement into Action Systems: Did you define the first next step? The accountability mechanism? The weekly check-in?
Replace Demands with Preferences: Shift your thinking from: “They must do this for the company to succeed.” (Rigid, frustrating) TO “I strongly prefer they do this, so what flexible system can I put in place to help them succeed?” (Flexible, empowering)
If you’re tired of pushing, stop assuming the “must” and start designing the system that enables success.
What is the most common “Must” you hear (or think) in your leadership meetings?
In many leadership workshops, we introduce a simple idea that quickly becomes a powerful lens: the idea of the line.
Above the line, we are open, curious, and ready to learn. Below the line, we are closed, protective, and trying to get through the moment.
It is easy to assume that one is good and the other is bad. But that is not the point at all. The point is simply to notice.
There is something almost like a leadership version of the Heisenberg principle. We cannot predict with certainty whether someone will be above or below the line in a specific situation. We can guess. We can know habits, patterns, preferences. But we cannot know for sure.
A difficult conversation, a stressful deadline, a sense of threat, a flash of insecurity, an unexpected constraint. Anyone can drop below the line. Likewise, the right environment, a supportive colleague, or a moment of clarity can shift someone above the line just as quickly.
There is no moral judgment in this. There is only awareness.
A big part of what pulls us below the line is our relationship with pain and uncertainty. Uncertainty carries the possibility of discomfort, disappointment, or loss, so our first instinct is often to avoid it. We try to control it, fix it, or eliminate it. This creates a kind of tension inside. We are not reacting to what is actually happening. We are reacting to the possibility of pain.
That is why uncertainty can feel like a wave we want no part of. If we are below the line, the wave seems unpredictable and dangerous. We brace. We contract. We try to make the wave smaller or make ourselves smaller. The energy becomes something to resist.
But above the line, uncertainty takes on a different meaning. Surfers know this well. A wave is not an enemy. It is a source of movement and energy. It is something to ride, not something to fear. When we stop trying to protect ourselves and start being willing to learn, the same uncertainty becomes possibility. It becomes play instead of pressure.
My friend John Poelstra, an executive coach based on the US West Coast whom I highly recommend, once offered a metaphor that may be even more helpful than surfing: dancing. Surfing is an individual sport. Dancing requires relationship. It requires sensing another person, adjusting moment by moment, and sharing leadership.
In a dance, the question is not Who is above or below the line?
The real question is How do we move together, given where each of us is right now?
Dancing works only when there is responsiveness. And responsiveness begins with noticing.
In teams, just like in dance, we cannot control whether people are above or below the line. But we can cultivate shared awareness. We can normalize the idea that both states are human. We can learn to pause. To breathe. To reconnect with intention instead of fear.
Above the line is not a superior state. Below the line is not a failure. Both are part of being human. The shift comes from recognizing where we are and choosing how we want to engage with the wave in front of us.
As you think about your week ahead, here are a few questions to explore:
What signals tell you that you are dropping below the line?What helps you return above the line without forcing it?How do you react when someone else is below the line?What would change if you stopped trying to avoid pain and started working with uncertainty instead of fighting it?
Andreas Treichl, Chairman of the Supervisory Board, ERSTE Foundation
The discussion revolved around one essential tension that leaders face today. When should a leader simply focus on running the business, and when should they take a public position on broader social and political issues?
What struck me during this conversation is how deeply connected this question is with the polarity between the short term and the long term. It is not a problem with a single right answer. It is a polarity to manage carefully and continuously.
The world today pushes leaders toward the short term. Shareholder pressure. Quarterly expectations. Electoral cycles. Social media outrage. Geopolitical shocks.
Yet almost every speaker insisted that leadership requires something very different. It requires seeing beyond the urgency of the moment.
Tom Tugendhat said it clearly. Politics often operates on very short time horizons. Electoral cycles and media storms pull elected leaders into the daily fight. But business has the opportunity, and even the responsibility, to bring in long-term thinking. Decisions on energy, technology, rare earths, supply chains, and defense have consequences that unfold over decades. When business leaders focus only on the short term, society loses one of the few voices capable of thinking beyond the next three years.
Antonella Mei Pochtler added another dimension. Many global companies face situations where taking a stand is difficult, because they operate across countries that are in political conflict. What position should a company take when the United States and China oppose each other, and the company depends on both markets? Taking a stand might hurt the business. Not taking a stand may quietly support an authoritarian regime. This is a long-term dilemma: protect immediate business interests or defend values that ensure long-term legitimacy.
Andreas Treichl offered a complementary warning. In recent years, many companies, governments, and institutions pushed too fast on various ESG topics without bringing people along. The result was a backlash that played directly into the hands of populists. Progress that does not match the pace of public understanding eventually works against the long-term goals it tries to advance.
This brought the conversation back to a fundamental point. For a democratic society to function, people need to understand how their institutions work. And that includes their companies.
Several speakers argued that companies should be radically transparent with their employees. Explain how the company really makes money. Explain the pressures, the constraints, the trade-offs. Help people understand why they are paid what they are paid, and what decisions shape the future of the business.
When employees understand the inner workings of the company, they become less susceptible to manipulation from populists on the left or the right. They develop a deeper sense of agency and clarity. They can then participate more confidently in long-term decisions.
This is where the polarity of short term versus long term becomes visible inside organizations too. Short-term secrecy may simplify life for leaders who prefer not to explain everything. Long-term transparency is harder, but it builds understanding, resilience, and trust.
To help visualize this polarity, here is the polarity map for Short Term and Long Term.
The panel reminded me that next-era leadership is not only the capacity to take a stand. It is the capacity to take a stand while thinking across decades. It is resisting the pressure to react to every wave of anger or confusion, and instead building organizations where people understand, participate, and grow.
It is also refusing to be neutral when neutrality reinforces oppression. Some speakers insisted that not taking a stand against an authoritarian regime means silently supporting it. Others insisted that taking a stance could put thousands of employees or billions in revenue at risk. There is no simple answer. But the conversation made one thing clear. Silence is a choice. And choices shape the long-term world in which we all live.
This brings me back to the core idea of Emerging Leadership. It is the practice of creating systems where people take responsibility for both the next step and the next generation. It is the discipline of balancing urgency with vision. It is the courage to create organizations that serve society, not just the quarter.
As we close, here are the questions I invite you to reflect on this week:
Where in your leadership are you being pulled too strongly into the short term?Where should you be taking a longer view to serve your team, your organization, or society?What would more transparency inside your organization make possible?What stand would you take if you were not afraid of the immediate consequences?
Last week, I attended a fascinating panel at the Peter Drucker Forum: Real-World Lessons from Hierarchy-Busting Pioneers, chaired by Michele Zanini from the Management Lab.
The speakers were – Michael Lurie from Bayer – Michael Y. Lee from INSEAD – Kevin Nolan from GE Appliances, a Haier company – Karen Massey from argenx
All of them described how their organizations replaced traditional hierarchies with networks of small, cross-functional teams focused on delivering value to internal or external customers.
What impressed me is that these transformations work at scale. Haier and Bayer each have more than 100,000 employees. Both used to be very hierarchical. Both removed entire layers of management and replaced them with teams that are closer to the customer, faster in execution, and clearer in accountability.
Karen Massey brought an important nuance. She leads argenx, a younger company founded in 2008 that has grown to around 2,000 people. You might think starting from scratch makes it easier to avoid hierarchy. But as she explained, even when you start with a horizontal structure, the people you hire still carry the mindset of hierarchy with them. They need help to understand and value horizontal relationships instead of vertical ones.
Working with teams, I often hear that the real problems come from the levels above them. Speaking with senior leaders, I often hear that they truly want change but feel blocked by the structure, the expectations, and the perks associated with climbing the ladder. It becomes clear that the hierarchical ladder has its own way of protecting itself.
Which leads to one conclusion. If you want to change the way an organization works, you may need to remove the ladder completely.
