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Product design fundamentals every product manager should know

I’ve been building products for nearly three decades and one of the things I wish someone had told me early on is this: you don’t need to be a designer, but you need to understand design well enough to have an opinion.

A “this flow is going to confuse people and here’s why” opinion. That’s a fundamentally different skill, and it’s one that separates good PMs from great ones.

Design Literacy Is a Product Superpower

Most PMs I’ve worked with fall into one of two camps. Either they defer entirely to the designer (“you’re the expert, I trust you”) or they micromanage pixels without understanding why.

Neither works great.

The best PMs I know can open a Figma file, look at a proposed flow, and say: “This solves the problem, but I think we’re going to lose people at step 3 because there’s too much cognitive load.” That’s product judgment informed by design principles.

Here are the fundamentals that have made the biggest difference in how I work.

Visual Hierarchy Drives Behavior

Every screen has a job. The user lands on it and their eyes need to go somewhere. If everything is bold, nothing is bold. If there are six calls to action, there are zero calls to action.

This sounds obvious, but I can’t tell you how many product reviews I’ve sat in where the page is trying to do five things at once. The conversion data always tells the same story: users don’t know what to do, so they do nothing.

The principle is simple: every page should have ONE primary action. Everything else is secondary.

When I look at a design now, the first question I ask is “what’s the one thing we want the user to do here?” If the designer can’t answer that in one sentence, we have a problem.

Consistency Reduces Cognitive Load

This one took me a while to internalize. Consistency is about reducing the mental effort required to use your product. (If you haven’t read it, Schneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules is a great foundation for this.)

When a button is blue in one place and green in another, when the save action is top-right on one page and bottom-left on another, when confirmation messages look different everywhere, each inconsistency is a tiny tax on the user’s brain. Individually they’re nothing. Collectively they’re the reason people say “this product feels clunky” without being able to explain why.

As a PM, I’ve learned to flag consistency issues early. They compound. And they’re 10x easier to fix in design than in code.

Feedback Loops Build Trust

Users need to know their action worked. Every single time. No exceptions.

Click a button? Something should visually change. Submit a form? Show a confirmation. Trigger a process that takes time? Show a loading state.

I still see products that leave users wondering “did that work?” And every time that happens, trust erodes a little. I’ve started treating feedback loops as a product requirement, not a design nice-to-have.

Whitespace Is Not Wasted Space

My instinct as a PM was always “we have this space, let’s use it.” More features visible, more value communicated, more reasons to convert.

That instinct was backwards. Whitespace is what makes the important things important. It’s what gives the user’s eye a place to rest.

Some of the most effective design changes I’ve seen were about removing things. Taking away a sidebar. Eliminating a secondary nav. Letting the content breathe. The metrics almost always improved.

Accessibility Is Just Good Design

I’ll be honest, I used to think of accessibility as a checkbox. Something we needed to do for compliance. I was wrong and it wasn’t until I reached mid-forties that I started to recognize why they are necessary.

High contrast text is easier for everyone to read. Clear labels help everyone navigate.

Keyboard support benefits power users as much as it benefits users with motor disabilities. When we improved accessibility on our platform, our overall usability scores went up across the board. For everyone.

The PM’s Role in Design

My job is to define the problem clearly enough that the designer can solve it well. I challenge designs that optimize for aesthetics over usability. I push back when a beautiful mockup doesn’t account for edge cases, error states, or the reality of what happens when a user has 500 items instead of 5.

I don’t draw wireframes or pick colors or argue about border radius.

The best design partnerships I’ve had were two people with different expertise looking at the same problem and making it better together. That only works when the PM speaks enough design language to have the conversation.

I wish I’d started learning design fundamentals earlier. You don’t need a course. You don’t need to learn Figma (though it helps).

Just start asking “why” when you see a design decision, and pay attention to the answer. That habit alone will make you measurably better at your job.

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How do you avoid burnout in product management?

There was a season a few years back where I was checking Slack before my feet hit the floor in the morning. Responding to emails during dinner. Thinking about roadmap priorities during my daughter’s volleyball game.

I wasn’t working more hours than anyone else on my team. I was just never NOT working.

Product management does this to people. (HBR’s research on burnout confirms it’s systemic, not individual.) You own the outcome but you don’t own the resources. You’re the one the CEO asks when numbers are off, the one engineering pings when priorities conflict, the one the customer success team escalates to when a big account is unhappy. The role is designed to pull you in every direction at once.

I was hired to replace the previous PM who burned out. He had replaced a PM who had burned out. Now, I was burning out. Not dramatically. I didn’t quit or have a breakdown. It was the slow kind, where you stop being excited about the work and start just surviving it. Where your family gets the leftover version of you and even that feels like it’s running on fumes.

Here’s what I’ve changed since then. I’m not going to pretend I’ve got it all figured out, but I’m in a fundamentally better place than I was, and most of it came from a few non-negotiable decisions.

Protect Your Time Like It’s a Product Requirement

I have a hard rule: home by 5:30 for dinner. No exceptions. Not for a board prep. Not for a product review. Not for a “quick sync” that will definitely run long.

I also block a 90-minute gym window in the middle of my day and an hour for reading first thing in the morning. These aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re on my calendar as immovable blocks, the same way a meeting with the CEO would be.

When I first started doing this, I felt guilty. Like I was being less committed than my peers. What I actually found is that the constraints made me sharper.

When you know you have to be done by 5:30, you stop saying yes to the third “alignment meeting” of the day. You get ruthless about prioritization because you have to be. The artificial scarcity forced better decisions about where my time went.

Automate Everything You Touch Twice

My theme for this year is automate as much as possible. Every hour I spend on repetitive work is an hour I’m not spending on the high-leverage thinking that actually moves the business forward.

Status reports, data pulls, recurring communications, task routing, inbox triage: if I do it more than twice, I build a system for it.

Some of these are sophisticated (automated morning briefings that synthesize email, calendar, and tasks into a single digest). Some are dead simple (a Slack reminder template so I don’t have to think about weekly check-ins).

The compounding effect is real. Each small automation frees up 15-30 minutes. Stack enough of them and you’ve recovered entire blocks of deep work time that used to disappear into operational overhead.

Your Team Is Your Leverage

The biggest burnout trap for PMs is thinking you need to be involved in everything. You don’t. You need to be clear about what matters, set the direction, and then trust your team to execute.

I used to review every analytics pull. Now my analytics lead knows what I care about and surfaces the insights, not the data.

I used to write every A/B test hypothesis. Now my growth marketer proposes them and I weigh in on priorities.

I used to attend every customer call. Now my PM partner handles the S4K side entirely and we sync weekly.

Delegation is about building capability on your team so that your time is spent on the decisions only you can make. If you’re the bottleneck for everything, that’s a sign of a system that’s one illness away from breaking.

Make Peace with “Good Enough”

Perfectionism will eat you alive in product management. There’s always one more edge case to account for, one more stakeholder to consult, one more data point to gather before making a decision.

I’ve learned to ask: “Is this decision reversible?” If yes, make it fast and move on. You can adjust later. If no, take the time you need.

But most decisions in product are reversible, and treating every one like it’s permanent is a fast track to analysis paralysis and the chronic stress that comes with it.

Shipping at 80% with the ability to iterate beats shipping at 100% three months late. And honestly, your users can’t tell the difference most of the time.

Faith and Purpose as Anchors

This one’s personal, so take it for what it’s worth. For me, faith is the thing that keeps work in perspective. I care deeply about what I do (I’m building products that help the church grow, and that mission matters to me). BUT it’s not the entirety of who I am.

When I remember that, it’s easier to close the laptop. It’s easier to be present at dinner. It’s easier to let go of the meeting that didn’t go well, the metric that’s off target, the feature that shipped with a bug.

Whatever your version of that anchor is (faith, family, community, a creative pursuit), guard it. Don’t let the urgency of product work crowd out the things that actually sustain you.

The Bottom Line

Burnout in product management comes from working without boundaries, without leverage, and without recovery.

Set the boundaries. Build the leverage through automation and delegation. Protect the time that restores you.

Your value is measured by the clarity of your decisions and the impact of what you ship. The version of me that protects his time, trusts his team, and goes to the gym at 11am is a better PM, a better leader, and a better husband and father than the one who was grinding 14 hours a day and calling it dedication.

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25 Skills Every Product Manager Should Be Building in 2026

Product Manager sitting in his home office reading

There’s no shortage of “skills for PMs” lists on the internet. Most of them read like a job description, technically correct, but practically useless.

This isn’t that list. These are the 25 skills I’ve seen separate the product managers who move the needle from the ones who stay busy. I’ve organized them by the areas where I see the biggest gaps, not by some theoretical framework. Some of these are timeless. Some are specific to right now. All of them are things I wish someone had told me earlier in my career.

I. Customer Obsession

These are the skills that everything else builds on. Get these wrong and nothing else matters.

1. Deep Customer Knowledge

You can’t fake this one. The best PMs I’ve worked with can describe their top customer segments in vivid detail – not just demographics, but the actual daily workflow, the frustrations, the workarounds they’ve built, the language they use when they’re annoyed.

This doesn’t come from dashboards. It comes from sitting with customers, watching them use your product, and resisting the urge to defend your design choices when they struggle. Do this monthly, not quarterly. The PMs who “don’t have time” for customer conversations are the same ones who build features nobody uses.

2. Jobs-to-be-Done Thinking

Clayton Christensen’s framework has become so mainstream that people name-drop it without actually applying it. The real skill isn’t knowing what JTBD is, it’s being able to articulate the job your customer is hiring your product to do in one sentence.

If you can’t do that, you don’t understand your customer well enough yet. Every feature decision should trace back to that job. If it doesn’t advance the job, it’s noise.

3. Continuous Discovery

Teresa Torres literally wrote the book on this. The skill isn’t “doing user research” – it’s building a rhythm of weekly customer touchpoints that inform your decisions in real-time, not once a quarter when the research team delivers a 40-page report nobody reads.

The PMs who do this well talk to 2-3 customers every single week. Not formal research sessions with screeners and discussion guides. Quick, focused conversations that answer specific questions about specific opportunities.

I have “virtual coffee” times available on my calendar and invite users on our emails to book some time with me. It’s fantastic and gives me tons of insight into our customers.

4. Knowing When to Ignore Feedback

This sounds counterintuitive after three skills about listening to customers. But one of the hardest skills in product management is knowing WHICH feedback to act on and which to file away.

Not every customer request is a product insight. Sometimes a customer wants something that serves them but hurts the broader user base. Sometimes they’re describing a symptom, not the root cause. The skill is triangulating. When you hear the same pain from multiple segments, supported by data, that’s signal. When one loud customer demands something, that’s noise.

5. Empathy That Goes Beyond Platitudes

Every PM claims to have empathy. The actual skill is translating empathy into product decisions. It’s the difference between saying “I understand the user’s frustration” and redesigning the onboarding flow because you watched someone struggle for 8 minutes trying to complete a task that should take 30 seconds.

Real empathy is uncomfortable. It means watching your product fail in real-time and sitting with that feeling instead of explaining it away.

II. Strategic Thinking

These are the skills that determine whether your team is building the right things.

6. Product Vision

A compelling product vision describes what the world looks like 2-5 years from now if your product succeeds. Not a feature list. Not a technology roadmap. A picture of a better future for your customer.

The skill is making this concrete enough to inspire and vague enough to allow room for discovery. “We’ll be the leading platform for X” is not a vision. “Every pastor will have a personal AI-powered sermon preparation assistant that cuts their weekly prep time in half” – that’s a vision.

7. Product Strategy

I wrote about the 10 most common strategy mistakes recently, and the biggest one is teams that have no strategy at all — just a backlog they call a strategy.

The skill here is making choices. Real ones. Strategy means explicitly deciding what you will NOT do, who you will NOT serve, and which opportunities you will walk away from. If your strategy doesn’t make someone uncomfortable, it’s not a strategy.

8. Ruthless Prioritization

This is the skill that separates senior PMs from everyone else. You will always have more opportunities than capacity. The question is never “should we build this?” Everything on your list is probably worth building. The question is “should we build this INSTEAD of that?”

Frameworks like RICE scoring help, but the real skill is having the conviction to say no to good ideas because they’re not the BEST idea right now. Warren Buffett’s two-list strategy applies: identify your top 25 priorities, circle the top 5, and treat the other 20 as your “avoid at all costs” list.

9. Outcome-Focused Roadmapping

The shift from output-based roadmaps (“Q2: Ship feature X, Y, Z”) to outcome-based roadmaps (“Q2: Reduce trial-to-paid time from 14 days to 7 days”) is one of the most important evolutions in modern product management.

The skill is framing your roadmap around the problems you’re solving and the metrics you’re moving, not the features you’re building. This gives your team room to discover the best solution instead of being locked into a predetermined one.

10. Saying No (and Making It Stick)

Every PM knows they should say no more often. The actual skill is saying no in a way that maintains relationships and builds trust. “No, because our strategy is focused on X, and here’s why that matters more right now” is dramatically different from just “no.”

The best PMs I’ve seen turn a “no” into a learning moment by explaining the reasoning, sharing the data, and making the person feel heard even when the answer isn’t what they wanted. I’ve found that people can disagree with a well-reasoned decision. What often causes stress is ambiguity.

III. Execution and Delivery

These are the skills that turn strategy into a shipped product.

11. Rapid Experimentation

The ability to test ideas in hours or days instead of weeks or months is a superpower. This means prototyping. Not pixel-perfect mockups, but rough, testable concepts that answer specific questions.

Can users find this feature? Does this flow make sense? Will anyone actually use this? You can answer all of these questions with a prototype and 5 users in a single afternoon.

12. Writing Clear Requirements

This is an underrated skill. The gap between “what the PM imagined” and “what engineering built” is almost always a requirements problem, not a competence problem.

The skill is writing requirements that are specific enough to build from but flexible enough to allow engineering creativity. I’ve found that focusing on the PROBLEM and the SUCCESS CRITERIA while leaving the implementation approach to engineering produces the best results.

13. Data Literacy

You don’t need to be a data scientist, but you need to be dangerous with data. That means understanding statistical significance (so you don’t kill an A/B test too early), knowing which metrics actually matter for your product, and being able to query your own data when the analytics team is backed up.

AI has made this dramatically easier. You can now describe what you want in plain English and get a SQL query back. That’s a genuine unlock for PMs who previously had to wait days for a data pull.

14. Delivery Management

Understanding how your team ships code, whether it’s sprint cycles, deployment pipelines, feature flags, rollback procedures, makes you a better PM. Not because you need to manage the process (that’s engineering’s job), but because understanding the constraints helps you make better tradeoff decisions.

“Can we ship this behind a feature flag to 10% of users first?” is a much better question than “when will this be done?”

15. Technical Literacy

You don’t need to code, but you need to understand enough about your technology stack to have meaningful conversations with engineering. What’s an API? What are the database constraints? Why does this “simple” change actually require refactoring three services?

The skill is asking good technical questions, not having the answers. When your engineering lead says “that’s a 3-month project,” you should be able to ask “what makes it 3 months?” and understand the answer.

IV. Communication and Influence

These are the skills that get people aligned and keep them there.

16. Stakeholder Management

Your stakeholders have competing priorities, different incentive structures, and varying levels of product literacy. The skill is navigating all of that without losing your strategic direction.