When people no longer look up or down, they start to look across. This is where collaboration, learning, and accountability start to emerge naturally.
Here is the question I leave you with this week:
In your organization, which part of the ladder could you remove to make space for genuine collaboration?
Many organizations struggle to find the right balance between giving people freedom and keeping things under control. They often try to fix a “trust problem” with more control, or fix a “control problem” with more trust.
But these are not opposites to be solved. They are a polarity to be managed.
In Polarity Management, Barry Johnson showed that many tensions in leadership, such as trust versus control, stability versus change, or individual versus collective, are not problems with one right answer. They are ongoing dynamics that must be balanced over time.
When we overuse control, we get bureaucracy, fear, and disengagement. When we overuse trust, we get chaos, inconsistency, and uneven performance. Yet when we balance the two, we create clarity and empowerment, high standards and high commitment.
A perfect example of an organizational model that overuses control is Taylorism. It was built on the belief that people could not be trusted to think, only to execute. Managers designed the work, workers performed it. Efficiency improved for a while, but curiosity, initiative, and humanity were left behind.
Now imagine instead a Michelin-starred restaurant. Every detail is thought through carefully. Standards are sky-high. Yet everyone, from the chef to the dishwasher, plays an active role in maintaining those standards. Trust and control coexist. Precision and creativity reinforce each other.
That is the sweet spot of emerging leadership. It is not about choosing trust over control. It is about creating systems where trust enables control, and control protects trust.
In your team, where might you be overusing one side of this polarity? And what small shift could bring you closer to that Michelin balance: high standards, high trust, and collective excellence?
In busy weeks filled with meetings, decisions, and endless messages, it is easy to lose sight of what drives us. Sometimes we move from one task to another without noticing whether we are acting out of obligation or out of genuine choice. This quick reflection can help leaders and teams reconnect with what truly matters.
Take a piece of paper. Draw a horizontal line across it.
Now think back over your past week.
Each time you did something because you had to, make a small mark below the line. Each time you did something because you wanted to, make a small mark above the line.
Pause. Look at your page. What does your week look like?
This simple exercise can reveal a lot. It shows the balance between obligation and intention, between compliance and choice. A week filled mostly with marks below the line might feel heavy, reactive, or constrained. A week with marks above the line often feels lighter, creative, and purposeful.
Now ask yourself:
Are there any “below the line” activities that could move above the line if I changed how I look at them? For example, a difficult meeting you “had to” attend could become something you “want to” do if you saw it as an opportunity to learn, to build trust, or to clarify direction.
Then, take the reflection one step further:
What might the week of my colleagues in the leadership team look like? What would happen if we shared our drawings and compared perspectives? What would we learn about where our collective energy goes?
And finally:
What might the week of the people in our organization look like? Are we, as leaders, unconsciously pushing work “below the line,” assigning tasks that feel like obligations? Or are we creating the conditions for people to want to do work that truly matters to the organization?
This simple drawing can open a deep conversation about motivation, meaning, and the space between “have to” and “want to.”
And that space, as Viktor Frankl reminded us, is where our freedom (and our leadership) begin.
We often talk about values as if they were things we already have. We list them in presentations, print them on posters, or mention them when asked about what matters most to us. But if we look closer, our real values show up in what we do, especially when no one is watching.
In The Happiness Trap, Russ Harris reminds us that values are not goals or traits, but directions. They are not achievements to check off, but aspirations that guide how we live, lead, and make decisions.
He offers a long list of possible values to help us reflect on who we want to be in different areas of life. Here are a few examples that often resonate with leaders and teams:
Authentic – being genuine, real, and true to myself
Courageous – persisting in the face of fear, threat, or risk
Curious – being open-minded and willing to explore and discover
Kind – being considerate and caring toward myself and others
Mindful – fully present and engaged in what I am doing
Responsible – being trustworthy, reliable, and accountable for my actions
Supportive – being helpful and encouraging toward others
And this is only a glimpse. Harris’s complete list contains 36 values, including accepting, adventurous, assertive, caring, compassionate, cooperative, creative, forgiving, grateful, helpful, honest, independent, industrious, loving, open, persistent, playful, protective, respectful, skillful, trustworthy, and many more.
When you read through them, which words describe how you want to show up in your work and life? Which reflect the person you want to become?
Values are aspirational by nature. We never fully arrive. And that is the point.
Benjamin Franklin understood this very well. At the age of 20, he designed a personal system of 13 virtues to guide his growth:
Temperance – Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
Silence – Speak only what may benefit others or yourself.
Order – Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
Resolution – Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
Frugality – Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; waste nothing.
Industry – Lose no time; be always employed in something useful.
Sincerity – Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and if you speak, speak accordingly.
Justice – Wrong none by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
Moderation – Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries as much as you think they deserve.
Cleanliness – Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.
Tranquility – Be not disturbed at trifles or at accidents common or unavoidable.
Chastity – Use physical pleasure with care for health and peace of mind.
Humility – Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
Franklin’s system gave him the chance to practice each virtue four times per year. Every week, he focused on one of them, tracking his progress in a small notebook. He did not expect perfection; he practiced awareness. He later wrote that although he never achieved all his ideals, he became “a better and happier man than I otherwise should have been.”
Maybe that is the heart of living our values: not perfection, but practice. Not claiming them, but embodying them, one choice at a time.
So here is a small exercise for this month: 👉 Pick one value that matters to you. 👉 Notice how it shows up (or doesn’t) in your day. 👉 Ask yourself: What would it look like to live one step closer to that value today?
We often talk about leadership as if it’s a role, something that begins when you’re promoted or when your title changes.
But the truth is, leadership is a collective capacity, not a position. It’s something we build together, moment by moment, through how we show up, communicate, and make decisions.
This month, I’d like to explore a few simple ways to practice leadership wherever you are, drawn from the conversations I’ve had with inspiring guests on Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership.
1. Lead by Clarity and Care
In my discussion with Russ Laraway, author of When They Win, You Win, we talked about how great leadership is measurable. It shows up in clear direction, thoughtful coaching, and meaningful career conversations. Russ’s advice was simple: set clear expectations, offer real feedback, and invest in people’s growth.
Try this: Pick one person this week and ask, “What’s one thing I could do to better support your success?” Then act on what you hear.
2. Build Trust by Talking About How You Talk
With Jeffrey Fredrick, co-author of Agile Conversations with Douglas Squirrel, we explored the idea that every problem in an organization is ultimately a conversation problem. Jeffrey shared that high-trust teams don’t just talk about what they’re doing; they talk about how they talk. They examine their assumptions, make their reasoning visible, and invite challenge.
Try this: In your next meeting, pause to ask, “What assumptions might we be making here?” or “Is there something we’re not saying?”
You might be surprised how quickly this opens up honesty and alignment.
3. Empower the People Closest to the Work
In my conversation with Maria Bracho, CTO for LATAM at Red Hat, she shared that the most effective leaders are those who trust their teams to make decisions. Her insight was clear: People closer to the work usually know best what needs to happen. The leader’s role is to create the conditions for them to act.
Try this: Instead of giving solutions, ask: “What do you think we should do?” Then, genuinely listen.
Empowerment is not a slogan; it’s a daily choice to let others lead.
4. Make Change Feel Possible, One Step at a Time
When I spoke with Tamar Bergovici, VP of Engineering at Box, she described how real transformation doesn’t come from big speeches, it comes from small, consistent actions that build trust and momentum.
Try this: Choose one thing your team has been struggling with. Instead of planning a massive fix, take one visible step forward this week. Then, celebrate it.
And if your favorite platform isn’t on the list, just let me know, I’ll be glad to add it.
I’d love for you to join me there! See you in your earbuds!
Before closing, a quick update! This month, I’ll be in Vienna, delivering the opening keynote at a private client event, while Isabel will deliver the opening keynote for Agile Tour Bordeaux. These talks mark the beginning of a new season, with fresh insights drawn from our upcoming book, set for release next year. If you’re organizing a public or private event and would like us to bring these ideas to your audience, we’d be delighted to join you.
Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs, are simple in form and powerful in practice. Used well, they connect vision to execution, align teams on outcomes instead of outputs, and create a learning cadence that compounds over time. Used poorly, they become a quarterly spreadsheet that encourages busywork and sandbagging.
This edition is a practical guide to OKRs you can trust. Along the way, I will reference three favorite conversations from Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership: Christina Wodtke on Radical Focus, Radhika Dutt on Radical Product Thinking, and Gojko Adzic on Impact Mapping.
1) OKRs in one page
Objective A short, qualitative statement that inspires focus for the next cycle. Think of it as a mission for a quarter. Christina’s reminder: the Objective should be meaningful enough that people care, and specific enough that people can act.
Key Results Three to four measurable indicators that show you are achieving the Objective. They describe evidence of change, not tasks. Christina’s warning: avoid the seduction of the task. If a KR reads like a to-do, rewrite it as a result you expect to see.
Cadence Weekly check-ins on progress and learning, a monthly regroup on what is helping or hindering, and an end-of-cycle retrospective. Christina’s emphasis: cadence is what turns OKRs from set-and-forget goals into organizational learning.
2) From outputs to outcomes
A common failure mode is to treat OKRs as a dressed-up backlog. You see KRs like “launch feature X” or “install CRM.” Those are outputs. Great KRs answer “what will be different if we succeed.”
Rewrite example
Weak KR: “Install a new CRM.”
Strong KR: “Increase returning customer purchases by 20 percent.” Now you can ask whether a CRM is the best lever or if there is a better path to the same outcome.
Christina’s lens: OKRs unite people who love numbers with people who love meaning. Objectives hold the story. Key Results tell us how we will know the story is becoming true.
3) Strategy first, then OKRs
OKRs do not replace strategy. They operationalize it. Radhika’s contribution: treat execution as hypotheses derived from strategy, not as pass or fail exams. Her RDCL strategy mnemonic is a useful checklist:
Real pain points that bring users to you
Design choices that solve those pains
Capabilities that power the solution
Logistics that deliver and sustain it
Write KRs that test RDCL For each element, ask: what do we believe, how will we know, and what will we do next if we are wrong. That turns KRs into evidence, not vanity metrics.
Radhika’s insight on tradeoffs: be explicit about vision vs survival. Sometimes you incur vision debt to win a deal. Name it. Add a short survival statement so teams understand the tradeoff without losing faith in the long term.
4) Creating OKRs with Impact Mapping
If OKRs are the scoreboard, Impact Mapping is how you design the game plan. Gojko’s idea: map the chain from business goal to the actors who can help or hinder it, the impacts you want in their behavior, and the deliverables that might enable those impacts.
Mini impact map template
Goal: what business outcome matters now
Actors: customers, partners, internal roles that influence the outcome
Impacts: specific behavior changes you want from each actor
Deliverables: initiatives or features that could enable those changes
Then write OKRs from the map
Objective: restate the Goal in plain language
Key Results: quantify the desired Impacts
Initiatives: select Deliverables as bets to test this cycle
This keeps OKRs laser-aligned with real behavior change rather than a pile of tasks.
5) How to write great OKRs
A simple checklist
One objective that matters now If you have three, you probably have none.
Three to four key results Each KR is a measurable outcome, not an activity.
Clear baseline and target Everyone should know today’s number and the ambition for the cycle.
Explicit assumptions Note the hypotheses you are testing so you can decide faster next time.
Weekly learning ritual What did we try, what moved, what will we try next.
Ownership without individualization Teams own OKRs. Use OKRs to develop the product and the system, not to grade people. Christina and Radhika agree: tying individual compensation to OKRs distorts behavior and kills learning.
A quick example
Objective: Make it effortless for first-time users to get value in 10 minutes.
Key Results
First session completion rate rises from 38 percent to 60 percent.
Time to first successful action falls from 12 minutes to 7 minutes.
Trial to paid conversion within 14 days increases from 8 percent to 12 percent.
Initiatives Guided setup, new sample data, contextual tips.
Hypotheses Sample data reduces blank-page anxiety. Guided setup reduces errors.
Review cadence Weekly metrics review and experiment stand-up, end-of-cycle retro.
6) Common traps and how to avoid them
Task KRs Replace to-dos with evidence of user or business change.
Too many goals Pick one objective. Park the rest.
Cascading paralysis In large orgs, align instead of cascade. Company sets the north star. Teams propose their contribution.
Command and control OKRs thrive in empowered cultures. In top-down environments, they turn into pressure targets that invite gaming.
Set and forget No weekly learning, no OKRs. Cadence is the engine.
7) Culture is the multiplier
Radhika’s culture model: map work along two axes, fulfilling vs not, urgent vs not. Aim to maximize fulfilling and non-urgent work, and reduce the other quadrants like heroics and busywork. OKRs can help by removing noise and focusing attention, but only if leaders protect time for thinking, learning, and steady progress.
Christina’s team lens: great OKRs live inside teams with clear goals, roles, and norms. If feedback is avoided or roles are fuzzy, OKRs will surface conflict rather than resolve it.
Gojko’s product lens: if the behavior change is unclear, you do not have an OKR problem, you have a strategy and product problem. Go back to the impact map.
8) Try this with your team next week
Draft a one-line Objective that everyone understands.
List five candidate Key Results. Keep three that reflect behavior change.
Sketch a quick impact map. Confirm which actor behaviors your KRs reflect.
Write two explicit hypotheses. Decide how you will know within two weeks.
Put 30 minutes on the calendar every Friday for progress and learning. Celebrate movement, not perfection.
If you want to go deeper, listen to these episodes of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership while you refine your next cycle
This month, let’s tackle a common yet challenging topic many leaders and teams face: handling difficult personalities at work. Specifically, what to do when someone frequently seems defensive, overly critical, or constantly “on the attack,” making collaboration challenging for everyone involved.
Understanding Difficult Behavior
It’s also valuable to reflect on why certain behaviors trigger us strongly. Often, the traits we find most challenging in others are characteristics we dislike or struggle with in ourselves. Recognizing this can help us respond with greater empathy and self-awareness.
When encountering difficult behaviors, it’s easy to slip into unhelpful patterns, feeling like a victim, hoping the manager will step in, or wishing the individual will simply change or leave. These responses often lead to frustration and resentment, impacting both your well-being and team productivity.
Instead, let’s explore practical ways to manage interactions constructively, maintain your composure, and foster healthier team dynamics.
Effective Strategies for Managing Difficult Interactions:
Stay Calm and Objective: When someone is defensive or critical, emotional reactions often escalate the issue. Aim to remain composed and focused on facts, rather than taking it personally.
Seek to Understand: Difficult behavior often stems from underlying concerns or fears. Engage by asking genuine, open-ended questions to better understand their perspective.
Set Clear Boundaries: Be respectful yet firm in communicating acceptable behaviors and interactions. If someone crosses boundaries, address it directly and calmly.
Model the Behavior You Want to See: Responding constructively, even when facing criticism, sets a positive example for your entire team.
Focus on Solutions, Not Blame: Redirect negative energy towards collaborative problem-solving. Clearly emphasize shared goals and outcomes rather than individual faults.
Empower Yourself and Your Team: Avoid falling into a victim mindset. Instead, focus on what is within your control. Strengthen team collaboration and resilience by openly discussing and reinforcing positive practices.
Reflection and Action:
Reflect: How do your reactions impact these difficult interactions?
Act: Pick one strategy from above to apply this week. Notice what changes in yourself, the other person, and the overall team dynamic.
Remember, while you can’t control others’ behaviors, you always have the power to choose your own responses.
Small ones. Big ones. Technical ones. Strategic ones.
And yet, in many organizations, those decisions are made with very limited exposure to real customers.