The best approach I’ve found: radical transparency about your decision-making process. Share the data, explain the tradeoffs, make a clear recommendation, and invite disagreement before the decision, not after. People support what they help create, even if they don’t get everything they wanted.

17. Executive Communication

Executives don’t want details. They want: what’s the problem, what’s the recommendation, and what do you need from them. That’s it.

The skill is compression, taking a complex product situation and distilling it into a 2-minute narrative that leads to a clear ask. If you can’t explain your strategy in the time it takes to ride an elevator, you haven’t thought about it clearly enough.

18. Cross-Functional Leadership

PMs lead without authority. You can’t tell engineering what to build, design what to design, or marketing what to say. You can only influence.

The skill is making other teams WANT to follow your lead because you’ve earned their trust. That means understanding their constraints, respecting their expertise, giving them credit publicly, and never throwing them under the bus when something goes wrong.

19. Writing as a Leadership Tool

Product managers who write well have an outsized advantage. Strategy docs, product briefs, stakeholder updates, customer communications – writing is how PMs scale their influence beyond the meetings they attend.

Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint at Amazon for a reason. Clear writing forces clear thinking. If you can’t write a coherent one-page strategy doc, your strategy probably isn’t coherent.

20. Storytelling with Data

Data alone doesn’t persuade anyone. The skill is wrapping data in a narrative that makes people care. “Churn increased 3%” is a data point. “We’re losing 40 paying customers every month, and here’s what they’re telling us on the way out the door” is a story that drives action.

Every dashboard metric should have a “so what?” attached to it. If you can’t articulate the “so what,” the metric isn’t useful yet.

V. Personal Mastery

These are the skills that compound over time and separate the good from the great.

21. AI Fluency

This is the new table-stakes skill for 2026. Not building AI products (though that’s increasingly common) but using AI tools to accelerate your own work.

I like Dell computers tagline of: “It’s a you-multiplier.”

Customer research synthesis, competitive analysis, PRD drafting, experiment design, data analysis, all of these are dramatically faster with AI assistance. PMs who aren’t using AI in their daily workflow are leaving massive productivity on the table.

The skill isn’t prompting. It’s knowing which parts of your work benefit from AI acceleration and which parts still require human judgment. Strategy, customer relationships, and cross-functional trust can’t be automated. Research synthesis, first-draft writing, and data analysis absolutely can.

22. Product Evangelism

Your product needs a champion, and that’s you. The skill is inspiring genuine excitement in your team, your stakeholders, and your customers without crossing the line into hype.

The best product evangelists I’ve seen lead with the customer problem, not the product solution. “Let me tell you about a pastor who spent 12 hours preparing a single sermon because our tools weren’t good enough” hits harder than “let me show you our new feature.”

23. Managing Your Energy, Not Just Your Time

PM burnout is real. The role pulls you in every direction: stakeholder meetings, customer calls, sprint planning, strategy reviews, fire drills. You can optimize your calendar perfectly and still burn out.

The skill is recognizing which activities give you energy and which drain it, then structuring your week accordingly. For me, customer conversations and strategy work are energizing. Back-to-back status meetings are draining. I protect my calendar accordingly.

24. Continuous Learning

The product management discipline is evolving rapidly. The frameworks that worked 3 years ago might not work today. The best PMs read broadly, attend selectively, and most importantly apply what they learn immediately.

Books that have shaped my thinking: Inspired by Marty Cagan, Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri, and Chief Customer Officer 2.0 by Jeanne Bliss. But reading without applying is just entertainment.

25. Intellectual Humility

This might be the most important skill on the entire list. The willingness to say “I was wrong” or “I don’t know” is what separates PMs who keep growing from ones who plateau.

Every strong opinion you hold about your product, your customers, or your market should come with an asterisk: “based on what I know right now.” New data should change your mind. Customer feedback that contradicts your hypothesis should make you curious, not defensive.

The best product managers I’ve worked with hold their strategies with conviction AND their assumptions with humility. That balance is the whole game.

The Thread That Connects All 25

If I had to distill all of these into a single principle, it would be this: the best product managers are relentlessly curious about their customers and brutally honest about what they don’t know.

Every skill on this list is either about understanding customers more deeply or making better decisions with incomplete information. That’s the job. Everything else is just technique.

The good news? Every one of these skills is learnable. None of them require a specific degree, a specific title, or a specific number of years in the role. They require intentional practice and the willingness to be uncomfortable while you’re learning.

Start with the ones where you have the biggest gap. Work on them deliberately. And be patient with yourself. The best PMs I know are still working on all 25.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the most important skill for a product manager?

Deep customer knowledge is the foundational skill that enables everything else. Without a genuine understanding of your customers, their workflows, pain points, and goals, no amount of strategic thinking, technical literacy, or stakeholder management will produce great products. Build a habit of weekly customer conversations and the other skills become dramatically more effective.

How do product managers use AI in 2026?

Product managers use AI primarily for research acceleration like synthesizing customer interviews, generating competitive intelligence, drafting PRDs and experiment hypotheses, and querying data with natural language. The key skill is knowing which tasks benefit from AI assistance (research, analysis, first drafts) and which still require human judgment (strategy decisions, customer relationships, cross-functional trust-building).

What technical skills do product managers need?

Product managers don’t need to code, but they need enough technical literacy to have meaningful conversations with engineering. This includes understanding APIs, database constraints, deployment processes, and architectural tradeoffs. The goal isn’t to make technical decisions, it’s to ask informed questions and understand the implications of technical choices on product capabilities and timelines.

How do you transition into product management?

The most common entry points are from engineering, design, data analytics, or customer-facing roles like support or sales. Each background brings a natural strength: engineers bring technical depth, designers bring user empathy, analysts bring data fluency, and customer-facing roles bring direct insight into user pain points. Focus on building the skills in whichever category you’re weakest. Most transitions fail not because of lack of domain knowledge, but because of gaps in communication, strategic thinking, or customer understanding.

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The 10 Product Strategy Mistakes I Keep Seeing (After 10+ Years in SaaS)

An enamel pin about Product Management

I’ve made every one of these mistakes. Some of them more than once. Product strategy reads well in a blog post, but in practice it’s a minefield of competing priorities, stakeholder pressure, and the constant temptation to say yes to everything.

After more than a decade leading product and growth for SaaS companies – including subscription products serving millions of users – I’ve developed a pretty reliable list of strategy mistakes that kill momentum. Not the theoretical kind you read about in business school. The real kind. The ones that cost you quarters.

Here are the 10 pitfalls I keep coming back to, the ones that have cost me the most time, energy, and momentum over the years.

What is Product Strategy, Really?

Before we get into the mistakes, let’s get aligned on what product strategy actually is – because the lack of a shared definition is often the first problem.

Product strategy is the set of choices that connect your company’s vision to the work your team does every day. It answers three questions:

  1.  Who are we building for? (target audience)
  2.  What problem are we solving for them? (value proposition)
  3. How does this create value for the business? (business model)

Marty Cagan, author of Inspired and founding partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, puts it simply: strategy is about deciding which problems are worth solving. Roman Pichler frames it as the path to your product vision – the high-level plan for achieving your goals.

The important thing is that strategy is about CHOICES. Not a roadmap. Not a feature list. Choices about what you’ll do, and more importantly, what you won’t do.

With that foundation, here are the 10 mistakes that undermine those choices.

Mistake 1: Confusing Activity with Progress

This is the one that gets almost everyone. You ship a feature. Then another. Then another. Your release notes look great. Your team feels productive.

But the metrics aren’t changing.

I’ve lived this. We shipped feature after feature and our conversion numbers stayed flat. Lots of effort, but no forward motion. The problem was that we were building things that were nice to have, not things that moved the needle.

This is what the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework helps you avoid. When you understand the actual job your customer is hiring your product to do, it becomes much easier to evaluate whether a feature advances that job or just adds noise. Clayton Christensen’s insight was that customers don’t buy products – they hire them to make progress. If your feature doesn’t help the customer make progress on their core job, it’s activity, not progress.

How to avoid it: Before greenlighting any feature, ask “which metric does this move, and by how much?” If the team can’t answer that clearly, the feature isn’t ready to build. This is easy to say, but extremely difficult to do. Use a prioritization framework like RICE scoring (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) to force the conversation beyond gut feel.

Mistake 2: Strategy by Consensus

There’s a version of inclusive leadership that sounds great in theory but kills strategy in practice. You bring everyone to the table. You gather input. You synthesize. You try to find a path that makes all stakeholders happy.

… and you end up with a strategy that offends no one and inspires no one.

Real strategy requires choices. Hard ones. The kind where someone in the room won’t like the answer. If your strategy document doesn’t explicitly state what you’re NOT doing, it’s a wish list.

This is what killed products like Google+. Google had the engineering talent, the distribution, and the resources to build a social network. But the strategy tried to be everything to everyone – a Facebook competitor, a Twitter alternative, an identity platform, a photo sharing service. No hard choices were made and the product sadly died a slow death by committee.

How to avoid it: I’ve learned (the hard way) that my job is to make everyone feel heard, synthesize the inputs, make a clear decision, and then communicate the reasoning. People can disagree with a well-reasoned decision, what they can’t work with is ambiguity. Write down your strategy in one page. If it doesn’t fit on one page, you haven’t made enough choices yet.

Mistake 3: Copying the Competition

Your competitor launches a feature. Your sales team forwards the announcement. Your CEO asks “why don’t we have this?” And suddenly your roadmap has a new top priority that wasn’t there yesterday – classic!

I’ve fallen into this trap more than I’d like to admit. You absolutely should know what your competitors are doing. The real risk is letting their decisions drive YOUR strategy.

When you copy a competitor’s feature, you’re solving for THEIR customers with THEIR context.

You don’t know why they built it. You don’t know if it’s working. You don’t know if they’re about to kill it. You’re making a strategic bet based on a press release.

Gibson Biddle, former VP of Product at Netflix, uses what he calls the DHM Model – Delight, Hard-to-Copy, and Margin-Enhancing. The “hard-to-copy” piece is key but with AI it’s getting more difficult. If your strategy is just replicating what competitors build, you’ll always be behind AND you’ll never build anything that’s uniquely valuable to your users.

How to avoid it: Understand what problem the competitor is trying to solve, then ask whether YOUR users have that same problem. Sometimes they do, and then you should solve it in a way that fits your product, your architecture, and your users’ workflow. Sometimes they don’t, and the right answer is “we’re not building that” – Jeff Bezos has a great framework for this kind of decision.

Mistake 4: Ignoring the Metrics That Actually Matter

Vanity metrics are seductive. Page views are up! Sign-ups are growing! App downloads hit a new record!

But if your churn rate is climbing at the same time, you’ve got a leaky bucket. And no amount of top-of-funnel growth fixes a retention problem.

I’ve been in situations where the dashboards looked green but the business was struggling, and situations where the top-line numbers looked concerning but the underlying health was strong. The difference was which metrics we were watching.

This is what the North Star Metric concept helps solve. Your North Star is the single metric that best captures the core value your product delivers to customers. For Spotify, it’s time spent listening. For Airbnb, it’s nights booked. For a subscription SaaS product, it might be weekly active usage or feature adoption depth.

How to avoid it: For any subscription product, the metrics that matter are: how many people start a trial, how many convert to paid, how many cancel, and what’s the net change. Everything else is context. Build your dashboard around these numbers first, THEN add the supporting metrics that explain why they’re moving.

Mistake 5: Trying to Serve Everyone

This one is especially hard in mission-driven organizations. You WANT to help everyone. Every user segment seems important. Every use case feels valid.

But trying to serve everyone equally means serving no one well.

Your onboarding can’t be optimized for beginners AND power users simultaneously. Your pricing can’t be accessible to individuals AND competitive for enterprises without compromise.

Trying to serve everyone equally means serving no one well.

Kodak learned this the hard way. They saw digital photography coming but tried to straddle both worlds – maintaining their film business while half-heartedly investing in digital. They served neither audience well, and a company that once dominated an entire industry filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

How to avoid it: The best products I’ve used (and the best products I’ve built) made clear choices about who they were for. They explicitly prioritized one audience and designed everything around their needs first. When you do that well, other segments often benefit anyway, from a focused, coherent product rather than a compromised one. Define your primary persona. Write it on the wall. When someone asks “but what about this other segment?” you have your answer ready.

Mistake 6: Having No Strategy at All

This sounds obvious, but it’s shockingly common. My last few roles I’ve called “The Fixer” because years of the company running hard has caused them to lose their focus and they suddenly realize they don’t have a strategy. They have a roadmap. They have a backlog. They have quarterly goals. They ship things on time.

But there’s no unifying thesis about WHERE the product is going and WHY.

Roman Pichler calls this the most common product strategy mistake he encounters. Teams jump straight from vision to execution without the strategic layer that connects them. The result is a collection of features that individually make sense, but collectively don’t tell a coherent story.

How to avoid it: Your strategy should be a testable hypothesis, not a document that lives somewhere on the server. Try this format: “We believe that [target audience] struggles with [problem]. If we build [solution], we’ll see [measurable outcome] within [timeframe].” If you can’t fill in those blanks, you don’t have a strategy yet. You have a to-do list.

Mistake 7: Treating Strategy as Static

You spend weeks crafting the perfect strategy document. Leadership signs off. The team aligns. You print it out and pin it to the wall.

Six months later, the market has shifted, a competitor has launched something unexpected, and your customers are telling you something you didn’t anticipate. But the strategy is “locked.”

Eric Ries built the entire Lean Startup methodology around this problem. The Build-Measure-Learn loop isn’t just for startups – it’s for any team that operates in uncertainty, which is literally every product team. Your strategy should have built-in checkpoints where you evaluate whether your assumptions still hold.

How to avoid it: Set quarterly strategy reviews. Not annual planning sessions where you redo everything – lightweight reviews where you ask: “What have we learned? What’s changed? Do our bets still make sense?” The best strategies are living documents, not manifestos. Jeff Bezos distinguishes between “one-way door” decisions (irreversible, deliberate slowly) and “two-way door” decisions (reversible, move fast). Most strategic choices are two-way doors. Treat them that way.

Mistake 8: Skipping Validation Before Committing

You have a great idea. The team is excited. Leadership is bought in. You go straight to building.

Three months later, you launch to silence. Customers don’t want it, don’t understand it, or already solved the problem another way.

I’ve seen this pattern destroy entire quarters. The excitement of a new idea creates momentum that skips right past the “should we build this?” question and lands on “how do we build this?”

How to avoid it: Before committing engineering resources, validate the problem AND the solution. Talk to 5-10 customers. Run a fake door test. Build a prototype and put it in front of real users. Teresa Torres’ Continuous Discovery framework calls this “opportunity solution trees” – mapping the opportunity space before jumping to solutions. The cost of 2 weeks of discovery is nothing compared to 3 months of building the wrong thing.

Mistake 9: Siloed Strategy Without Cross-Functional Input

Product writes the strategy. Engineering learns about it at spring planning. Design gets brought in when wireframes are needed. Marketing finds out at launch.

This isn’t strategy. It’s a relay race where nobody can actually see the finish line.

The best product strategies I’ve been part of were shaped by engineering constraints, design insights, and market intelligence from day one. Your engineers know what’s technically feasible and where the architecture creates opportunities. Your designers have insights about user behavior that data alone can’t capture. Your sales and support teams hear objections and pain points every day.