In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I spoke with Teresa Torres, product discovery coach and author of Continuous Discovery Habits, about what it truly means to embed customer discovery into everyday product work.
This conversation goes far beyond techniques. It challenges how teams learn, how leaders lead, and how organizations adapt in an increasingly unpredictable world.
From expert intuition to shared mental models
Teresa’s journey toward Continuous Discovery Habits began with a simple but unsettling realization.
After years of coaching product teams, one team told her:
“We love working with you — but we’re afraid we won’t know what to do when you’re gone.”
That moment sparked a deep reflection: What do experienced product leaders hold in their heads that others don’t?
The answer led to the creation of the Opportunity Solution Tree, a simple visual model that helps teams:
Externalize what they’re learning about customers
See whether their opportunity space is rich or shallow
Stay anchored on outcomes while exploring solutions
Rather than relying on expert intuition, teams can now build and share a mental model of their customer.
Continuous discovery is a habit, not a phase
One of Teresa’s strongest messages is this:
Continuous discovery is not about doing more research. It’s about changing the rhythm of learning.
Talking to customers once a quarter is better than never. Talking to customers once a month is better than once a quarter. But weekly conversations fundamentally change how teams think.
Why?
Because teams make decisions every day.
The goal isn’t to validate every decision with a customer. The goal is to build a mental model that matches how customers think, so everyday decisions naturally align with real needs.
The Product Trio and the end of clean role boundaries
Teresa popularized the concept of the Product Trio: Product, Design, and Engineering working together from the very beginning.
What stood out in this conversation is how much this model is evolving.
With Generative AI:
Engineers are shaping product decisions through feasibility constraints
Designers are engaging deeply in discovery and sense-making
Product managers are increasingly required to understand technical evaluation, quality, and trade-offs
The clean boundaries between roles are fading.
And that’s uncomfortable.
But Teresa sees this as an opportunity: Teams that embrace cross-functional collaboration and shared ownership will move faster and learn better.
Opportunity Solution Trees in practice
The Opportunity Solution Tree helps teams navigate the messiness of outcome-driven work.
Instead of reacting to:
the loudest stakeholder
the most recent customer complaint
the shiniest new technology
Teams:
Start with a clear outcome
Map customer opportunities based on real stories
Decide where to play strategically
Explore and test solutions intentionally
This structure reduces overwhelm and helps teams stay focused while still embracing uncertainty.
Leadership in an unpredictable world
Teresa connects continuous discovery to a broader leadership shift.
COVID. Generative AI. Geopolitical instability.
The illusion of predictability is gone.
Yet many organizations still operate with:
fixed annual roadmaps
long-term project commitments
output-driven management
Teresa argues that leaders must:
Accept ambiguity
Shift from control to trust
Enable learning rather than demand certainty
This doesn’t happen through big transformations. It happens through small habit changes, starting with ourselves.
“Organizational change doesn’t start with convincing others. It starts with changing how you work.”
What Teresa is exploring now
Today, Teresa is deeply engaged in exploring how Generative AI changes product discovery and product management:
AI prototyping in discovery
Evaluating non-deterministic products
Evolving product roles and collaboration models
She is actively sharing these learnings on Product Talk, continuing her long-standing mission: helping teams make better decisions by learning faster.
A closing question
If your team had a clearer, shared mental model of its customers…
What decisions would you make differently tomorrow?
Alexis: [00:00:00] Welcome to Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership. I’m your host, Alexis Morville. Today I’m excited to speak with Teresa Torres, author of the influential book Continuous Discovery Habits. Teresa helps product teams adopt habits that enable them to uncover customer insights continuously, ultimately building better product.
Through our blog producttalk.org and extensive coaching Teresa has reshaped how companies think about product management and customer discovery. In today’s conversation, we’ll explore how teams can integrate discovery into their daily routines, make more informed decisions, and consistently create valuable outcomes for their customers.
Welcome Teresa! How do you typically [00:01:00] introduce yourself to someone you just met?
Teresa: Ah, that’s a great question. As far as from a work standpoint, it’s always a little bit of a challenge. There’s a lot of jargon in our industry. So for the folks that are familiar with Discovery, I, I introduce myself as a product discovery coach.
For folks that are not familiar with those terms, which is quite a few of us, I say that I help teams that are building digital products make better decisions about what to build.
Alexis: Okay. I really like that. So how did your journey led you to write the book?
Teresa: Yeah, this is a big one. It took a long time for me to write the book.
People ask me like, how did your book do so well? And I say, well, I let demand build up for a really long time. And it wasn’t intentional. So. It really goes back to 2016. So in 2016, I was several years into working as a discovery coach. I’ve been working with [00:02:00] dozens of teams, really just looking at like, how do they build fast feedback loops as they make decisions about what to build.
So are they interviewing customers? They testing their ideas. And I mentioned 2016 because I was working with a team. And they said, they came to their coaching session and they said, Theresa, we really love our sessions, but we’re afraid we won’t know what to do when you’re not here. That like really landed with me because here’s the thing, I decided to work as a coach and not a consultant because I want to leave people better off.
I wanna empower people to do this on their own. I didn’t wanna build a dependency. So this feedback from this team was a little bit gut wrenching for me. And I sat down and I started to think about like how am I making decisions about what to do next in discovery? And this was not the first time I like had this thought for probably.
Five or six years prior to this, especially working with engineers and working with product teams. [00:03:00] Trying to think about like, what do I hold in my head that my peers don’t? That’s like keeping us from being aligned. And around this same time I was reading Andrew’s Erickson’s book Peak, which is all about expertise and deliberate practice and what distinguishes experts from novices.
And one of the ideas in the book is this idea of experts have. Mental representations that are different from what novices have. And this was exactly the insight I needed. I was like, okay, what is the mental representation I have in my head about discovery that the teams that I’m coaching don’t? And that’s what led to the Opportunity Solution Tree.
So for listeners who aren’t familiar with this, and Opportunity Solution Tree is just a really simple visual decision tree where the team’s outcome is at the top. As they talk to customers, they learn about customer needs, paint points and desires. Those are opportunities. They literally map them on the tree and then they’re looking for what solutions match [00:04:00] one-to-one to those opportunities.
And so it’s really simple, but what it does is it gives you a visual cue for like, do I know enough about my customer? Does my opportunity space look rich and detailed? Am I actually working on a solution that solves someone’s problem in a way that drives their outcome? Mm-hmm. So it was in, I think, August of 2016, I introduced this visual to this team for the first time.
And it had a huge impact right away, like right away. And I was like, oh, this is a thing. Like I’m a product person. I know that things don’t have a huge impact right away. And so when it did, I was like, there’s something here. This is my very long way of answering your question, which is I start, I was like, I have to write a book about this.
Alexis: Right?
Teresa: And I started trying to write that book in 2016. But I struggled because books are waterfall. You write the whole book and you release it in hopes people like it. And I refuse to operate that way. And so it took me several years to figure out like, how do I test the [00:05:00] content in the book? How do I know that it’s gonna be good?
How do I know that it’s gonna be actionable? And so I spent several years. Taking all my discovery knowledge, codifying it into online courses, watching students engage with it in both my coaching practice and in my online courses. And then once I felt like it was clear enough and good enough, I wrote the book.
Alexis: Ah, excellent, excellent. This is very interesting because I’ve heard a lot of people saying, oh yeah, we, we build up a training course because the book was successful, so people want, wanted to buy training from us. Yeah. Okay.
Teresa: I went the other way around because I needed a feedback loop. I needed to know what was clear, what was confusing, where did people get stuck, and then I think it really comes out in the book, like every chapter.
Ends with anti-patterns, like those came from real coaching sessions and real course students. All the activities in the book are things we do in our courses. So they’ve been vetted and tested with, I mean, at this point, hundreds of teams. So maybe the real [00:06:00] answer to how did the book do so well is that I tested all of the content like crazy, but I will say like in 2016, I said I was gonna write a book.
And so for. Five years, people said, where’s your book? Yeah. And I’ve learned to not put timelines on things, so they had to just keep waiting.
Alexis: Yeah. That’s, uh, that’s good. That would’ve been, uh, terrible to have a, a kind of a deadline that forces you to publish something that, uh, that’s not good. Early on, you introduced the idea of the, the product, and could you.
Why this T prioritization tool and how those roles effectively collaborate.
Teresa: You know what’s funny is that I didn’t create this idea, like this idea has been around for a long time. In the agile world. They often talked about the three-legged stool or the three amigos. I think the reason why people attribute this idea to me, I did include it in the book, but I also just gave it simple language.
So I heard a lot of people talking about like triads, [00:07:00] and I remember the first time I heard that word. I was like, what’s a triad? And so I called it a product trio, and that’s because I just really think that language matters. I mean, I’ve introduced my own terrible language. The Opportunity Solution Tree is a terrible name.
So like, I’m not critical of this, but like I tried really hard with this idea of a product trio to just simplify the language. And I think it has helped because it’s now a much more popular and much more common idea. It’s this idea of how do we cross-functionally collaborate from the very beginning?
And it sounds so simple, but in business we’re really bad at cross-functional collaboration and we see it up and down the organization. It’s why like so many executive teams are dysfunctional. ’cause we don’t know how to cross-functionally collaborate in a lot of ways. Business culture rewards us for staying in our silo and like being territorial.
I think we have enough years of experience now, like across the industry to recognize that if we’re gonna build a good digital product that’s always [00:08:00] evolving and always improving and always getting better. It really does take a cross-functional mindset. So we need to keep. Business perspective and viability in mind.
We need to keep the customer of course, in mind. And how do we make it delightful for the customer? And how do we make it usable for the customer? And how do we make sure that we’re building something that satisfies a real need and not just like an aspirational need. It has to be feasible. And you know, for a long time on the internet, feasible was easy.
We were just building crud apps, people aren’t familiar with that term. It’s just like things where you create and update things and delete things like it’s not. Really simple like. Webpages are just front ends to databases. Like there wasn’t a lot of feasibility complexity. Well, today we’re seeing a lot of that change because generative AI is forcing a lot of teams to debate and discuss what’s feasible with this new technology.
And so we can define this as roles like for most companies, a typical product trio is a product manager, a [00:09:00] designer, and a software engineer. But it’s not that clean. And actually, I think generative AI is. Is making this even messier. We have a lot of designers that have a good human-centered like research background, and they want to be involved in the decisions about what to build.
We have a lot of product managers that have MBAs and maybe they’re weak on the usability or the desirability side, but they’re really strong on the viability side. We have a lot of product managers that are the complete opposite. Maybe they came from a UX background, maybe they’re just grew up in a consumer product world and they’ve never had to think about viability.
We see the same with engineers. Everybody has worked with that engineer that just had a really good intuitive product mindset where a lot of our front eng engineers have good design skills. So I think like it’s easy to think about this as fixed roles, but I think the underlying principle is we need a wide variety of skills.
To build a successful product. How do we get the right people in the room to make sure [00:10:00] all those skills and perspectives are represented? And so what we used to do is we used to silo it, right? The product manager wrote requirements. It got handed to the designer who did the design work. It all got handed to the engineer.
And the problem with this is there was a ton of rework. By the time it gets to the engineer, they’re like, this isn’t feasible. And we have to start over and start. It’s like the assembly line gets reset. Whereas I think when we see these roles working together from the beginning, we get much better solutions and we get ’em faster.
It’s kind of counterintuitive.
Alexis: So what are the common challenges team face when adopting the continuous discovery habit?
Teresa: How long do we have? I mean, since we were just talking about team collaboration, I’m gonna say this is a big one. Like of course we all wanna be on a team and we’re gonna work together.
It’s really hard. We’ve been trained to be territorial. Generative AI is gonna make this worse. I’ve been building my first, I. Generative AI [00:11:00] product and it’s, I’m starting to learn myself about like, what does it take to make these products good? So I’m starting for people familiar with this process. I’m starting to get into the world of like evals and guardrails and like how do we evaluate.
The success of a non-deterministic product. And that’s a very, that’s a challenging question. And this is all like frontier. We’re all figuring it out together.
Alexis: Mm-hmm.
Teresa: Well, it turns out like the methods that are starting to arise to evaluate these tools are like required domain expertise that your product manager or your designer, or even your business stakeholders might have.
And it requires engineering expertise to like know what’s possible with code and how to code up these automated evaluations. And it requires like a continuous process of both. And there’s a lot of conversations in this space around who does what, does the engineer do this part? Does the product manager do this part?
And it’s messy. And I think the answer is gonna be the person closest to the customer is gonna do one part. The [00:12:00] person that has the necessary engineering skills might do another part, but who that is from a role standpoint might change from team to team. Right. So like for myself personally, I’ve actually spanned all three roles.
I started out as an interaction designer and a front end web developer. I moved into product management. I spent most of my career as a product manager and a product leader. But in the last three years, I’ve moved back into coding, and in the last month as I’ve been building this AI product, I took this course on AI evals and I am doing the work of an AI engineer.
I just learned, like, I literally implemented my first set of automated evals. And I did it in a language I had never programmed in and I did it in a tool I had never used before and I did it all in one week. And the reason why that was possible is because chat GPT guided me through all of it.
Alexis: Yeah.
Teresa: So like these boundaries are blurring, like designers can now code and product managers can design, and engineers are gonna have to learn some design skills and some product management skills.
The product trio [00:13:00] concept, like the underlying principle, cross-functional collaboration stays, I don’t think it’s going anywhere. But these like really clean boundaries we have between our roles, they’re getting obliterated.
Alexis: Yeah.
Teresa: And that it’s hard for people. We identify with our jobs, designers identify as designers, product people identify as product people.
Engineers definitely identify as engineers and those identities are gonna get. Stretched and blurred and it’s gonna cause some discomfort for people. So I think that’s the first thing. I think like we already see this just with the discovery habits. Forget AI already with the Discovery habits.
Collaboration is hard.
Alexis: Mm-hmm.
Teresa: I think it’s gonna get a lot harder. It’s gonna get a lot blurrier and messier, but I actually think that makes it more fun. I like spanning boundaries. I think most people like spanning boundaries. I think there’s real organizational challenges, like our leaders have grown up in a world where they get to tell us what to do, and when we’re empowering our teams, they have to learn different ways to have oversight and management without.
[00:14:00] Dictating outputs. Um, I think that’s hard. Like leaders have to learn how to do that, and then product teams have to learn how to show their work so their leaders trust they’re making progress. That’s a huge barrier on both sides.
Alexis: Mm-hmm.
Teresa: Some companies think there’s a significant barrier in getting access to customers.
In my experience, this is more mental roadblocks. This is more like forms of resistance than it is tangible, real barriers to customers. And I’m gonna say that even in regulated industries. So all my folks working in regular, in, in regulated industries wanna say, we have all these rules. Those are just constraints.
It’s still possible. There are people in every industry doing this, but I would say those are the top three. Like how do we really work as a team? How does the leader team interaction change? And then how do we get over our mental resistance to actually talking to customers?
Alexis: It’s very interesting because while you were talking, I was thinking of a team I’m working with and, [00:15:00] uh.
They’re in a regulated industry in the healthcare industry, of course, and they have a a lot of good reasons for not being able to do things, which is very interesting because when you look really in details into it, you realize that maybe you can do a little bit more of that.
Teresa: You know, healthcare’s a great example.
So here in the US we have a law, hipaa. It’s our healthcare privacy law. Here’s the basis of the law. It says that if I tell you my doctor something. You can’t go share that with other people. Like it’s my privacy, like I have a right to privacy in the healthcare ecosystem.
Alexis: Mm-hmm.
Teresa: Okay. So now you’re a product manager working on a healthcare product.