How to avoid it: Include engineering and design leads in strategy formation, not just execution. Share customer research broadly. Bring it up in meetings regularly. Make your strategy document accessible to everyone on the team, not locked into a leadership slide deck. When people understand the WHY behind the strategy, they make better decisions at every level.

Mistake 10: Being Unrealistic About Execution Capacity

This is the mistake that ties all the others together. You have a clear strategy. You’ve validated the direction. You’ve made all the hard choices about what to build.

Then you commit to 3x more than your team can actually deliver.

Your roadmap becomes a pressure cooker. Quality drops. Shortcuts get taken. The team burns out. And paradoxically, you end up delivering LESS than if you’d committed to fewer things done with excellence.

I’ve seen this cycle repeat across every company I’ve worked with. The ambition is always bigger than the capacity, and the gap gets filled with overtime and technical debt instead of honest prioritization.

How to avoid it: Be ruthlessly honest about how much your team can ship in a quarter. Then cut 20% from that estimate. Even writing that sounds crazy, but it must be done. Use the OKR framework (Objectives and Key Results) to limit your bets to 3-5 outcomes per quarter – not 3-5 per team, 3-5 total. Warren Buffett’s “two-list strategy” applies here: write down your top 25 priorities, circle the top 5, and treat the other 20 as your “avoid at all costs” list (avoid them entirely until the top 5 are achieved). The same logic applies to product strategy.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Product strategy is about having the discipline to say no to good ideas that don’t align with what matters most right now.

Every mistake on this list comes from the same root: the unwillingness to make a hard choice and live with the tradeoff.

Choose the right things. Decide clearly. Pick your own path. (I wrote about this focus in 5 things needed for business success.) Watch the honest metrics. Serve someone specific.

Strategy is the art of sacrifice. The sooner you get comfortable with that, the better your products will be.

Product Strategy Checklist

Before you finalize your next product strategy, run through this list:

  • Can you state your target audience in one sentence?
  • Can you articulate the core problem you’re solving for them?
  • Does your strategy explicitly state what you’re NOT doing?
  • Is every major initiative tied to a measurable outcome?
  • Have you validated your assumptions with real customers?
  • Does your team have the capacity to execute this quarter’s plan?
  • Have you set a date to review and adapt the strategy?
  • Can your entire team articulate the strategy without looking at a document?
  • Is there a clear North Star Metric everyone is aligned on?
  • Would you bet your own money on this plan working?

If you can’t check every box, your strategy still has gaps. Go back and make the hard choices.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the most common product strategy mistakes?

The most common product strategy mistakes include confusing activity with progress (shipping features that don’t move metrics), strategy by consensus (avoiding hard choices to keep everyone happy), copying competitors instead of solving for your own users, ignoring retention metrics in favor of vanity metrics, and trying to serve every user segment equally. The root cause of most strategy failures is an unwillingness to make clear choices and accept tradeoffs.

What is the difference between product strategy and a product roadmap?

Product strategy defines WHERE you’re going and WHY. It’s about choices, tradeoffs, and the thesis behind your product direction. A product roadmap is the HOW and WHEN – the sequence of work that executes the strategy. A roadmap without a strategy is just a feature list. A strategy without a roadmap is just a vision. You need both, but strategy comes first.

How do you create an effective product strategy?

An effective product strategy begins with a clear understanding of your target audience, the problem you’re solving, and how solving it creates business value. Frameworks like Jobs-to-be-Done help identify what customers actually need. Validate your assumptions through customer discovery before committing resources. Set a North Star Metric to track progress. Review and adapt quarterly. Most importantly, be explicit about what you will NOT do – that’s ultimately where the real strategy lives.

How often should you update your product strategy?

Product strategy should be reviewed quarterly and updated when market conditions, customer needs, or business goals change significantly. It should NOT change weekly based on competitor moves or stakeholder requests. The best approach is setting lightweight quarterly checkpoints where you evaluate whether your core assumptions still hold, while keeping the overall strategic direction stable enough for the team to execute with confidence.

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15 quotes to stir Courageous Leadership

I’ve been collecting quotes on courageous leadership for a while now. The kind that don’t just sound good on a poster but actually rearrange how you think about showing up for the people in front of you.

Here’s the question that started this collection:

Can an individual affect their society by simply, courageously caring for the individual in front of them enough to see who they truly are and encourage them into that identity?

I believe the answer is yes. And these 15 quotes have shaped how I try to live that out.

On Seeing People

  1. How many of us are stuck in the daily grind of survival? If you were to plot yourself on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, where would you be today? Most of us live at level 3, but David Whyte challenges us to step beyond, to risk being truly seen and to see others as they really are.

  2. “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.” – John Ruskin

  3. “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” – Simone Weil. Constant distraction makes full presence rare. Choosing to be fully present with another person is an act of courage.

On Leading with Vulnerability

  1. “Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome.” – Brene Brown. This applies to every hard conversation you’re avoiding right now.

  2. “The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.” – Elizabeth Gilbert. Sometimes the most courageous leadership decision is the one that costs you the most personally.

  3. “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” – Joshua 1:9. Courage is the decision that something else matters more.

On Doing the Hard Thing

  1. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.” – Theodore Roosevelt. Courageous leaders lead from inside the mess.

  2. “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

  3. “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.” – Ambrose Redmoon. I come back to this one regularly. Especially when I’m about to say something in a meeting that I know won’t be popular but needs to be said.

On Serving Others

  1. “Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

  2. “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” – Mahatma Gandhi. The leaders who’ve had the deepest impact on my life were the ones who showed up for me when it cost them something.

  3. “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves.” – Philippians 2:3. This is the hardest standard of leadership I know. And the most transformative when you actually live it.

On Persistence

  1. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill

  2. “Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’” – Mary Anne Radmacher. This one resonates with anyone who’s had a week where nothing went right but showed up on Monday anyway.

  3. “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” – Galatians 6:9. The most courageous thing you might do today is simply not quit.

The Thread

Courageous leadership is the daily decision to see people, serve them, and keep going when it would be easier to stop.

That’s available to anyone, in any role, at any level. You don’t need a title to lead courageously. You just need to care enough about the person in front of you to show up fully. And then do it again tomorrow.

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The Traffic You Depend On Is Being Answered Without You

I’ve been staring at a traffic chart for the last three weeks that I can’t stop thinking about.

It’s Chegg’s chart. The online education platform lost 34% of its organic visitors in a matter of months. That’s a cliff. Their keyword footprint went from 11.1 million to 3.5 million.

And the culprit wasn’t a competitor outranking them or a Google algorithm update penalizing thin content. It was Google answering the questions before anyone ever clicked.

The Machine That Eats Your Top of Funnel

Google’s AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries that now appear at the top of search results, and they are fundamentally changing what it means to rank on Google. For years, the playbook was clear: create valuable content, optimize it for search, capture intent, convert visitors.

That model assumed one thing: that people would actually click through to your site.

AI Overviews break that assumption.

When someone searches “how to explain forgiveness to a congregation” or “best illustrations for an Easter sermon,” Google can now synthesize an answer from multiple sources and present it directly in the search results. No click required. No visit to your site. No entry into your funnel.

Tomasz Tunguz laid this out clearly in a recent analysis:

“Content dependency on organic search is no longer a sustainable acquisition model.”

That sentence should be pinned to the wall of every SaaS product leader who relies on organic traffic (understanding these shifts is a critical PM skill) to fill the top of their funnel.

Chegg Is the Preview

The pattern is showing up everywhere. Stack Overflow, the platform that essentially taught a generation of developers how to code (including me), is seeing the same erosion. Informational queries that used to drive millions of visits are now being answered inline by AI.

The New York Times is thriving. Why? How? A $100 million content licensing deal with Google. They’re feeding the AI, on their terms, for revenue.

Here’s what I think the data is telling us:

1. Q&A-style content is the most vulnerable. If your value proposition is answering questions that can be summarized in a paragraph, you’re in the blast radius.
2. Branded, premium, behind-the-paywall content is more defensible. AI Overviews can summarize a sermon topic, but they can’t replicate a full manuscript, a downloadable media pack, or an AI-powered sermon builder.
3. The winners will be the ones who stop treating Google as a given and start building direct relationships with their audience.

What This Means for SaaS Product Leaders

I run product and growth for a content platform that serves pastors. We have 245,000+ sermons and 50,000+ text illustrations, exactly the kind of content library that ranks well for long-tail informational queries.

For years, that library has been our primary discovery engine. Pastors search for sermon ideas, find us, browse free content, start a trial, and convert to paid.

That model still works today, but we’re down around that same 34% mark and from what I can tell so is everyone, across all industries. But I’d be naive to assume it’ll work the same way in 18 months.

Here’s the uncomfortable math: if organic traffic drops by even 20-30%, and organic is your dominant acquisition channel, no amount of conversion rate optimization saves you. You can have a best-in-class trial-to-paid flow and still miss your numbers because not enough people are entering the funnel in the first place.

It’s an exposure problem. And it requires a fundamentally different response than what most product teams are used to.

The Diagnostic Before the Panic

Before you restructure your entire growth strategy, there’s a critical diagnostic step that teams often skip. You need to know whether AI Overviews are actually appearing on YOUR highest-value queries.

Here’s the move:

  • Pull your top 50 keywords from Google Search Console. Look at click-through rate trends over the last 90 days, segmented by week.
  • The signature you’re looking for: stable or rising impressions, but declining CTR. That pattern means Google is showing your content in results, but users aren’t clicking because the AI Overview already gave them what they needed.
  • If your impressions are dropping, that’s a competitor or algorithm problem. If impressions are stable but clicks are falling, that’s AI Overview cannibalization. Different diagnosis, different treatment.

Most teams I talk to are just making this distinction. They’re looking at traffic declines and assuming it’s an SEO problem when it might be a platform shift problem. The difference matters.

Three Moves to Make Now

I’m not going to pretend I have the full playbook figured out. But here’s where my thinking is landing:

1. Shift discovery investment toward owned channels.
Email nurture sequences, community platforms, pastoral networks, partnerships with organizations that already have the audience. Organic search should be one of many channels, not the only one. Every dollar of effort I’m putting into SEO-driven top-of-funnel content I’m asking if that same effort in email or community would be more durable.

2. Make your paywall content genuinely irreplaceable.
AI can summarize a sermon outline. It cannot replicate a curated media pack, a professionally produced video series, or a workflow tool that saves someone three hours a week. The content that survives AI summarization is the content that requires depth, production value, or interactivity: things a search snippet can’t deliver.

3. Explore whether the threat is also an opportunity.
The NYT licensing deal tells us something important: Google is willing to pay for premium vertical content. If you’re the dominant content platform in your niche, there may be a deal to be made.

A licensing partnership could convert a traffic threat into a revenue stream while maintaining brand visibility inside AI-generated results. Worth exploring.

The Bigger Lesson

I keep coming back to something I’ve learned over the last few years leading product: the most dangerous risks are the ones that look like stability. Traffic holding steady today doesn’t mean the foundation isn’t shifting underneath.

Chegg’s team didn’t wake up one morning to a 34% traffic drop. It happened gradually, then suddenly. The chart looks normal until it doesn’t.

The product leaders who navigate this well will be the ones who diagnosed early, diversified before they had to, and built value that can’t be summarized in a paragraph. The ones who don’t will be staring at a chart they can’t explain and wondering where all the visitors went.

I’d rather be asking the hard questions now than explaining the traffic decline later.

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The Big Five Personality Traits: What Every Change Leader Needs to Know

Most change management initiatives fail. Not because the strategy was wrong or the technology didn’t work but because leaders treated a room full of unique human beings the exact same and expected they would all respond to change the same way.

They won’t. They never do.

After more than a decade leading product and organizational change, running platform modernizations, launching new products, and driving cross-functional alignment at companies serving millions of users, I’ve learned one thing: how people respond to change is largely predictable if you’re paying attention to the right signals.

The Big Five personality model gives you a scientific framework for doing exactly that. It won’t tell you everything about a person. But it will tell you enough to stop being surprised when your most methodical engineer resists a process change that your most curious designer is already championing at lunch.

This article breaks down what the Big Five actually is, what each trait means in practice, and how you can apply it specifically to change management no matter what your title is.

What Is the Big Five Personality Model?

The Big Five — also called the Five-Factor Model (FFM) or referred to by the acronym OCEAN — is the most empirically validated framework in personality psychology. This isn’t Myers-Briggs, which has significant reliability problems. This isn’t an astrology-adjacent personality quiz. The Big Five emerged from decades of peer-reviewed psychometric research and is the standard model used in academic personality research worldwide.

The framework originated from what researchers call the lexical hypothesis: the idea that the most important personality traits in any culture will inevitably be encoded in its language. In the 1930s, psychologists Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert catalogued over 4,500 English adjectives used to describe people (I love this idea and think it would be so interesting to have watched them come up with some of the silly ones). From there, researchers spent decades using factor analysis, a statistical technique for identifying patterns in data, to cluster those descriptors into broader dimensions.

By the 1960s, Warren Norman had consolidated the research into five robust factors. In the 1980s, Paul Costa Jr. and Robert McCrae developed the NEO Personality Inventory, which remains the most widely used Big Five assessment today.

The key distinction from other personality models: the Big Five measures traits on a continuous spectrum, not binary categories. You’re not an “introvert” or an “extravert” but you fall somewhere on a range. That nuance matters enormously when you’re managing real people through real change.

The five traits, spelled out by the OCEAN acronym, are: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

Let’s go through each one in detail.

O — Openness to Experience

What it measures: Creativity, intellectual curiosity, and willingness to engage with new ideas, abstract thinking, and novel experiences.

High scorers tend to be imaginative, intellectually adventurous, and genuinely excited by complexity. Low scorers tend to be practical, conventional, and preference-stable — they want proven methods over experimentation.

Neither end of the spectrum is “better.” High openness without the grounding of conscientiousness can produce someone who loves ideas but ships nothing. Low openness combined with high conscientiousness can produce your most reliable operators.

In change management: High-openness people are your early adopters. They’ll be intrigued by the change, ask the interesting questions, and often become your internal champions. I recently had a large launch and my main champion was so excited that she had been using the prototype before I had even let some of my development team know about the project. The risk with high-openness individuals is that they get excited about the idea of change and then lose interest during the unglamorous implementation phase. I kept my champion excited by only introducing small features to her throughout the build.

Low-openness individuals will resist change more instinctively, not because they’re obstinate, but because they’re wired to value stability and proven approaches. What they need from you is not enthusiasm, it’s evidence. Show them data, precedent, and a clear picture of what stays the same. They’re not your enemy in a change initiative. Ignored, they become your loudest critics. Engaged correctly, they become your quality control. This guy is on my team too. He’s difficult to deal with if I don’t give him the data, but I’ve looked at it as a win because it does force me to slow down and get the data. I know he’s going to be asking me questions and I try to have the answers before he arrives.

The practical play: Segment your communication strategy. Don’t send one change announcement to your entire organization and assume it lands equally. High-openness stakeholders want to be in the room early, contributing to the shape of the change. Low-openness stakeholders want to see the pilot results before they commit. Build your rollout timeline to accommodate both.

C — Conscientiousness

What it measures: Self-discipline, organization, dependability, and goal-directedness. Essentially: how reliably does this person follow through?