That law doesn’t say, I can’t willingly share my healthcare experience with you. It doesn’t say that. That’s not what the law says. Right. But teams interpret it as we have to be HIPAA client, we’re not allowed to talk to our customers. And so a lot of this is like, yes, we have to understand our regional laws.
Yes, we have to understand our company policies. And especially [00:16:00] for a lot of HIPAA compliant companies, they have policies that say you can’t talk to customers ’cause they don’t wanna train them on the HIPAA requirements. So like those are constraints we have to work within, but it doesn’t mean somebody who’s willing to share their experience with you can’t share their experience with you.
I’ve never seen a law that restricted that yet.
Alexis: I have a questions about product managers who, who struggle to really understand the value of user experience of UX work, especially in that context of the discovery process. What are the misconceptions that you see there
Teresa: when it comes to ux? I actually see two extremes.
I think both are wrong. So one extreme is our engineers can just build it. We’re not reinventing the wheel. We have a design library. They can just throw together some components. We don’t need a designer on this. The other extreme is we need a designer on everything. Everything [00:17:00] needs to be delightful and perfect.
I actually think both are completely wrong. Like most things probably need a designer to at least glance at it. But we don’t need every single part of our product to be delightful. If that was our requirement, we probably would never ship a product. And we see this like look at the most design oriented company on the planet I’m gonna say is Apple.
Whether you like their design or not. Like they’re clearly a company committed to design.
Alexis: Mm-hmm.
Teresa: There are lots of parts of their website that are horrendous to use. This is true for any product. In fact, I get frustrated with my iPhone on a regular basis. This is true for any product. It is impossible to create a perfectly designed product.
Now, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aspire to that. What it means is that like we have to make prioritization decisions. What are the parts of the customer journey that are most important to get right? What are the moments in the journey where delight matters the most? Where can we just not reinvent the wheel and use a common pattern?
And [00:18:00] so I think. It’s, I see it with UXers in particular. We go to design school, we learn about the delightfulness of design and we admire these like beautiful products. And we take that and we try to apply it to everything. And like digital products have big footprints. They’re constantly changing. It’s just not realistic.
And then people that haven’t been exposed to this design world take it the other way around. Like I still meet companies that have 20 product managers and zero designers. And I’m like, how is this still happening? Right. And it’s ’cause they just have this belief of like, oh, it’s just colors on a website.
And I got a design palette. I paid a dis, a agency to gimme a design palette and my engineers can just apply it. Okay. Well you’re overlooking information architecture and interaction design and like all these other elements of design practice. And not to mention like your engineers probably don’t know how to design that.
Design palette, that color palette in a way that is good visual design. And so I think [00:19:00] it’s, especially if you read like the internet at all, social media in particular, like it’s really easy to think the world is these extremes. Whereas I think in almost everything, the right response is somewhere in the middle.
It’s much more nuanced.
Alexis: Yeah.
Teresa: But nuance doesn’t win on social media, so it’s not what we read about
Alexis: unfortunately. I would love that to be more nuanced. We would all learn in the process. You emphasize weekly customer interviews. Yeah. And uh, the first time I discussed that with, with the product team, they were puzzled.
They had in their mind really a process that seems radically different from that. Yeah. Too far away for them to even think about it. And, uh, the would do, it was also a concern, which. Kind of funny. So you have a, you have very strong opinion on that and I, I really love to hear what you have to say on that.
Teresa: Yeah. So first of all, let’s talk about why I recommend this, and we can get into how can teams [00:20:00] get there. So,
Alexis: yeah,
Teresa: the big thing here, for me, discovery is about if we wanna make good decisions about what to build, we have to get feedback on those decisions, right? Like. We have so many examples of products where the people that designed them or built them did not get feedback along the way, and they flopped.
Or maybe they didn’t flop, like maybe they had the right idea for a right moment and they took off, but they didn’t sustain. Clubhouse comes to mind, if you remember Clubhouse. Like the beginning of the pandemic, it was this like audio go in a room chat with people. It was wildly popular for like three months and then it just petered out.
Right? Yeah. We see a lot of products like this and I think some early success can sometimes be problematic, right? Like where we don’t get over the crossing the chasm hump, we don’t get past the early adopters, and so we gotta be really careful about who are we designing for? Who are we building for? What are their needs and how many [00:21:00] people out there are like those people, right?
So this is starting with the ideal customer profile, really understanding the market size, really digging in and understanding what are the needs that they care about, and are we adequately solving those needs? And that’s like the big picture. That’s like the strategic stuff. But then, okay, so we’ve identified there’s this need, I’m gonna stick with Clubhouse is my example.
Like people are all stuck at home and they wanna connect with other people. Okay, great. That is a real need. And in that moment it definitely was a real need. But now we need to get into like, okay, as we build this product, we have daily decisions about how it should work. How do we promote what’s happening in a room?
Who’s allowed to come in? How many people are allowed to talk at the same time? What happens when people say offensive things? How are we gonna handle that? All these things that arise, we make millions of decisions like constantly. All day long. Everybody on your product team is making decisions. Where’s the feedback loop for all those decisions?
And when I say feedback loop, I don’t mean like. [00:22:00] I can’t change this one line of code until I get feedback from a customer. I mean, we need to have constant exposure to who we’re building for to make sure all these teeny tiny decisions work for them. And if we don’t have that constant exposure, we’re just like in a dark room looking for a teeny, tiny thing on the floor.
Like we’re lucky if we find it. And so the why behind this is the more we talk to our customers, the more we engage with them, the more exposure we have to them, the more likely these teeny tiny decisions are gonna work for them. And so if I talk to a customer once a month, that’s better than never.
Alexis: Mm-hmm.
Teresa: But I’m making decisions all day, every day. So the more exposure I have, the more likely. Those all day everyday decisions are gonna fit. And here’s the thing. Too many teams use their customer interviews to walk in and say, Hey, here’s my shiny solution I’m working on. What do you think? That’s not the [00:23:00] purpose of these interviews.
When I say talk to your customers every week, it’s not go sell to your customer every week. It’s not Go show off your shiny object every week is go talk to your customer. And learn about their world. Who are they? What are they doing? What are their goals? What are the stories in which those, what are they doing?
Why? Collect those stories. Your goal is to understand your customer’s mental model of how they approach whatever it is they’re trying to accomplish. So if I work at Spotify, I’m gonna interview people about the role music plays in their life, when they listen to it, where they listen to it, how they listening to it, where they learn about new music.
And I’m gonna collect lots and lots of stories about how they engage with music. It’s not gonna tell me what product to build. It’s gonna tell me how my customer’s mental model of music works. Mm-hmm. And then my job is to make sure my product matches that mental model. And so all those hundreds of decisions I’m making every day have to be [00:24:00] consistent with that mental model.
If they’re not consistent. It’s not gonna work for my customer. So it’s not that I have to get feedback on every single decision that I make. It’s that I have to build a mental model that matches my customer’s mental model. And that mental model tells me how to make all those daily decisions
Alexis: that leads us to the, the how and who are doing.
Who are doing. Okay. So that’s
Teresa: the why. So let’s get into the how. What I tell people is we get to take a continuous improvement mindset to our own discovery habits. So if you’ve never talked to a customer, forget that I told you once a week, just go talk to one customer. Like just find the first person to talk to.
And I don’t mean like go join a sales call, I mean. Talk to a customer about their world, their goals, their context, their stories, not your product, their stories. Once you’ve done that, I want you to think about how do I talk to my second customer and then by the time you’ve talked to two or three, I don’t need to [00:25:00] convince you, you should do it more.
You’re already convinced you should do it more because so much magic happens in those first couple of conversations. So like, if you’ve like for people listening, if you’ve literally never talked to a customer about their world, so I don’t mean your product, I don’t mean a sales call, I don’t mean handling a support ticket.