High scorers are methodical, thorough, and tend to plan ahead. They show up on time, deliver on commitments, and prefer structured environments. Low scorers are more spontaneous, flexible, and sometimes prone to procrastination — but also often more adaptable in chaotic environments.

In change management: High-conscientiousness people are your implementation backbone. Once they buy into a change, they will execute it more reliably than anyone else in the room. The challenge is that they need the full picture before they commit. Launch an initiative without a detailed plan and they’ll spend the entire kickoff meeting asking questions that feel obstructionist but are actually their brain trying to build the mental model they need to be effective.

Low-conscientiousness people adapt to change more easily in terms of mindset but more erratically in terms of execution. They’re comfortable with ambiguity, which is valuable in early-stage change, but they need more structural accountability to follow through on the consistent behaviors that make change actually stick.

The practical play: During change planning, put your high-conscientiousness people in charge of the process design. Give them the runway to build the playbook. During rollout, give them clear milestones and let them hold the team accountable — they’ll do it naturally. For low-conscientiousness team members, build in more check-in touchpoints and make progress visible publicly. Not as surveillance, but as external structure that replaces the internal structure they don’t naturally have.

E — Extraversion

What it measures: Energy drawn from social interaction, assertiveness, tendency toward positive emotion, and degree of talkativeness and engagement in group settings.

This is the most commonly misunderstood trait. Introversion is not shyness. Extraversion is not confidence. The dimension is about where you draw energy from, social engagement energizes extraverts and drains introverts, not the other way around.

High extraverts are vocal, enthusiastic in group settings, and often the first to speak up. High introverts process internally, may need more time before contributing, and tend to prefer one-on-one conversations over all-hands forums.

In change management: Extraverts will often create the social momentum a change initiative needs. They talk about it at lunch, they advocate in meetings, they make it feel like something real is happening. That’s enormously valuable — but it can also mean they’re generating buzz ahead of the evidence, which creates a credibility gap if the initiative stumbles.

Introverts are processing the change deeply but quietly. The danger is confusing their silence with acceptance or indifference when they might be holding substantive concerns that never surface in a town hall setting. Some of the sharpest change-resistant thinking I’ve encountered came from introverted team members who raised it six weeks later in a one-on-one after everyone thought we were past the debate phase.

The practical play: Don’t let all-hands meetings be your only feedback channel. They structurally favor extraverts. Build in async feedback mechanisms — surveys, Slack threads with explicit prompts, written pre-reads before meetings — that give introverts the processing space they need. And deliberately seek out your quiet team members one-on-one before major decisions close. You’ll learn things you never would have heard in a group setting.

A — Agreeableness

What it measures: Cooperativeness, empathy, trust, and prioritization of social harmony. How inclined is this person to put others’ needs above their own?

High agreeableness correlates with warmth, generosity, and conflict avoidance. Low agreeableness correlates with competitiveness, skepticism, and willingness to challenge or confront. Confronting doesn’t necessarily look like hostility, but there may be a higher tolerance for tension.

In change management: This is the trait that creates the most dangerous blind spots for change leaders. High-agreeableness individuals will often nod along with a change initiative in a group setting even when they have legitimate reservations because disagreeing publicly feels like a social cost they’d rather avoid. When you see heads nodding around the conference table, do not assume buy-in.

Low-agreeableness individuals will push back openly and sometimes aggressively. That can feel uncomfortable and even disrespectful in a change rollout. One thing I’ve learned to appreciate (as alluded to above) is the person who tells you directly that your change plan has a hole in it, they are actually doing you a favor. The person who agrees in the meeting and then quietly undermines the initiative in the hallway is the real risk.

The practical play: Create explicit, structured opportunities for dissent. Not just “does anyone have concerns?” at the end of a packed meeting, but dedicated pre-mortem exercises, anonymous surveys, or devil’s advocate assignments that normalize pushback as part of good process. This gives high-agreeableness people a structured reason to voice concerns (it’s the process, not personal conflict) and channels the energy of low-agreeableness people productively into improving the plan rather than resisting it.

N — Neuroticism

What it measures: Emotional volatility, sensitivity to stress, and tendency toward negative emotional states like anxiety, irritability, and self-doubt.

High scorers experience stronger emotional reactions to uncertainty and stress. Low scorers (sometimes called emotionally stable) tend to remain calm under pressure and recover from setbacks more quickly.

This is the trait that demands the most careful handling in a leadership context. Neuroticism should not be viewed as a weakness or a character flaw. I do think there is a maturity level where it may appear as aspects of Neuroticism, but Neuroticism is a genuine dimension of human experience that shapes how people respond to threat and uncertainty. And organizational change is perceived as a threat by more of your team than you probably realize.

In change management: High-neuroticism team members will likely experience change as significantly more stressful than their low-neuroticism peers, even if the change is objectively positive. They need more frequent reassurance, more visibility into what’s coming, and more explicit communication that their role and contributions are valued. If they’re experiencing change anxiety and you’re not addressing it, it will express itself as resistance, absenteeism, or performance decline.

Low-neuroticism individuals may be so unfazed by change that they underestimate the impact it’s having on their teammates. If you’re a leader who naturally scores low in neuroticism, this is your blind spot. Just because you’re energized by the change doesn’t mean everyone else is. Watch for signals in your team: short tempers, declining work quality, missed deadlines during the transition period. These are symptoms, not character issues.

The practical play: Increase your communication frequency during change and especially about what’s NOT changing. The human brain in stress mode fills uncertainty with worst-case assumptions. Every uncertainty you don’t address explicitly will be addressed implicitly by anxiety. Over-communicate the stable elements: this team stays together, your role isn’t going anywhere, here’s exactly what the next 30 days look like. Predictability is medicine for high-neuroticism team members.

Putting OCEAN to Work: A Change Management Framework

Understanding the five traits individually is useful. Using them together is where the real leverage is.

Here’s how I’ve applied this thinking practically in change initiatives:

Start with team mapping, not org charts. Before you launch a change initiative, spend time mapping your key stakeholders across the OCEAN dimensions based on what you’ve observed. These aren’t formal assessments, but your working knowledge of how these people behave. Who asks the most questions before committing? (High conscientiousness / low openness.) Who nods in meetings but raises concerns later privately? (High agreeableness.) Who goes quiet during stressful periods? (High neuroticism.) This map tells you who needs what from you.

Design your communication strategy around the spectrum, not the average. Most change communications are written for the mythical average employee: moderately open, moderately agreeable, moderately stressed. That person doesn’t actually exist in your organization. Write for the ends of the spectrum. Give your low-openness people evidence and precedent. Give your high-neuroticism people explicit, frequent reassurance. Give your introverted team members async channels to process and respond. One message, multiple formats and frequencies.

Use personality diversity as a feature, not a bug. The knee-jerk response in change management is to minimize resistance. The better instinct is to channel it. High-conscientiousness skeptics will pressure-test your process and find the gaps before they become launch-day disasters. Low-agreeableness team members will surface the honest objections everyone else is thinking but not saying. High-neuroticism individuals will be acutely sensitive to signals that something is off and they’re often right. Build a change governance structure that treats these people as assets, not obstacles.

Match your change champions to the stakeholders they’re influencing. A high-extravert, high-openness champion will be brilliant at building excitement in your early adopters. They’re probably the wrong person to walk your most cautious, routine-oriented team members through the transition. Match your internal advocates to the personality profiles of the people they need to bring along. This is people strategy, not manipulation, it’s meeting people where they actually are.

A Note on Using This Responsibly

The Big Five is a lens, not a label. People are more complex than five dimensions, their trait expressions shift with context, and nobody should be reduced to their personality profile in a change initiative or anywhere else.

What this framework does is expand your range of hypotheses. Instead of concluding that your cautious colleague is “resistant to change”, which puts the problem on them and takes it out of your hands, you have a more useful hypothesis: they may be low-openness and high-conscientiousness. That means they need evidence and a clear plan, not enthusiasm. That’s a solvable problem. “Resistant to change” isn’t.

Used that way, the Big Five doesn’t box people in. It opens up more humane, more effective ways of leading them through the hardest parts of organizational life.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Big Five personality model?

The Big Five, also known as the Five-Factor Model (FFM) or OCEAN, is an empirically validated framework that measures human personality across five dimensions: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Unlike personality typing systems that sort people into categories, the Big Five measures each trait on a continuous scale, making it a more accurate representation of the actual range of human personality.

How does personality affect change management?

Personality traits significantly shape how individuals perceive, process, and respond to organizational change. People high in Neuroticism typically experience change as more stressful and need more frequent, explicit communication. People high in Openness tend to embrace change early but may disengage during implementation. People high in Conscientiousness need structured plans before committing. Understanding these tendencies allows change leaders to design communication strategies, rollout timelines, and feedback mechanisms that meet people where they actually are rather than where leaders wish they were.

Should you give your team a Big Five assessment?

Formal assessments can be useful, but they’re not required to apply this framework. Effective leaders can identify rough trait profiles through observation and noticing who asks detailed questions before committing, who speaks up readily in group settings versus one-on-one, who seems energized versus stressed by ambiguity. Formal assessments add precision; behavioral observation gets you most of the way there and doesn’t require an HR initiative to begin.

Is the Big Five better than Myers-Briggs for organizational use?

For research-backed applications, yes. The Big Five has substantially stronger empirical support than Myers-Briggs (MBTI), which has been criticized for low test-retest reliability, meaning people often get different type assignments when they retake it. The Big Five is the standard model in academic personality research precisely because of its consistency and predictive validity. For organizational change management specifically, the Big Five’s continuous scale model is also more practically useful because it captures the nuance that binary type systems miss.

What is the most important Big Five trait for a change leader to understand?

Neuroticism. Not because it’s more common, but because it’s most likely to be invisible until it creates problems. High-neuroticism team members experience genuine distress during organizational change that can express itself as resistance, disengagement, or performance decline if it’s not addressed. And leaders who naturally score low in neuroticism often don’t notice it in their team because they’re not experiencing the same stress response. Understanding and proactively addressing the anxiety dimension of change is one of the highest-leverage moves a change leader can make.

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AI Just Walked Into Your Website Without Knocking

Last month I asked ChatGPT a question I’ve asked Google a thousand times: “What’s a good sermon illustration about forgiveness?”

It gave me a solid answer. Three illustrations, structured with context, application points, even a suggested closing line. It was genuinely useful.

And it never sent me to a single website.

That moment hit me differently than it would have two years ago. I run a platform with over 245,000 sermons and 50,000 illustrations. I didn’t just lose a click. I watched an AI system do what our product does, using content that likely came from sites like ours, and deliver it in a way that made visiting the source unnecessary.

That’s a revenue problem. (I wrote about the traffic implications of this shift recently.) (I wrote about the traffic implications of this shift recently.)

The Zero-Click Layer

Most product leaders I know are still thinking about AI as a feature to bolt onto their product: chatbots, smart search, AI-generated recommendations. And that matters. But there’s a bigger shift happening underneath that conversation.

AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity) are becoming the front door to the internet. They don’t just search. They visit your site, interpret your content, synthesize it, and serve it directly to the user. The user gets the answer. You get nothing.

Google’s featured snippets started this zero-click trend years ago. BUT what’s different now is the depth. A featured snippet pulls a paragraph. An AI answer engine can synthesize an entire page, or multiple pages, into a comprehensive response that genuinely satisfies the user’s intent.

If your business depends on organic traffic as a top-of-funnel engine, this should keep you up at night.

Your Content Library Is Both Your Greatest Asset and Your Biggest Vulnerability

Here’s the paradox I’ve been sitting with.

We spent years building one of the largest structured content libraries in our space. That library is what drives our organic traffic. It’s what Google indexes. It’s what pastors find when they search “sermon on grace” at 11pm on a Saturday night.

That same library is now what AI systems are ingesting to train their models and generate their answers. The very content that built our moat is being used to fill in the moat.

And here’s what makes it worse. The emerging AI-native competitors in our space don’t even need to win Google rankings. They ARE the AI tool. They’re built to live inside AI workflows, not compete for traditional search clicks.

I think this pattern applies to any SaaS company sitting on a large content asset. If you’ve built your growth engine on content that AI can summarize, you’re exposed.

AEO: A Genuinely Different Discipline

There’s a term gaining traction: AEO, or AI Engine Optimization. And I’ll be honest, my first reaction was skepticism. We don’t need another three-letter acronym.

But the more I’ve dug into it, the more I realize it represents a genuinely different discipline.

SEO optimizes for ranking. AEO optimizes for citation. The goal is to be the source that AI systems reference AND link back to. That requires a fundamentally different content strategy.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

  1. Structured data becomes non-negotiable. Schema markup, clear metadata, explicit problem-solution framing in your content. AI systems parse structure, not vibes. (Schema.org is the starting point.)
  2. Content architecture matters more than keyword density. How your content is organized (headers, relationships between pages, internal linking) determines how AI systems understand your authority on a topic.
  3. Gated content is a double-edged sword. If your best content is behind a login wall, AI crawlers can’t index it. You’re invisible to the answer engine. But if everything is open, you get summarized without a click. The play is in the middle: structured preview content that AI can cite, with depth that requires the visit.
  4. Domain-specific language is your moat. Generic content gets synthesized away. Content that uses the precise language of your audience (the way a pastor describes their Saturday night prep struggle, the specific vocabulary of sermon structure) is harder for AI to replace and more likely to be cited with attribution.

What I’m Doing About It

I’m not going to pretend I have this figured out. But here’s where my head is:

Audit how AI sees us. Before optimizing anything, we need to understand how our top pages render to AI crawlers. What structured data exists? What’s behind login walls that blocks indexing?

Treat AI referral as a distinct channel. We track direct traffic, organic search, paid. AI referral needs its own lane in our analytics. We can’t optimize what we can’t measure.

Build content AI can’t summarize away. The full sermon text? AI can handle that. But a pastor’s framework for adapting a sermon to their specific congregation? A diagnostic tool for matching an illustration to a particular emotional moment in a service? That’s interactive, personalized, and requires being on the platform.

Move faster than the AI-native competitors. They have the structural advantage of being built for AI workflows. We have the structural advantage of 20+ years of trusted content and relationships. The question is whether we can adapt our distribution before they build our depth.

The Strategies That Got You Here Won’t Sustain You

I keep coming back to this. The strategies that built organic growth over the last decade won’t sustain it over the next five years.

That’s a reason to move, not a reason to panic.

The companies that treat AI answer engines as a new channel will capture disproportionate share of the next era of discovery. The ones that keep optimizing for Google page one while AI summarizes their content into zero-click answers will watch their traffic erode and wonder what happened.

I’d rather be early and wrong about the tactics than late and right about the trend.

The AI just walked into your website. The question is whether it’s going to send people your way, or make visiting you unnecessary.

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Revolutionizing Product Management: Insights from Industry Leaders and Emerging Trends

In the fast-paced world of software as a service (SaaS), product management stands at the intersection of technology, strategy, and user experience. Recent insights from industry leaders and emerging trends highlight how product teams are navigating new challenges and opportunities, especially with the integration of AI and advanced database infrastructures. This article explores key learnings from top product management blogs, offering a comprehensive guide for professionals looking to enhance their strategies and operations.