I mean just literally talking to another human and being curious about how they do whatever your problem is, Des, whatever your product is designed to solve. That’s it. Just how do you do this thing after you get to two or three? Now you’re like, wow, this is mind blowingly amazing. And we need to start to think about how do we operationalize it?
So how do we do this on a regular basis? We have to create a continuous pipeline of people to talk to. I recommend people automate the recruiting process. I share tips on how to do this in the book. We also have a course on customer recruiting that shares five different strategies on how to automate your recruiting process with lots and lots of examples, and [00:26:00] then you have to learn how to ask the right questions.
So how do you make sure you’re getting reliable feedback? We teach a very simple interviewing format focused on collecting customer stories. The reason why I do that is I think any human on the planet can learn how to do it. It’s evidence-based, it’s grounded in good qualitative research practices and it’s, it solves this problem of like, how do I build a mental model that matches my customers?
Alexis: Mm-hmm.
Teresa: Right? So like it doesn’t answer every research question you might ever have. We probably still want researchers involved in like other types of research, but it allows a product team to close the gap. Like, how do I make sure the decisions I’m making every day match the mental model of my customer?
And then once you’ve. Sort of worked on your pipeline of interview participant problems. You’re starting to practice asking better interview questions. Now you can look at your cadence. If you’re talking to someone once a month, try to get to every three weeks. Then try to get to every two weeks. I use the [00:27:00] guideline of once a week.
I think that’s our minimum. We def like that. We wanna aspire to plenty of teams do multiple a week. Plenty of teams do every day.
Alexis: Yeah, and I assume that. Product managers and probably, uh, UX people would probably be comfortable discussing with customers or discussing with real users. Our engineers on the team would benefit from doing it.
Teresa: Yeah, I want every single person who’s involved building the product to at least be listening to the conversations. What you’re gonna find is the more people on your team listen to the conversations, the more they’re gonna wanna get involved in the conversations. But I think you can start with, you can have the person on your team who’s most comfortable conducting interviews, conduct the interview.
And have everybody else observe or watch the video afterwards, but not, not clips, not just read the transcript, not just read the notes, see the participant [00:28:00] share their story. And then I think with time it does make sense to have multiple people on the team comfortable conducting interviews. It just helps with the resiliency of the habit.
If you have a product manager who does all the interviews and then they leave the company, what happens to your team? They go on vacation, you go two weeks without anybody conducting interviews. They’re sick unexpectedly who’s gonna conduct today’s interview? So the more people comfortable with it, the more resilient the habit is.
But really I want everybody watching the interviews, including our engineers.
Alexis: Yeah. You can see that I’m trying to find, uh, the arguments to convince people that it’s very, very important. Yeah. And making decisions. Hopefully as, as a team, more often than not, and as we are involved in those decisions, having that mental model is critical.
Yeah. So that’s a, that’s an important one. You mentioned the opportunity Solution tree before. Really beautiful name. [00:29:00] Um, do you have a concrete example to walk us through what it is really, but with an example, not just saying us. What it’s.
Teresa: Yeah. So in the book, I use streaming entertainment as my example, and that’s because it’s available worldwide, like Netflix is everywhere.
We’re broadly familiar with it.
Alexis: Yeah.
Teresa: So let’s talk about a tree. The purpose of an Opportunity Solution Tree is to help you as a cross-functional team, drive an outcome and to stay aligned in your discovery work as you drive the outcome. So the challenge is when we shift from focusing on just building outputs to trying to impact a metrics, so driving an outcome.
It’s messy. We have a lot of false starts. We do a lot of things that don’t work. We do some things that do work. We learn a lot from our interviews. It can feel really overwhelming of what do we pay attention to? What do we not pay attention to? As we get into solutions, it’s really easy to fall pre to like shiny object syndrome and we end up working with solutions that don’t actually [00:30:00] match anything we heard in our interview.
It just was like a cool application and new technology. We’re seeing a lot of that right now. Right? So the goal with the Opportunity Solution Tree is like, how do we keep everybody aligned and how do we help them know what to do when? So when we, when a team is new to driving outcomes, what they don’t realize is the whole nature of their job changes.
So when we’re told to build a thing, it’s very deterministic. Like it’s very. Narrowly defined like, yes, there’s a lot of decisions to make about the requirements for that thing and how to implement it, and the underlying data model and those decisions all matter. I’m not trivializing them, but what to do has been clearly defined when you’re starting with an outcome.
What to do. It feels like a blank page problem. It feels like we could do a hundred thousand things. How are we gonna decide? It’s this very open-ended ill, ill-defined problem. What I recommend teams do is they start by interviewing customers. They’re collecting stories. One of the things they [00:31:00] hear in their stories is pain points, friction, unmet needs, des unsatisfied desires, right?
So as they collect stories, they’re hearing about things that they could help. Those are opportunities. And so the team maps out the opportunities and then they’re gonna choose a opportunity to solve. So let me give the example. Using Netflix, I’m starting with an outcome. An outcome represents a business need.
They’re typically derived from your revenue model. So Netflix is a subscription business. The types of outcomes they’re gonna care about acquiring more customers, increasing their average monthly spend. Increasing how long they stick around. So retention, lifetime value, right? Those are the primary drivers of what drives revenue for Netflix.
Now, each of those I can further deconstruct, like let’s say I have a team that’s focused on retention. Okay, well, what are the factors that drive retention? This is almost always tied to the value your product delivers. So what does Netflix deliver from a value [00:32:00] standpoint? Well, they entertain me. Okay, well, how do I know that you’re being entertained?
Well, you might watch Netflix more often, so maybe my outcome is to increase the average viewing minutes per week. Okay, that’s my outcome at the top of my tree Now. I am, this is, I’m new to this outcome. I don’t know why you watch Netflix or how you decide how much to watch, or what prevents you from watching more.
So I have to go interview customers, and as I interview customers, I’m gonna just collect their story. Tell me about the last time you watched Netflix, or tell me about the last time you watched tv. Maybe you’re watching a competitive service. And as I collect those stories, I’m gonna hear things like. It took 45 minutes to find a show that I might like, or my friend recommended this show and I’m checking it out, but I can’t tell if I’m gonna like it or not.
Or we might hear stories like, I’m in the middle of watching this TV series, but I can’t figure out how to get back to it. Or we might hear things [00:33:00] like, I was in a hotel on a really terrible wifi network and it took like seven minutes for the show to load. It paused 14 times during my 30 minute episode, and it was a really terrible experience.
This is what comes from real world stories. Mm-hmm. Right? So now I can collect those as opportunities on my tree and I, what I recommend is that people organize their opportunities based on steps in the journey. So the top level of the tree might be, I need to find something to watch. I wanna have a good viewing experience.
I don’t wanna stay up too late, so like I wanna go to bed on time. Right? And then under, I can’t find something to watch. I need to find something to watch. We might uncover all these pain points. Like I can’t find the show I was watching. I can’t tell if the show is good or not. I just finished my show.
Like I want a similar show. I wanna know who’s in this show. Right? These are all opportunities, just like what does your customer need to be able to find something to watch? And then around the viewing experience, like what do they need [00:34:00] for it to be a good viewing experience? Well, they don’t wanna wait for it to buffer forever, or they wanna be able to rewind quickly and find what they’re looking for or.
They need to be able to pause to go get another beer, like whatever it is, right? This is what emerges from real stories. So then we collect all these on this visual and we organize them based on steps in the journey. We structure ’em, some are, some are sub parts of others, and then we get to decide, like we’ve taken an inventory of what we’re hearing across our interviews, and now we can make a strategic decision, like where do we wanna play?
Which of these opportunities are most important for us to solve? And this sounds so obvious and trivial, but like what do most teams do? They’re reacting to the most recent conversation. They heard. Stakeholder pulls ’em into a customer conversation. Somebody has a pain point, they’re like, oh, hands on deck.
Let’s solve that right now.
Alexis: Mm-hmm.
Teresa: There’s, we’re missing this strategic decision about where do we wanna play? And the thing is, the opportunity space is infinite. Like there’s a [00:35:00] million. Needs and pain points and desires that are unmet. When we talk to customers, we really need to make the strategic decision of what differentiates us in the market, what supports our company’s strategic initiatives, like where do we wanna play?
We can’t do all of this stuff. And so that’s a lot of what we get with the Opportunity Solution Tree is it gives us a place to collect all that we’re hearing, and it helps with this like overwhelm. We’ve talked to so many customers, they have so many needs. Where do we play? Well, we filter based on our outcome.
We make that strategic decision about what has an impact for us as a team, and then we choose a small starting place and then that bounds the types of solutions we consider and then we test, is our proposed solution gonna actually address that opportunity in a way that’s gonna drive that outcome.
Alexis: And then we are able to experiment and, uh, and really test all our hypothesis.
I love it. Oh, thank you very much. That was, uh, perfect. Impressive. You mentioned the importance of [00:36:00] outcome and versus outputs and, uh, the roles of leaders in changing their language and or changing what they believe they have to do. Do you see other things about the roles of leaders? In that way, different ways of D, different way of working.
Teresa: Yeah. So the first thing I’ll say is we’ve seen three major world event, two major world events that everybody has been subject to and maybe and a third depending on where you live in the world. That I think is finally teaching organizations that we need to be outcome focused. So the first was COVID.
The entire world shut down very quickly. Everybody worked from home. The way we work changed suddenly. What does this mean? It means that you could look at your roadmap and you probably had to throw a lot of it away. You probably had to change a lot of it. If you were Zoom, you had to react to a huge new market opportunity.
If you were building software for restaurants, you probably lost a lot of customers very quickly, right? Like we all just suddenly had to like adapt. [00:37:00] Okay. Second major world event, the rise of generative ai. Like we’re all going through this right now. Like what does this new technology do for me? How does it work?
It’s disrupting everybody’s road roadmap, like literally everybody’s roadmaps. Third one, and this is really regional, but I think it’s affecting a lot more people than we realize is just all the geopolitical climate, right? Whether we’re talking about the Russia, Ukraine, war, now we have Israel, Iran, we have.
Our craziness with tariffs affecting the global economic environment, right? There’s been like so much geopolitical craziness, for lack of a better word, that I think companies are really struggling with. How do we predict the year? And so I think the combination of all three of these things, and they’ve basically been back to back to back.
I think leaders are starting to recognize, like we’ve all said it for decades, right? Like there’s all these acronyms in the business literature about like ambiguity and uncertainty, and there’s frameworks, [00:38:00] but like companies don’t work this way. They still come up with five year strategic plans and they still want 12 month roadmaps, and they wanna know exactly what you’re doing when.
We still operate businesses as if the future is predictable.
Alexis: Mm-hmm.
Teresa: But I think we’re starting to see some cracks in this. I think we’ve had so much uncertainty and so much chaos, and so much craziness over the last five years. The companies are like, okay, like I. I’m tapping out like we’re no longer planning five years in advance because I can barely plan next month.
I think this is a good thing. This is, I think is the silver lining of all of the nonsense that we’ve been through, is that companies are starting to see, we absolutely have to learn how to be adaptable, but it’s a whole new skillset across the organization. Like, how does my CFO plan if we didn’t fund projects for the year?
How does my marketing team run marketing campaigns if they don’t know launch dates? How does my sales team close deals if they can’t say when features are coming? Like [00:39:00] literally everybody in the organization has to change the way that they work. And this is why we now have books on transformations and we have billion dollar consultancies on transformations and we have, right, and we have like hundreds of solo consultants supporting transformations like.
This is a giant shift for businesses and we don’t know how to do it yet. I’ll be the first to say we don’t know how to do it yet. Like it’s still a work in progress. We’re still feeling our way through it, but here’s what I know. From an organizational change standpoint and from a coaching standpoint, nothing changes until the mindset changes, until people believe there’s a need for the change.
I think what’s happened in the last five years is we’re starting to believe there’s a need for the change. So I’m excited about that. Like I’m not excited. We had to go through COVID. I am excited about generative ai. I’m not excited about the geopolitical stuff, so mixed bag. But I am excited that we are starting to see evidence [00:40:00] that companies are taking this seriously.
Alexis: Yeah. That’s a strong belief that could help us and getting to that desire. Yeah. To be more adaptable and, yeah. I, I. Discussing about beyond budgeting. Yeah. And being absolutely convinced and, uh, and is incredible and I, I was going back to my organization explaining why we needed to and not, not,
Teresa: yeah.
Alexis: That was not so easy to convince people.
Teresa: Yeah. One of my mantras this year is really around organizational change. Doesn’t happen as a big change. It happens through a series of teeny, tiny changes. So I like tell people, don’t try to change your organization. Just change your own habits. Don’t try to change all your habits at once. Pick one habit, adopt it, internalize it, make it the way that you work.
Then move on to the next habit. And it turns out when we focus on our own behavior, when we [00:41:00] change our own habits
Alexis: mm-hmm.
Teresa: People around us get curious. Hey, you’re doing this thing that’s really interesting. What is it that you’re doing? Now we have an invitation to share when we come in and say, Hey, I learned this new thing.
We’re doing everything wrong. What do people do? They dig their heels in. They say, no way. I’m stubborn that I, I hate frameworks. Influencers don’t know anything. You can’t read anything. You can’t learn anything from books. You just learn by doing. Product management’s different everywhere. Like we’ve all heard these things, right?
Alexis: Absolutely.
Teresa: Yeah. So. It’s really like, you almost have to be sneaky about organizational change and like the hard truth is it starts with yourself. Nobody wants to hear they’re the problem, right? So like the only way to drive change, I think, is to start with your own behavior and model what you want to see across the rest of the organization.
Alexis: I love it. I believe we should end on that. That’s a, that was a perfect. What do you think, do you wanna share anything? Anything else [00:42:00] about. What you’re currently working on, you, you give us a glimpse or about anything else?
Teresa: Yeah, I’ll share. So if any listeners are new to my work, I do blog@producttalk.org.
The book is called Continuous Discovery Habits. I’m assuming we’ll add links to those in the show notes yet. The other thing I’ll share, so I’ve done a ton of work over the last, we’re almost coming up on 15 years, which is crazy to me about discovery, how to do discovery well, how to build fast feedback loops with your customers.
I love all of it. I’m not done. There’s still more work to do. There’s still plenty of teams not doing discovery. Um, but in this exact moment in time, like for the last four months, I’ve been diving deep on. How to use generative AI to support teaching. So I’ve been building my first LM based apps, which has been really fun and we’re already using some of them in our courses.
But it also introduced me to this whole new world of how product management is changing when the product that we’re building [00:43:00] is non-deterministic.
Alexis: Mm-hmm.
Teresa: And how do we measure quality when the product is non-deterministic? And I’m gonna be blogging way more about this, so like in July, I have a blog post coming out about.
What role AI prototyping can play in discovery. I’ll be doing a blog post about what role, like how cross-functional teams should be doing evals and guardrails for LLM based apps and how to navigate that. ’cause it’s really not clear who does what. And I probably will do be doing a blog post about how our roles are blending even more than they already have and like how we need to mentally prepare for that.
Like if we really identify as one role. How to maybe start to adopt an identity of other rules and like. Build out your toolkit, your skill box, um, and, and maybe have that be your focus. So I think we’re all going through a ton of change because of generative ai. And I, I’ve been reluctant to write about this stuff ’cause it changes so fast.
But I think after [00:44:00] four months of like building with it, um, starting to develop. A point of view and I’ll be sharing much more about that@producttalk.org.
Alexis: Excellent. I am eager to read about that. Thank you very much for all the work you’re doing. It’s absolutely fantastic. And thank you for having joined the podcast today.
Teresa: Ah, thanks for having me. This was a fun conversation.