The Evolution of Database Infrastructure

The shift in database technology is pivotal for SaaS companies aiming for scalability and performance. Intercom’s journey with Vitess and PlanetScale, as discussed in “Evolving Intercom’s database infrastructure: Lessons and progress,” showcases:

  • Scalability: How adopting PlanetScale Metal has allowed for zero-downtime maintenance and performance improvements.
  • Performance: Insights into how new database technologies can handle increased load without compromising speed.
  • Lessons Learned: The challenges and triumphs of integrating new systems into existing architectures, offering a roadmap for similar transitions.

Designing for User Clarity

Product design isn’t just about aesthetics; it’s about clarity and usability. Pranava Tandra from Intercom shares in “Intercom on Product: Designing for Clarity”:

  • Balancing Simplicity with Depth: Strategies for redesigning information architecture to make complex features discoverable yet not overwhelming.
  • AI Integration: How AI can be seamlessly integrated to enhance user interaction without disrupting the existing user flow.

Learning from Product Conferences

Conferences like #mtpcon London provide a wealth of knowledge:

  • Key Takeaways: Insights from product leaders on current trends, including the integration of AI in product management, as seen in “What we learned at #mtpcon London 2025.”
  • Networking and Collaboration: The value of community and peer learning in advancing product strategies.

Leveraging AI in Product Management

AI’s role in product management has grown exponentially:

  • Enterprise AI Agents: The article “How to build an Enterprise AI Agent” discusses how AI can manage and utilize organizational knowledge, reducing productivity drain.
  • Analytics Superpowers: AI’s ability to simplify SQL queries and data analysis, as highlighted in “Are you struggling with SQL? AI can give you analytics superpowers.”

Strategic User Engagement and Retention

Driving user adoption and retention is crucial:

  • Onboarding Gamification: Utilizing gamification techniques to engage users during onboarding, as explored in “11 Onboarding Gamification Examples to Engage & Retain Users.”
  • Feature Adoption: Tactics to ensure new features are adopted, enhancing user experience and product value, detailed in “How to Drive Feature Adoption: 10 Proven Strategies (+ Examples).”

Customer-Centric Approaches

Understanding and leveraging customer feedback:

  • Feedback Tools: A review of the best tools for collecting and analyzing customer feedback in “16 Best Customer Feedback Tools For SaaS Companies.”
  • UX Metrics: Key metrics to track for measuring user experience, as discussed in “How to Measure User Experience: 7 Key UX Metrics.”

Conclusion

The landscape of product management is continuously evolving, driven by technological advancements and strategic insights shared by industry leaders. From redesigning for clarity and leveraging AI for deeper analytics to enhancing customer engagement through innovative onboarding and feedback mechanisms, product managers have so many tools and knowledge at their disposal. By staying informed and adaptable, product teams are ready to not only meet but exceed market demands, ensuring their products remain competitive and user-centric.

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25 Skills a Product Manager should focus on in 2025

I’ve been in product leadership long before the term ‘Product Management’ became a common buzzword. Over the past eight years, I’ve held various titles with ‘Product’ in them, and yet, every day brings new lessons and insights. As I approach 2025, I’ve realized the importance of grounding myself in the principles that have guided me so far. This list serves as a personal reminder—a collection of foundations I’ve built upon, shaped by insights from books like Crucial Conversations, INSPIRED, The E-Myth Revisited, and The Mom Test.

I. Foundational Principles

  1. Embrace the Product Mindset: Product management is not just a job; it’s a mindset 1. It requires a passion for solving customer problems and a commitment to continuous improvement.
  2. Deep Customer Knowledge: Become an undisputed expert on your customers2. This involves understanding their needs, pain points, and desires through both qualitative and quantitative data3.
  3. Data-Driven Decisions: Be comfortable with data and analytics4. Use data to understand how customers are using your products, analyze A/B test results, and inform product decisions.
  4. Master the Product: Be an expert on your actual product and your industry. Share your knowledge openly and generously.
  5. Continuous Learning: Stay intellectually curious and quickly apply new technologies to solve problems for customers5.

II. Team Dynamics & Collaboration

  1. Build Strong Product Teams: Focus on building and nurturing strong, collaborative relationships with your product team. A product team typically includes a product manager, a product designer, and engineers.
  2. Empowered Teams: Champion empowered product teams that are equipped to solve business problems. Ensure your team understands the company vision and how their work contributes to the larger purpose6.
  3. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work effectively with product designers, engineers, and product marketing managers. Ensure product marketing is embedded with the product team7.
  4. Effective Communication: Communicate product learnings clearly and consistently. Keep stakeholders informed and engaged8.
  5. Delivery Management: Recognize the importance of delivery managers in removing obstacles for the team. Their work ensures that the team can focus on building valuable products9.

III. Strategic Product Development

  1. Product Vision: Develop a compelling and inspiring product vision10. Use it to articulate your purpose and inspire the team11.
  2. Product Strategy: Define a clear product strategy that serves as a path to achieving the product vision. Ensure alignment between the product strategy and overall business strategy12.
  3. Product Principles: Complement your product vision and strategy with a set of guiding principles that define the nature of the products you want to create13.
  4. Outcome-Focused Roadmaps: Shift from output-based roadmaps to those focused on business outcomes14. Ensure every roadmap item is tied to a specific business objective.
  5. Embrace Discovery: Prioritize product discovery, which involves collaboration between product management, UX design, and engineering. Tackle risks before writing any code.
  6. Prioritize Ruthlessly: Focus on a single, scalable idea rather than jumping on every good one15.
  7. Problem-First Approach: Focus on solving the underlying problem. Don’t get caught up in the solution before you’ve fully understood the problem16.
  8. Customer Discovery Programs: Use customer discovery programs to ensure that you’re building a product that customers love.

IV. Product Discovery and Delivery

  1. Master Discovery Techniques: Utilize various discovery techniques to understand customer needs and validate ideas. This includes opportunity assessment, customer letters, and startup canvases.
  2. Rapid Experimentation: Use prototypes to conduct rapid experiments17. Test ideas with users, customers, engineers, and business stakeholders in hours and days, not weeks and months18.
  3. Usability Testing: Conduct regular usability tests to identify friction points in prototypes. Use these tests to learn about how customers use your products19.
  4. Continuous Delivery: Strive for frequent release cycles to ensure teams move quickly and release with confidence.
  5. Iterative Approach: Understand that it typically takes several iterations to get the execution of an idea to the point where it delivers the expected business value20.

V. Leadership & Growth

  1. Product Evangelism: Become an effective evangelist for your product. Inspire your team, stakeholders, and customers by “selling the dream”. Use prototypes to communicate the product vision21.
  2. Adaptability: Be prepared to adapt to changes in the market and new trends22. Be flexible with the details, but remain stubborn on the overall vision.

Conclusion

Product management in 2025 will demand a combination of deep technical knowledge, strategic thinking, and a genuine passion for solving customer problems. By focusing on these 25 areas, product managers can position themselves for success and contribute to the creation of truly impactful products. It’s not about having all the answers, but about asking the right questions and embracing a continuous learning mindset.

  1. “The art of Product Management is the art of life itself. Surround your-selves by great people, focus on your mojo, build great stuff with integrity, hold strong opinions but lightly. And Marty is one of the best teachers of this art.” —Punit Soni, Founder and CEO, Robin, Former Google APM ↩︎
  2. “you need to become an acknowledged expert on the customer: their issues, pains, desires, how they think—and for business products, how they work, and how they decide to buy.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  3. “Without this deep customer knowledge, you’re just guessing. This requires both qualitative learning (to understand why our users and customers behave the way they do), and quantitative learning (to understand what they are doing)” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  4. “… product managers are expected to be comfortable with data and analytics. They are expected to have both quantitative skills as well as qualitative skills. The Internet enables unprecedented volume and timeliness of data.
    A big part of knowing your customer is understanding what they’re doing with your product. Most product managers start their day with half an hour or so in the analytics tools, understanding what’s been happening in the past 24 hours. They’re looking at sales analytics and usage analytics. They’re looking at the results of A/B tests.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  5. Be “intellec-tually curious, quickly learning and applying new technologies to solve problems for customers, to reach new audiences, or to enable new business models.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  6. “The product teams need to have the necessary business context. They need to have a solid understanding of where the company is heading, and they need to know how their particular team is supposed to contribute to the larger purpose.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  7. “… because that’s where they are connected to the experience that the customer is having an opportunity to engage with.” —INSPIRED, Martina Lauchengco ↩︎
  8. “Evangelize continuously and relentlessly. There is no such thing as over-communicating when it comes to explaining and selling the vision. Especially in larger organizations, there is sim-ply no escaping the need for near-constant evangelization. You’ll find that people in all corners of the company will at random times get nervous or scared about something they see or hear. Quickly reassure them before their fear infects others.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  9. “In growth-stage and enterprise companies, many product managers complain that they have to spend far too much of their time doing project management activities. As a result, they have almost no time to address their primary product responsibility: ensuring that the engineers have a product worth building.
    Delivery managers are a special type of project manager whose mission is all about removing obstacles—also known as impediments—for the team. Sometimes, these obstacles involve other product teams, and sometimes they involve non-product functions. In a single day, they might track down someone in marketing and press them for a decision or an approval, coordinate with the delivery manager on another team about prioritizing a key dependency, persuade a product designer to create some visual assets for one of the front-end developers, and deal with a dozen other similar roadblocks.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  10. “The product vision describes the future we are trying to create, typically somewhere between two and five years out. For hardware or device-centric companies, it’s usually five to 10 years out.
    Note that this is not the same as the company mission statement. Examples of mission statements are “organize the world’s information” or “make the world more open and connected” or “enable anyone any-where to buy anything anytime.” Mission statements are useful, but they don’t say anything about how we plan on accomplishing that. That’s what the product vision is for.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  11. “Start with why. This is coincidentally the name of a great book on the value of product vision by Simon Sinek. The central notion here is to use the product vision to articulate your purpose. Everything follows from that.
    Fall in love with the problem, not with the solution. I hope you’ve heard this before, as it’s been said many times, in many ways, by many people. But it’s very true and something a great many product people struggle with.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  12. “Communicate the strategy across the organization. This is part of evangelizing the vision. It’s important that all key business partners in the company know the customers we’re focused on now and which are planned for later. Stay especially closely synced with sales, marketing, finance, and service.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  13. “Where the product vision describes the future you want to create, and the product strategy describes your path to achieving that vision, the product principles speak to the nature of the products you want to create.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  14. … focus “on outcome and not output. Realize that typical product roadmaps are all about output. Yet, good teams are asked to deliver business results.
    Most of the product world has the same definition for product roadmap, but there are a few variations. I define product roadmap as a prioritized list of features and projects your team has been asked to work on. These product roadmaps are usually done on a quarterly basis, but sometimes they are a rolling three months, and some companies do annual roadmaps.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  15. “Startups are about focusing and executing on a single, scalable idea rather than jumping on every good one which crosses your desk.” —The Mom Test, Rob Fitzpatrick ↩︎
  16. “This is another reason why typical product roadmaps are so problematic. They’re lists of features and projects where each feature or project is a possible solution. Somebody believes that feature will solve the problem or it wouldn’t be on the roadmap, but it’s all too possible they are wrong. It’s not their fault—there’s just no way to know at the stage it’s put on the roadmap.
    However, there very likely is a legitimate problem behind that potential solution, and it’s our job in the product organization to tease out the underlying problem and ensure that whatever solution we deliver solves that underlying problem.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  17. “… use prototypes to conduct rapid experiments in product discovery, and then in delivery, we build and release products in hopes of achieving product/market fit, which is a key step on the way to delivering on the company’s product vision.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  18. “If we can prototype and test ideas with users, customers, engi-neers, and business stakeholders in hours and days—rather than in weeks and months—it changes the dynamics, and most important, the results.
    It’s worth pointing out that it isn’t the list of ideas on the roadmap that’s the problem. If it was just ideas, there’s not much harm in that. The issue is that anytime you put a list of ideas on a document entitled “roadmap,” no matter how many disclaimers you put on it, people across the company will interpret the items as a commitment. And that’s the crux of the problem, because now you’re committed to build-ing and delivering this thing, even when it doesn’t solve the underlying problem.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  19. “You will need to define in advance the set of tasks that you want to test. Usually, these are fairly obvious. If, for example, you’re building an alarm clock app for a mobile device, your users will need to do things like set an alarm, find and hit the snooze button, and so on. There may also be more obscure tasks, but concentrate on the primary tasks—the ones that users will do most of the time.
    Some people still believe that the product manager and the prod-uct designer are too close to the product to do this type of testing objectively, and they may either get their feelings hurt or only hear what they want to hear. We get past this obstacle in two ways. First, we train the product managers and designers on how to conduct themselves, and second, we make sure the test happens quickly—before they fall in love with their own ideas. Good prod-uct managers know they will get the product wrong initially and that nobody gets it right the first time. They know that learning from these tests is the fastest path to a successful product.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  20. “…even with the ideas that do prove to be valuable, usable, feasible, and viable, it typically takes several itera-tions to get the execution of this idea to the point where it delivers the expected business value that management was hoping for. This is often referred to as time to money” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan  ↩︎
  21. “The product vision needs to inspire. Remember that we need product teams of missionaries, not mercenaries. More than anything else, it is the product vision that will inspire missionary-like passion in the organization. Create something you can get excited about. You can make any product vision meaningful if you focus on how you genuinely help your users and customers.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  22. “Determine and embrace relevant and meaningful trends. Too many companies ignore important trends for far too long. It is not very hard to identify the important trends. What’s hard is to help the organization understand how those trends can be leveraged by your products to solve customer problems in new and better ways.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
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Ecomate: trusted globally as the top environmentally friendly alternative blowing agent

Ecomate is a foam blowing agent technology and family of polyurethanes that has a neutral impact on the environment. Ecomate foams provide excellent benefits to a wide range of products, without contributing to global warming, ozone depletion or smog production. As the EPA has phased out chemicals damaging to our environment, Ecomate has been there as a reliable, environmentally-friendly alternative since 2002.

Ecomate technology is based on the use of a unique blend of hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide. This blend is non-toxic, non-flammable, and has a zero ozone depletion potential (ODP). Ecomate foams are also very energy-efficient, providing excellent insulation properties.

Ecomate technology is used in a wide range of applications, including:

  • Rigid polyurethane foam insulation for buildings and appliances
  • Flexible polyurethane foam for automotive seating and packaging
  • Integral skin polyurethane foam for refrigerators and freezers
  • Extruded polystyrene (XPS) foam for insulation and packaging

Ecomate technology is a valuable tool for manufacturers who are looking for environmentally-friendly alternatives to traditional blowing agents. Ecomate foams provide excellent performance and meet the most stringent environmental regulations.

Here are some of the benefits of using Ecomate technology:

  • Environmentally friendly: Ecomate is a zero-ODP, zero-GWP blowing agent that does not contribute to global warming or ozone depletion.
  • Energy-efficient: Ecomate foams provide excellent insulation properties, which can help to reduce energy costs.
  • Safe: Ecomate is non-toxic, non-flammable, and has a low odor.
  • Durable: Ecomate foams are long-lasting and can withstand a variety of environmental conditions.
  • Versatile: Ecomate technology can be used in a wide range of applications, including rigid foam insulation, flexible foam, and integral skin foam.

If you are looking for an environmentally-friendly, energy-efficient, and safe blowing agent, Ecomate technology is a great option. Ecomate foams provide excellent performance and meet the most stringent environmental regulations. It’s non-toxic, non-flammable, has zero ozone depletion potential, and provides excellent insulation properties – meaning it can help you save energy costs in the long run.

If you’re interested in discovering more, contact my friends, the creators of ecomate, at fsi.co

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Marketing Dashboards

In my role at FSI.co I deal with an overwhelming amount of data. To make it simpler, I’m going to focus on one segment of the data that I’ve been trying to get a grasp on so that I can help further our mission – to be known as the provider for polyurethane chemical systems.

I’m challenging our Digital Marketing Director to develop dashboards so the executive team can quickly see and digest how effective the marketing campaigns we run are. As I’ve been researching business intelligence further, I am beginning to understand that finding data points is often too easy, and throwing up random data on a dashboard lives in the primary stage of DATA.

Let’s back up here and explain the four stages of DIKW otherwise known as the Wisdom Hierarchy. This is a way of categorizing data into four distinct levels: Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom.

  • Data is raw data that has not been organized or interpreted. For example, temperature readings in various regions.
  • Information is data that has been categorized and organized according to certain criteria.
  • Knowledge is “justified true belief”, as defined by Plato. It includes additional relational information such as correlations, causation, logic and conditions for the models to hold. This knowledge can then be put into actionable models which are a form of knowledge in themselves.
  • Wisdom comes from being able to identify and apply this relevant knowledge in meaningful ways.

So how would all of this help us in this example of a dashboard I’m preparing to setup in the Marketing department?

I listened to a podcast recently where Forrester’s VP & Principal Analyst Ross Graber stated: “Our latest buying study showed us that on average buyers are going through 27 different motions before they make a successful purchasing decision.”

That statistic aligns with what I’ve been hearing for the last year or two. That 27 motions are not time boxed either. As an example, one of our chemical systems is such a large scale decision that it takes roughly 5 years to move the purchasing organization along the buyer’s journey from Awareness to Decision.

My goal with setting up the dashboard is to be able to identify these 27 interactions and see where we can help answer questions or minimize risks, fears, anxieties the business may have. How can we turn a 5 year decision into a 2 year decision?

That is where wisdom is in the DIKW hierarchy.

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Schneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules

Ben Schneiderman worked in Human-Computer Interaction and his research revealed these eight golden rules for interface design.

  1. Strive for consistency. Use familiar icons, colors, menu styles, calls to action, etc.
  2. Enable users to use shortcuts. Users who use your product often will inevitably understand it and no longer need directions on how to use it. They will start looking for ways to move through the interface quicker, provide them shortcuts.
  3. Offer informative feedback. Breadcrumbs and ripple effects on websites, ATM noises, haptic responses on phones/watches are examples of informative feedback.
  4. Design dialogue to yield closure. Thank you messages after purchase, Congratulations after sign-ups, these messages close the interaction for the user.
  5. Offer simple error handling. This reminds me of back in the day when forms were really hard to develop and if you filled one out incorrectly, you would lose all of your information when the page kicked you back. Simple error handling flags fields that may have been missed or filled out improperly.
  6. Permit easy reversal of actions. If the user feels comfortable that errors are reversible, they will explore more.
  7. Support internal locus of control. If your users explore more, they will feel more in control and ultimately trust your application or company more.
  8. Reduce short-term memory load. Human attention is limited. We are only able to remember five things at a time (give or take 2). Recognition is always easier than recalling something.

Deep Dive Resources:

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/

This post is part of a series of quick informative lists I can refer back to when doing research or preparing presentations.

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Information Facts of Life

According to an article from HBR (March-April 1994), there are rules governing information sharing behavior. Having run across these rules doing some Change Management research this morning, I find these rules relevant even 26 years later.

  • Most of the information in organizations – and most of the information people really care about – is not on computers.
  • Managers prefer to get information from people rather than computers; people add value to raw information by interpreting it and adding context.
  • The more complex and detailed an information management approach, the less likely it is to change anyone’s behavior.
  • All information does not have to be common; an element of flexibility and disorder is desirable.
  • The more a company knows and cares about its core business area, the less likely employees will be to agree on a common definition of it.
  • If information is power and money, people will not share it easily.
  • The willingness of individuals to use a specified information format is directly proportional to how much they have participated in defining it, or trust other who did.
  • To make the most of electronic communications, employees must first learn to communicate face to face.
  • Since people are important sources and integrators of information, any maps of information should include people.
  • There is no such thing as information overload; if information is really useful our appetite for it is insatiable.

Original Article can be found here.

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Leadership is Empathy

Through my research I settled on a statement that I think everyone should become aware of: “The human heart desires to be heard, understood, and acknowledged.” As a husband, father, and leader, I try to “practice what I preach” so I listen to my wife and my kids. In some of the conversations and media consumption my wife and I have been going through lately, we have been diving into empathy.

This morning I happened to listen to a podcast with John Maxwell and Simon Sinek in which Simon stated something so succinctly that I wanted to share it:

When I hear people talking about the system is broken. There’s no mythical system, it’s us. Our society is a collection of individuals, and whatever the balance of behaviors from those individuals is the system you get. And so, it starts at home, it starts with us, and so, we want to change the system, this elephant, the only way to eat an elephant is one mouthful at a time. And so, I think we need to set ourselves in a course to become better listeners ourselves, and there’s a difference between listening and hearing. You know, hearing is understanding the words that are said to you, listening is trying to get to the meaning of the words that are said to you, with an appreciation that sometimes people say the wrong thing, they say what they’re trying to say badly. Sometimes emotions are involved, sometimes they get flustered, and it’s not for us to take their words personally, or to even pick apart, but to rather try and show up with curiosity, to really understand the meaning. What I’m describing is empathy. We show up with empathy. That’s all this is, and to look past the superficial.

Simon Sinek

I appreciate all that is said in that paragraph. I was really grateful that he discusses looking past the superficial. In a conversation I had the other day, I was discussing how the individual was upset and I understood their being upset, but they were focusing on a secondary issue and not the primary issue.

I aim to focus on the primary first and to put the second things second. With empathy, I want to “draw out” the depths of what the individual in front of me is saying.

The purpose in a man’s heart is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out.

Proverbs 20:5
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Four Questions to Ask yourself when developing a Brand

  1. What does our brand stand for?
  2. Based on the product selection and website, what would people think our brand stands for?
  3. Does our brand serve a need?
  4. Could a shift in brand serve this product in a better way?

It may be time to audit your website or communication in general. Often these audits are done by third-party consultants who don’t have the history or office politics and can ask Why? without offending colleagues. If you need help with an audit, contact me today and lets work together.

The full article with background details for each of the questions can be found here

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Understanding ITIL Change Management

Notes from a great talk on the do’s and don’ts of Change Management, specifically related to ITIL.

Key take-aways from this IDC Report from 2014:

  • the average cost of an infrastructure failure is $100,000 per hour.
  • 80% of failures are due to custom adjustments of current tools to meet DevOps practices – meaning: a breakdown of process, or lack of process (incorrect SOPs or human errors), causes these types of failures

Change Management is about coordinating/collaborating resources, especially people, across an organization and preparing them for a change that’s about to happen. Ensuring the people are ready, the technology is ready, and the process is ready so that it can be effective and efficient as it moves into production.

There is risk involved with Change Management. If a change fails, it can deteriorate the business. There is knowledge required for Change Management. The stakeholders need to be prepared with the right knowledge of what to expect.

With that in mind, Why is Change Management important?

  1. Operational Excellence
    It is simple to focus on doing a lot of things instead of the right things. Change Management helps keep focus on the business strategy and doing the right things.
  2. Management of Risk
    Managing Change ultimately is managing risk. Changes get thrown into the mix constantly, but if it doesn’t add business value, is it the right thing? It could be a major risk to the organization, to the financial resources, and to the customers perspective.
  3. Overall Strategy Support
    Change Managers maintain focus on keeping the business moving towards its goal.

The 8 Do’s and Don’ts of Change Management

Do Coordinate and Collaborate across the organization

Make sure all stakeholders, customers, users, and the business are aware of the change – communication is key.

Don’t overlook the role of people

People are the key. It is human nature to not like change, but as a Change Manager we need to help individuals become not just compliant, but compassionate. When people really believe in the change, they buy in and they do the right thing.

Do know your inventory

Understand your resources and their capability. Be familiar with your Configuration Management Database (CMDB), Configuration Management System (CMS), and the Service Knowledge Management Systems (SKMS). These should follow a service model (how services are delivered) underpinned by your services, infrastructure, people and capabilities. This knowledge allows the Change Manager to foresee problems and how the change in one area might affect other areas.

Don’t introduce too much change at once

There’s a rhythm to change. Too much change will cause “red flag” syndrome where the changes become ignored. The Change Manager needs to understand where the business and the customers are at and find that balanced rhythm.

Do communicate to those who need to know about the change

The Forward Schedule of Changes (FSC) is the document used to communicate change plans to the organization. Use this to: Track the list of approved changes and the proposed implementation dates. Provide visibility to key stakeholders on the status of changes being introduced in the production environment. Nothing is worse than having something change when you didn’t know anything about it. This causes incidents and distrust. Individuals will start ‘looking’ for negative aspects and things begin to be disrupted.

Don’t think about change in a silo

A change, no matter the size, can have domino effects. Therefore, any change is an organizational change and needs to be communicated in a way that anyone in the organization can see the value and its alignment with the vision.

Do approach change management from a Service-Oriented perspective

Look at the service and how it affects your customers and the relationships within the organization.

Don’t pick technology that doesn’t support a holistic perspective

This is in alignment with the “Do” from above – sometimes processes are inter-related. Make sure the technology takes the organization as a whole into account. You don’t want to change the tech in one area and it ends up causing an entire division to no longer be able to communicate strategic information. Remember from the IDC report – customization of tools accounts for 80% of failures.

Change Management affects everything in an organization.

In summary, the 8 Do’s and Don’ts of Change Management can be quickly navigated by this excellent list of the 7 R’s of Change Management: For proper impact assessment and understanding of benefits to risk, these seven questions should be asked.

  • Who RAISED the change?
  • What is the REASON for the change?
  • What is the RETURN required from the change?
  • What are the RISKS involved in the change?
  • What RESOURCES are required to deliver the change?
  • Who is RESPONSIBLE for the build, test and implementation of the change?
  • What is the RELATIONSHIP between this change and other changes?
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Book Review – Every Job is a Sales Job

The pandemic that is currently deteriorating economies globally is causing businesses to take a hard look at why they do what they do. I feel that the businesses that add value will be able to weather this storm. I believe we will see businesses that are not making “win-win” sales, let’s call them greedy (i.e. they win, customers lose), are going to dry up quickly. Note: There are some businesses that fall-in the “win/lose” category which have become too powerful to die, that’s a scary thought.

Why are the greedy ones going to dry up? Due to the unemployment rates skyrocketing consumers and businesses alike are now faced with looking at their finances on a granular level. It seems that necessities will trump luxuries for the next few years and I hope that many individuals are making wiser decisions when it comes to purchasing on credit versus waiting until they have the funds to buy in cash.

With all of this said, I have been challenged by a friend to read through the book “Every Job is a Sales Job: How to Use the Art of Selling to Win at Work” by Dr. Cindy McGovern.

The first “aha” moment in the book for me, after a lot of introduction, was her statement “Kindness sells.” She discusses a few stories along the lines of:

A Chick-fil-A opened on a Sunday just so a 14-year-old boy could fulfill his dream of working at a drive-through. The store’s manager let the child, who has autism and cerebral palsy, hand out cookies to friends and family during his “shift.”

That’s where I feel like the whole purpose of this book becomes evident. If I could summarize the entire book in one sentence, one question, it would be this: “What do you do at work to create a moment that matters for someone?”

To survive the pandemic, to survive 2020 in general, I believe the companies that create moments that matter – those are the companies that survive. Something like that requires an incredible team, but you can’t just have an incredible team, you need an incredible leader that embodies that ‘kindness.’

So, to all the leaders, C-Suites, executives, and managers – how are you leading your teams? Do you see the individual in front of you? I know of many who are hurting right now, your employees are probably hurting. I know of many who are anxious at the moment, your employees are probably anxious. Beyond that, you are probably hurting and anxious as well. If you are, contact me – I’m here for you. I want to see you able to stand as the leader you are and incite courage in those who follow you.

Move in kindness. Move others to do the same.

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Poem about “The Call of the Wild”

My 12 yo son just read the book “The Call of the Wild” and had an assignment to write a poem about it. After thinking long and hard, he wrote this and I couldn’t be prouder.

Buck.

Civilised, Aristocratic,

hunting, playing, swimming,

change, abuse, anger, pain,

labouring, straining, learning,

angry, mean,

Wild.

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The Paradox of Transparency

A gossip goes around telling secrets,
but those who are trustworthy can keep a confidence.

Proverbs 11:13

In a conversation with my wife earlier this morning we were discussing how blessed I am to work for the company I work for. I so appreciate the anonymity I’ve been given and I was relaying how I feel my productivity has skyrocketed because of it. This place of work is the polar opposite of my previous contract. Previously I worked in an open office where individuals were micromanaged and it felt like the productivity of that office was at a barely functional state. If something needed to be done quickly, that company would simply ‘throw more bodies’ on the task versus attempt to improve productivity. This only added to the confusion and frustration, dragging the productivity down further. It was a terrible cycle.

My current contract has me working wherever and whenever I choose. I have found that I naturally am excited about my work, diving into it, thinking through problems. I am probably 3x more productive in this environment and the organization actually gets more quality hours out of me because I end up working whenever I have an open chance, even outside of regular working hours.

In researching this phenomenon and trying to grasp language for what I’ve personally experienced and how it affects productivity and how management philosophies can cause a breeding ground for productivity or for lies and deceit, I came across this amazing paper/research project done by Ethan S. Bernstein (link to PDF) called: The Transparency Paradox: A Role for Privacy in Organizational Learning and Operational Control. He concludes the paper by stating:

We typically assume that the more we can see, the more we can understand about an organization. This research suggests a counteracting force: the more that can be seen, the more individuals may respond strategically with hiding behavior and encryption to nullify the understanding of that which is seen. When boundaries to visibility fall, invisible boundaries to accurate understanding may replace them at a significant cost. In this research, that cost was a 10–15 percent detriment to performance.

Hence the transparency paradox: broad visibility, intended to increase transparency, can breed hiding behavior and myths of learning and control, thereby reducing transparency. Conversely, I have observed that transparency can actually increase within the boundaries of organizational modules, or what the operators called zones of privacy, when the visible component of transparency is decreased or limited between them.

This paper does not challenge the value of transparency. Instead, it challenges what, and how much, individual observers should see in order to achieve it. Because the mere presence of a manager, in line of sight of an employee, may affect employee performance in negative ways, management by walking around may sometimes be inferior to management by standing still. In this study, creating zones of privacy around line workers’ activities did not result in slacking off or cutting corners. Instead, the zones of privacy improved transparency within the line and, with it, improved productive deviance, experimentation, and focus on productive work. While hourly defect-free production results remained transparent to all via the IT system, line activities remained visible only to those who were best suited to innovate: the line operators. The establishment of a zone of privacy around the line allowed improvement rights to be owned by those on the inside, encouraged more transparency within the visibility boundaries, and ultimately enabled an increase in organizational performance.

Visual privacy is an important performance lever but remains generally unrecognized and underutilized. Paradoxically, an organization that fails to design effective zones of privacy may inadvertently undermine its capacity for transparency.

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5 Things needed for business success

I cannot recall what I listened to, watched, or read. Sadly my notes don’t include the author of this incredible information. Being that it is “5 Things” I would guess that it’s from John Maxwell.

1. Find the Problem that needs solving.

To be successful in business value needs to be added to others. Find the pain points of customers and then find a solution that helps.

2. Understand the Problem

Once the problem is understood – WHY does this happen? – WHAT the Problem is becomes a leadership/strategy issue.

3. Push against the Problem

Discover HOW to move it by:

  1. Asking questions of the people that are surrounded by the Problem – Push “how fast, how high, etc.”
  2. Listen
  3. Their opinions determine their performance
  4. Determine a Solution / Strategy / Plan
  5. Expect Opposition – First within the company, then externally

4. Take the Vision from ‘Me’ to ‘We’

This is the Change Management step of clearly communicating the vision and getting everyone in the company on board and then getting everyone externally on board.

5. Simplify & Focus the Organization

Looking at military operations – an individual is either a supplier or a combatant. In business it is the same – you’re either supporting or you’re selling.

Action Step

Stay Focused

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Where is Wisdom – an ancient poem

Surely there is a mine for silver, and a place for gold that they refine. Iron is taken out of the earth, and copper is smelted from the ore. Man puts an end to darkness and searches out to the farthest limit the ore in gloom and deep darkness. He opens shafts in a valley away from where anyone lives; they are forgotten by travelers; they hang in the air, far away from mankind; they swing to and fro. As for the earth, out of it comes bread, but underneath it is turned up as by fire. Its stones are the places of sapphires, and it has dust of gold.

That path no bird of prey knows, and the falcon’s eye has not seen it. The proud beasts have not trodden it; the lion has not passed over it.

Man puts his hand to the flinty rock and overturns mountains by the roots. He cuts out channels in the rocks, and his eye sees every precious thing. He dams up the streams so that they do not trickle, and the thing that is hidden he brings out to the light.

But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? Man does not know its worth, and it is not found in the land of the living. The deep says, ‘It is not in me,’ and the sea says, ‘It is not with me.’ It cannot be bought for gold, and silver cannot be weighed as its price. It cannot be valued in the gold of Ophir, in precious onyx or Sapphire. Gold and glass cannot equal it, nor can it be exchanged for jewels of fine gold. No mention shall be made of coral or crystal; the price of wisdom is above pearls. The topaz of Ethiopia cannot equal it, not can it be valued in pure gold.

From where, then, does wisdom come from? and where is the place of understanding? It is hidden from the eyes of all living and concealed from the birds of the air. Abaddon and Death say, ‘We have heard a rumor of it with our ears.’

God understands the way to it, and he knows its place. For he looks to the ends of the earth and sees everything under the heavens. When he gave to the wind its weight and apportioned the waters by measure, when he made a decree for the rain and a way for the lightning of the thunder, then he saw it and declared it; he established it, and searched it out. And he said to man, ‘Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to turn away from evil is understanding.’

Job from Uz, Chapter 28

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9 AAR questions that lead towards success

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.

Peter Drucker

In the military they use after action reports to reflect on what happened, both good and bad, and what lessons can be learned. As the year and decade close off, the holiday time off is a perfect opportunity to perform an AAR.

  1. Looking back, what went well?
  2. What choices did you make that worked?
  3. What failed?
  4. What surprised you?
  5. What has become a good habit?
  6. What needs to change?
  7. What is an outrageous goal for the next year?
  8. What S.M.A.R.T. goals do you have for the coming year?
  9. What does your schedule need to look like for those goals to be accomplished?
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Scotty Kessler’s AWCFROGROL

I met Scotty Kessler when I played Football for Northwestern. He came to the training camp my sophmore year of college and challenged us to walk as men. His training had a powerful effect on my life and though I didn’t remember his name, I remembered what he taught.

Fast forward seven years and my wife and I had just begun attending a church 2000 miles away from my college in the Pacific Northwest. Kess was there and I was shocked to see him again. He now is a leader in the University where I completed my doctorate – it has been a really great journey together and his influence has always come at an integral time of my life.

As my children are getting older, preparing to head to university, and beginning to ask really great questions about life, my wife and I have been attempting to state, as simply as possible, our doctrine – what it is that we believe and why. I remembered Kess’ AWCFROGROL yesterday and found his website which is filled with incredible resources that will challenge you to become better.

AWCFROGROL

A –  ADMIT (Romans 3:23) – For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of god

W – WAGES (Romans 6:23) – For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of god is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord

C – CONFESS (Romans 10:9) – That if you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord, and believe in y our heart that god raised him from the dead, you will be saved

F – FORGIVE (I John 1:9) – If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness

R – REPENT (Acts 3:19) – Repent, then, and turn to god, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the lord

O – OPEN (Revelation 3:20)  – Here I am, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me

G – GRACE (Ephesians 2:8-9)  – For it is by grace that you have been saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of god, not by works, so that no one can boast

R – RECEIVE (John 1:12) – Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God

O – OBEY (I John 2:3-4) – We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands. The man who says, “I know him”, but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him

L – LOVE (John 14:21) – Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my father, and I too will love him and show myself to him

—————

GOSPEL PRESENTATION USING AWCFROGROL

A – ADMIT – that means that everyone is a sinner

W – WAGES – that means that the wages or results of your sin is that you are separated from god (both now and for eternity)

C – CONFESS – that means that if you confess or acknowledge jesus is lord and believe that god raised him from the dead you will be saved

F – FORGIVE – that means that if you acknowledge your sins god will forgive you

R – REPENT – that means that if you repent or change direction and follow god instead of yourself, that your sins will be wiped out

O – OPEN – that means that if you open your heart and ask jesus into your life he will come in

G – GRACE – grace means undeserved love. that means that life in jesus is a gift that is received; you can’t work for it or earn it

R – RECEIVE – that means that if you receive jesus into your life that you are now a child of god

O – OBEY – that means that if you obey him, that is the sign that you love him

L – LOVE – that means that when you love god by obeying him, that he then reveals himself to you

—————

PRAYER OF SALVATION USING AWCFROGROL

A – ADMIT – Lord Jesus, I’m a sinner

W ­- WAGES – And I know that I’m spiritually dead

C ­– CONFESS – I confess that you’re God

F ­- FORGIVE – Please forgive me for my sins

R ­- REPENT – I’m turning to you to make me clean

O ­- OPEN – Please come into my life and live within me

G ­- GRACE – I accept your gift of salvation

R ­- RECEIVE – Thank you for making me your (adopted) child

O ­- OBEY – Lord Jesus, I commit to obey you all my days

L ­- LOVE – I love you. Thank you for loving me

____________________________

GOSPEL PRESENATATION / MESSAGE (SLANG VERSION)

Lord Jesus, I’m sick and I’m gonna die (ADMIT AND WAGES)
You’re the doctor and I need help (CONFESS AND FORGIVE)
I’ve tried to help myself and I can’t do it (REPENT)
Jesus, please help me (OPEN)

_________

AWCFROGROL Doctrines

A –  ADMIT – the doctrine of the depravity of man

W – WAGES -the doctrine of eternal judgment

C – CONFESS – the doctrine of salvation

F – FORGIVE – the doctrine of forgiveness

R – REPENT – the doctrine of repentence and sanctification

O – OPEN – the doctrine of fellowship with God

G – GRACE – the doctrine of grace

R – RECEIVE – the doctrine of sonship

O – OBEY – the doctrine of obedience

L – LOVE – the doctrine of unconditional love

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15 Books I will be reading in 2020

  • The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  • Principle-Centered Leadership – Stephen R. Covey
  • Reasonable Greed: Why sustainable business is a much better idea – Wayne Visser & Clem Sunter
  • Leadership and the one minute manager – Ken Blanchard
  • The Whole Armor of God – Ralph W. Sockman
  • The Charisma Myth – Olivia Fox Cabane
  • The Wisest One in the Room – Thomas Gilovich & Lee Ross
  • Primary Greatness – Stephen R. Covey
  • The Top 10 Leadership conversations in the Bible – Steve Moore
  • 8 Lessons in Military Leadership for Entrepreneurs – Robert Kiyosaki
  • The Prodigal God – Timothy Keller
  • The Speed of Trust – Stephen Covey
  • Speak like a CEO – Suzanne Yates
  • The Leadership Challenge – James Kouzes & Barry Posner
  • Studies in the Sermon on the Mount – D. Martyn Lloyd Jones
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Stand Tall

Leadership is a matter of having people look at you and gain confidence, seeing how you react. If you’re in control, they’re in control.

Tom Landry
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Weathering the inevitable storms

We live and lead in a fallen world, marked by sin, tragedy, and disease. When disaster strikes in the form of a health crisis, financial pressure, or a thousand other forms of pain, we are all drawn to ask, Why is this happening? Wise leaders seek a better perspective by asking a better question, Who is in control?

When we gain better perspective on our situation we can more quickly recognize life-shaping experiences and respond properly to them. God uses everything in life to prepare us for everything in life. Every experience can be used to shape our character and accelerate our development. But the reverse is also true. When we fail to recognize how God is at work and therefore fail to respond properly, our lack of perspective slows our progress.

Steve Moore

As I’ve been speaking with a close friend who is in the midst of a storm, I’ve been challenged to sit and be present with him, no counsel, no words, just presence. What words could I possibly speak to mend the situation, a situation only God can mend, not man. This has brought me to reading through the book of Job – what a challenging book!

Job experienced an incredible injustice and could not fathom a reason why it had happened to him. He sat with his friends who were saying things like: “Righteous people don’t experience suffering like this.” Accusatory statements that were defeating, not helpful. Too much is going on in my mind right now to fully write my thoughts out.

I’m realizing that the challenge of writing 40 posts in 40 days is difficult in that, I don’t have the time to allocate crafting well written blog posts currently. I think my goal will continue to get the 40 out in 40 days and then revisit each post spending a week on each one, getting my thoughts and research put together and putting out a well-written article that will hopefully help others in similar situations – that’s the goal right? To share my thoughts with the internet, opening a dialogue, so that at the end of the day ‘we’ are certain of what it is that ‘we’ believe.

Action

Comment below to let me know your thoughts on how you counsel close friends in storms. Do you speak to them in the same manner you speak to yourself? Do you speak at all? Do you believe that: “God uses everything in life to prepare us for everything in life. Every experience can be used to shape our character and accelerate our development?” How have you weathered storms before and how did it shape your character?

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10 end of life quotes to inspire you today

I have been inspired recently after reading a speech that a leader gave near the end of his life. He was looking back over his years and wanted to exhort those he had led into maintaining the growth and the focus he had been guiding them in. This speech led to many others, including George Washington’s address to a young nation.

Why would I look into end of life speeches? I have currently reached mid-life (41) and as I am reading these speeches, it is incredible to see what these leaders have considered to be the errors or foundations that shaped them, their productivity, and their legacy. If I can pay attention to those, it builds a focus that can become an almost guaranteed success, so that at the end of my life, I can look back across the decades and feel like I’ve run my race well.

If neither crying nor laughing can change my circumstances, then I rather go through them laughing.

Moffat Machingura, Life Capsules

Life is like a restaurant; you can have anything you want as long as you are willing to pay the price.

Moffat Machingura, Life Capsules

In the end, if we don’t have God we don’t have anything other than an end.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

I am not afraid to fail, I am scared to death of dying and having the Lord say to me: ‘Angelica, this is what you might have done had you trust me more’.

Mother Angelica

But after my death let it be known that in my old age, at the very end of my life, there was still plenty that made me smile.

Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.

Oliver Sacks, Gratitude

At the end of life, your reward in heaven will not be proportional to the role you played on earth, but how faithful you played it. Be faithful in every little role you are to play; it’ll lead you to a greater reward! Faithfulness is key!

Israelmore Ayivor

At the end of my life I want to say, “I lived every moment of it.’

Debasish Mridha

Every Task, Goal, Race, and Year comes to an end… Therefore, make it a habit to always finish strong.

Gary Ryan Blair

George Bush had been fading in the last few days. He had not gotten out of bed, he had stopped eating and he was mostly sleeping. For a man who had defied death multiple times over the years, it seemed that the moment might finally be arriving.

His longtime friend and former secretary of state, James A. Baker III, arrived at his Houston home on Friday morning to check on him.

Mr. Bush suddenly grew alert, his eyes wide open.
“Where are we going, Bake?” he asked.
“We’re going to heaven,” Mr. Baker answered.
“That’s where I want to go,” Mr. Bush said.

Barely 13 hours later, Mr. Bush was dead. The former president died in his home in a gated community in Houston, surrounded by several friends, members of his family, doctors and a minister. As the end neared on Friday night, his son George W. Bush, the former president, who was at his home in Dallas, was put on the speaker phone to say goodbye. He told him that he had been a “wonderful dad” and that he loved him.

“I love you, too,” Mr. Bush told his son.
Those were his last words.

~ Excerpt from NY Times

Action

Because your vision always costs more than you estimated, and often takes longer than you planned, it can become blurred by your circumstances and emotions. That is why it becomes imperative to write it down and keep it in front of you! With a clear-cut written goal, you’ll always know where you are and remember where you’re going.

What is the direction, focus, or vision you have for your life?
At the end, what will your life look like as you look back?

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How I manage stress

As a Christian, I find that prayer and trusting the Lord is ultimately my biggest stress relief. Faith is trusting that God is an active participant in my life. The other part of the human-divine equation is my responsibility.

I am a husband to an incredible wife. We were married fresh out of college in July 2001 at 22.

At 24 we were parents. At 28 I started my own graphic design and web development company, began pursuing my masters degree, and we welcomed child number two. At 30, I had employees at the company and we welcomed child number three. At 32, we had child number four, massively shifted the focus of the company, and moved to a third world country.

At 37, I began pursuing my doctorate degree. I was still running my company in the USA and working a full time job here in South Africa. It took massive discipline to manage my family, my responsibilities, and my education. During that season I developed a system of daily and weekly disciplines that have helped me manage stress.

I have a daily planner that I write in. Every Sunday I perform what I call a “mind-dump” (read about it here), where I go through this routine:

Capture

  • Get things out of my head and onto paper
  • Collect any other notes lying stray
  • Process into the right place(s)

Reflect on the last week

  • Did I get everything done?
  • If not, why not?

Review next week

  • What commitments do I have?
  • What preparation do I need to do?
  • How much (sensibly) can I do in a day?
  • Allocate things from my monthly goals/tasks into my time
  • Make sure that there is a reasonable balance between the different key areas over the week

Review the next 4 weeks

  • What events are in there (and do I need to do anything about them?)?

Review goals/projects

  • Ensure they each have clear next action points to work on (in monthly goals)
  • Edit out impossible/pointless/out of balance things
  • Add anything new that has recently come up

Action

What is the routine that helps you stay sane?

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What is the noise you are making?

The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision. It’s got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet.

Theodore Hesburgh

I’m mainly asking myself this question: what is the noise I’m making? What does that trumpet blast sound like? Is it recognizable?

A greeting in one of the 11 National South African languages is “Sawubona.” It translates literally as: “I see you.” If the human heart’s deepest desire is to be seen, heard, and understood, then to Sawubona someone means “I see you, I hear you, and I understand you.”

With my family, the trumpet blast, or rather vision statement is a call to “Sawubona” each person they meet.

Personally and professionally it would be a similar call – the call to Servant Leadership. To see an individual’s needs and with balanced wisdom, respond appropriately.

Action

What is the noise you are making?

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How to make decisions according to Jeff Bezos

A few years back I sat down and listed out my personal values. It took me a few days of meditating on and solidifying the list. Having a list of what you value, and then re-visiting it regularly, reveals the type of individual you will be as well as how you will be perceived by others.

I recently met a software developer at a conference. He was my age, had a wedding ring on, and a photo of his kids on his computer. He was incredibly skilled as a programmer. Knowing the only way to get to that skill level of programming is with time, I asked him what priorities he had to sacrifice in order to gain the time he has put into programming – and does he have any regrets. He stopped the conversation and walked away, apparently we weren’t friends enough to have that deep of a conversation yet.

Looking at the successful programmer, he may have sacrificed time with his family, or he may have sacrificed certain career moves or finances or… in order to gain the skill he had. Any sacrifice is not ideal, but when one is firm on their values the choice is clear and made with confidence and includes no regret.

In regards to all of the above: I do not know Jeff Bezos personally but I can tell that he has a different set of values than I do – simply by the fact that he has made certain sacrifices which I would not make. He is however, a successful, intelligent businessman and there are principles one can gain insight from that his voice lends credence to. This is a business principle, but can be applied to every day life as well. Many have said it before, but I like how Bezos put it in his letter to the shareholders of Amazon – 2015.

Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long.

You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups. As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavy-weight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention.

2015 Letter to Shareholders

Courage is a characteristic I’m currently researching and hope to write further on. It takes courage to make decisions, to risk, to become and to be a great leader. While I continue researching and putting my thoughts together on courage, I will put this short poem by Mark Twain here:

With courage
you will dare to take risks,
have the strength to be compassionate,
and the wisdom to be humble.

Courage is the foundation of integrity.

Mark Twain

Action

If you haven’t already, I would challenge you to set a timer on your phone for 10 minutes and write out your values. Revisit the list over the next few days. Make sure those values will lead to the type of person you want to be and to be perceived as.

Next, are there decisions you have made/are currently making that need to be reversed in order to re-align yourself to your values?

Finally, are there decisions that you are not making because of fear? Are you stuck standing in front of a two-way door (Type 2 decision) but you’re treating it as a one-way door?

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Staying focused and true

It has been well said that the true test of a man’s character is what he does in his leisure hours. Many of us can demonstrate enormous heroism in the clash of conflict. It is often ease and plenty that perverts the best of people.

This quote encouraged me as I read it. The reason was because we were having “load shedding” here in Cape Town (no electricity) meaning that I had 2.5 hours of forced leisure time; so I went, sat outside and read. I was happy to see that I am in pursuit of developing my character.

One of the intentional choices I’ve made, and am committed to, is writing or journaling more. Journaling has been credited as the key to great success for decades now by many successful people in all different walks of life. My aim is not necessarily financial success or fame, but rather I want to live my life on purpose.

This online journal allows me to be able to look back in an easier way than in all of the many notebooks I have on my bookshelves. As a bonus, I hope my ramblings improve my writing skills, help me find my voice, and possibly encourage you.

Action

How do you develop your character? If your individual character went to the gym would it be fit or completely out of shape?

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Custom WordPress plugin – nextSunday

I was contacted this morning by the pastor of our church. He built a wordpress website and has been logging into every week to simply change the date on the homepage. Currently there is a statement that says join us next Sunday “December 15th, 2019” and he has been manually changing that date each week for a LONG time.

It struck him this morning that there is probably a better way, so he shot me a message. I was able to write a quick plugin for WordPress that anyone can use. He simply has to put a shortcode into the paragraph text now and it will automatically update the date each week to the next Sunday.

Check it out and let me know if it works for you. You can download it here. I will attempt to place it onto the WordPress plugin directory soon, but from what I’ve read, it seems to be a mission and I don’t have the spare time at the moment.

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Thinking slowly

It’s interesting what happens when you intentionally choose to slow down and think through a problem. I have found that while building websites and applications that there is a slippery slope when you run into a problem. The natural inclination is to chase after the problem in order to find the solution.

When I have actually stopped and gone for a walk in order to think through the issue, those are the times that I have found the most elegant solution.

I found this story about Warren Buffet and I really liked the perspective. If you are actually attempting to solve the problems of those you are working for, you will find success.

The first was to find out what people need and use that to get access to them. In 1951, after Buffett finished his studies, he set himself up as a stockbroker. But every time he tried to get a meeting with a local businessman, they turned him down. Who wants to meet some young guy with no track record, trying to sell stocks? So Buffet thought of a different approach: He started calling business people, telling them he could help save them from paying too high taxes. Now they finally wanted to meet, and Buffett was able to kick-start his career.

The Third Door by Alex Banayan

Action

What solution are you working out? What is it that your customer needs? It’s cliche, but what are their pain points, not just physically, but emotionally? How do you solve those problems?

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Resetting

I’m sitting in my bedroom right now doing a routine I often do on Sunday. I’ve explained this routine to my children using the metaphor that when a computer slows down, the ram has become overloaded and when you restart the computer and voila, it runs better.

I, like many other responsible adults, carry a lot of things that I need to remember in my “temporary memory” and that gets overloaded. I do a weekly (in stressful times – daily) “brain dump” where I sit down and write out everything I can think of.

I then take my list and prioritize it according to my values and the vision and mission I have laid out for my family, finances, work, etc. It is a constant checking and re-aligning. I do not perform this due to a fear I will miss anything, but more out of a stress relief. It helps me to stand with certainty that the choices I have made have been thought through thoroughly.

Back to this moment – I am taking the time to experience and remember, be present. I listen to all the noises surrounding me and I have peace. I can hear the waves crashing in the ocean, the Cape Town wind blowing, but more than that, I hear my nine year old playing a duet on the piano with my wife playing her cello.

My Bible is opened to Proverbs 8 and I am reminded of the security I have and all that I have been given by the perfect judge and creator.

I am at peace. I pray you are as well.

Action Step

What is something you do to reset? If you’ve never tried it, I encourage you to try a “brain dump” by putting a 10-minute timer on and writing out everything you are currently thinking or worrying about. Things as minute as: “don’t forget you need laundry detergent soon” to big things like “next paycheck I need to change the oil.”

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A life of uncertainty

Naturally we are inclined to be so mathematical and calculating that we look upon uncertainty as a bad thing…

Certainty is the mark of a common-sense life.

To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways, we do not know what a day may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness; it should rather be an expression of breathless expectation.

– Oswald Chambers

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Foundational Principles

I have felt for a while that I am to write more. I have even had an acquaintance challenge me out of the blue that: “I have a book in me that he wants to read.” With that in mind and knowing one only gets better at a task with time, I am setting out to write my thoughts down here.

Today I helped my daughter edit her capstone project for a civics course. She wrote a paper on what the ideal citizen should look in the USA. The history she looked back on was rich. I quickly did some of my own research after initially reading her paper. I came across George Washington’s farewell address that he made to a young nation. The thought of the United States without the leadership of Washington caused great concern. Despite his confidence that the country would survive without his leadership, Washington used the majority of the letter to offer advice as a “parting friend” on what he believed were the greatest threats to the nation.1

One of the most referenced parts of the letter is:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them.

George Washington

The interesting thing is that I’ve been reading two books lately which seem to be circling around this thought of foundational principles. What principles make up the foundation that I stand on? That I have built my life upon? That I lead my family from? Better yet, what are the principles that will make up the foundation that my children stand on/live based on?

Leadership is difficult.

It feels as though you’re constantly attempting to look ahead and gauge which direction is best. What direction seems to be pointed at the most in history by men who are still greatly respected centuries or even millenia later can be summed up in the words of another leader giving his parting speech. In the book of Joshua from the Bible, Joshua gathered all of Israel together when he “was old and well advanced in years.” As he always did, he reminded the people of all that had been done for them.

Note: It seems to be the mark of a great leader that vision is always spoken from a place of remembering. This seems to be too deep for this quick note and I will have to expand upon this thought in a different post.

He then stated: “Now therefore fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” (Joshua 24:14-15)

So, here is a man thousands of years ago stating he will choose to serve the Lord (Yahweh). You then have leaders throughout history making similar claims, including George Washington. It seems a strong fabric of society is made from individuals who choose to serve the living God and walk in His ways.

How does this play out in 2019? This is the question I think often on. I don’t quite know how to put it into words that make sense. I speak often to my children about three characteristics that I desire them to have: Integrity, Honor, and Humility. In Micah 6:8 the prophet wrote: “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

Action Statement

What principles are you living by? What seems to have been effective for you? What is your track record? When I am 80, I hope to look back and have a family that walks in peace, love, and laughter. As a close friend recently stated: “I want to be the same person in the midst of the storm that I am in the calm.”

  1. (Elkins, Stanley; McKitrick, Eric (1995). The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800. Oxford University Press. pp. 489–499. ISBN 978-0-19-509381-0.)
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Leadership Tip

You can talk for days about the customer journey… but if you really want to get results you have to bring up the metrics that are meaningful to executives.

– Shelley Armstrong

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SQL, scala, ioT and custom built dashboards

I love being a business intelligence solutions developer. I’ve been interested for the last few years in AI/ML and have been lucky enough to attend a few conferences on the subject.

I was just tasked with building out some custom dashboards that will display real-time data that is pushed from hundreds of ioT devices around the globe to a SQL database. From their the data is translated using scala software. It will then be sanitized from any traceable customer information and pushed into an AWS database (off-site). That way the dashboards I’m building will be able to access the data.

I’m planning on using PHP to encode the data into JSON and consume from there.

This is all new and I’m attempting to architect the schema and the flow of data, so this will end up becoming a multi-part post.

For now, the first step is to see if I can connect to a sql dB, encode it to JSON and consume it into a dashboard.

Looking at example dB’s here: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/index-other.html

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User Experience and the ease of usability

The definition of usability is sometimes reduced to “easy to use,” but this over-simplifies the problem and provides little guidance for the user interface designer. A more precise definition can be used to understand user requirements, formulate usability goals and decide on the best techniques for usability evaluations. An understanding of the five characteristics of usability – effective, efficient, engaging, error tolerant, easy to learn – helps guide the user-centered design tasks to the goal of usable products.

  • Usability means thinking about how and why people use a product. 
    Good technical writing, like good interaction design, focuses on user’s goals. The first step in creating a usable product is understanding those goals in the context of the user’s environment, task or work flow, and letting these needs inform the design.
  • Usability means evaluation.
    Usability relies on user-feedback through evaluation rather than simply trusting the experience and expertise of the designer. Unlike conventional software acceptance testing, usability evaluation involves watching real people use a product (or prototype), and using what is learned to improve the product.
  • Usability means more than just “ease of use”
    The 5 Es – efficient, effective, engaging, error tolerant and easy to learn – describe the multi-faceted characteristics of usability. Interfaces are evaluated against the combination of these characteristics which best describe the user’s requirements for success and satisfaction.
  • Usability means user-centered design
    Users are satisfied when an interface is user-centered – when their goals, mental models, tasks and requirements are all met. The combination of analysis, design and evaluation all approached starting from the user’s point of view creates usable products.

Read the well written, in-depth post by Whitney Quesenbery on her site here: http://www.wqusability.com/articles/more-than-ease-of-use.html

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Starting a consulting business

A close friend recently approached me asking for advice. They are considering launching a consulting business and in doing their research, they wanted to know any “off the cuff” words of wisdom I might have for them. Having run my own graphic design and website development firm for several years, I had some things to say.

When I was starting my company in the USA I had approached a businessman and asked a similar question, his wisdom was invaluable and I would say it is part of the reason my company was successful.

First, let’s define successful.

Each individual needs to define success in their own terms. For me personally, success would look far different today than it did a decade ago. I’m going to assume you’re reading this because you’re defining success monetarily, so let’s move on.

Look around enough and you will begin to recognize the “blah blah me too lemming-like” marketing speak everywhere. It’s boring and useless and begins to look pathetic. Be bold enough to plant a flag on ONE specific mountain and work hard to be the unquestionable SME (subject matter expert) to defend it. Find good people you can trust to hand off certain requests you are regularly getting asked for, maybe even work out a finders fee, but stand firm on top of your mountain. Get speaking gigs, get recognized, be the expert.

ADD VALUE. When you are an expert and you are adding value, you’ll be busy and well paid.

Consider these very distinct stages in how you make money in consulting, in order:

  1. Know your hourly rate and use it as a positioning tool.
  2. Get a second shift job to keep from compromising while you build it. 
  3. Fill >60% of ALL the time you work with residual fees. 
  4. Maintain >60% with an increasingly higher hourly rate. 
  5. Move exclusively to package pricing w/o reference to hours. 
  6. Build scalable income (webinars, books, etc.).

I personally have not made it to ‘6’ yet. I always am a bit nervous to put myself out there as I do not want to come across braggadocios.

Be very helpful in giving away terrific advice for free as long as you don’t personalize it; then charge ridiculous amounts of money to do so.

I spoke at an event once where I gave ALL of my secrets away. It was a wild plan, but it worked. I gained more business from that engagement than I could possibly handle and my hourly rate nearly doubled because of it. The reason: the business owners trusted me.

Figure out why you’re in business. I’d suggest these three things, in this order: 

  1. Make money. 
  2. Make a difference. 
  3. Enjoy the process.

If you don’t charge enough, no one listens and you don’t have an opportunity to make a difference. But just charging a lot of money, especially in a service-client relationship, can be soul crushing. You must find the win-win balance where you’re making enough money while feeling like your customers are winning. 

Take chances and be different. This leads me into my second take-away:

Be amazing at communicating. I have found transparency as highly valued in the C-Suite.

What I mean by transparency is: communicate as clearly and often as possible. Imagine yourself in the C-Suite and answer the questions you imagine them asking – especially the difficult ones. If your product is necessary then it will be easy to sell. Find out why it’s necessary and walk boldly as the expert in that category. In 2007 the iPhone was the answer – Apple wasn’t hiring salespeople to sell it, the product sold itself. 

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Feeling Machines that Think

Over the past several weeks I’ve been performing my research on developing empathy and humility, the foundation of servant leadership, in Afrillennials. I found in the past session an interesting “aha moment” popped up in our discussion and it brought me back to this quote:

According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio our emotions are the deciding factor for 95 percent of our decisions. So rather than “thinking and acting,” we generally “feel and act.” Part of Damasio’s research involved brain-damaged people who were unable to experience emotions. Even though they could list the pros and cons of any given choice, they were unable to make decisions.

Damasio’s work led him to believe that human beings aren’t “thinking machines that feel,” but rather “feeling machines that think.”

The 95% of our decisions are based on emotions is a staggering thought. I’ve found in my own life, as the development of this research has been taking place, that I desire to make more decisions based on fact vs. emotions. The self-awareness required for this takes deep effort, introspection, and humility with others to allow them to speak into your life, calling out the areas where your thoughts may not be in alignment with your values.