Introduction
After a journey down a twisted – but in hindsight, logical – path as an engineer, design researcher, UX designer, and product manager, I left my full-time job as VP of Product and Design at a deep learning startup and got certified as a professional coach. Having steeped myself in the Energy Leadership™ framework developed by the founder of the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC), I’ve come to realize that the most powerful leadership tool out there is self-awareness around the patterns and perceptions that shape our day-to-day interactions.
The Energy Leadership™ framework offers a tangible representation of the idea of perception, categorizing every possible leadership approach into seven levels of energy. Each level of energy represents a lens we might use when looking at a given situation. The levels are not good or bad – each one serves a unique purpose. In my work with startup product managers, I’ve noticed several patterns not only in the types of scenarios product managers encounter, but also in the way that they typically perceive and approach them. Product management is such a unique profession, where success depends entirely on influence without any authority, multitasking is essential, contributions are mostly intangible, and data-driven decisions are valued over creative ones. Most product managers are drawn to the profession because they are passionate about helping others and having a real impact, and yet spend their days under pressure fighting fires with little time to come up for air and be intentional.
In this article, I describe the framework through what I refer to as the Seven C’s of Product Management, describing a real product management scenario to demonstrate each of the seven approaches to leadership. My goal in writing this – and in general when coaching leaders – is to help you see (1) that you have access to all seven lenses and likely use them in your work and (2) that you can choose which lens to wear in any situation, rather than be stuck in your default mode.
Level 1: Self-Criticism
At Level 1 energy, we are plagued with self-doubt and anxiety. We feel overwhelmed to the point of debilitation. We second-guess our decisions, or avoid making them altogether, and disengage completely. We operate from a place of fear, and expect the worst outcomes.
Scenario
You are the most senior product manager at a founder-led startup. Over the last year, the startup has been growing rapidly but is still trying to gain more traction in the market. You feel pressure to prove your value to the founder by generating novel, strategic ideas that will lead to the success of the company. You spend hours preparing for meetings with the founder, and rehearse so that you are ready with answers to all their questions.
However, you’re hardly five minutes into your discussion, when your founder asks a question about your customer that you don’t actually know the answer to, and a voice inside you says, “I should know this.” You find yourself completely off-script. As you fumble around trying to get back on track, the founder veers off talking through the granular details of a tangential edge case. Diving into those nuances will lead you further and further off track from the higher-level, strategic discussion you were hoping to have, so you disengage and watch as the founder thinks through it out loud. At this point, you’ve lost all interest in sharing the insights you prepared, and decide they are probably not all that novel anyway, and you simply don’t have enough data to back it up. If you did, you would have known the answer to the founder’s question. You should have been more prepared.
Level 2: Conflict
At Level 2 energy, we shift our criticism outward, and see others’ thoughts, perspectives or actions as wrong and in direct conflict with our own. We are frustrated by the way things are, and might speak out against what we disagree with, sometimes in direct confrontation, or often in safer, private contexts.
Scenario
You’ve initiated a monthly product hour in order to streamline all the ideas, feedback and suggestions that your colleagues generally give you ad-hoc. This month, you are excited to present a sneak peek into a new feature you are releasing and get their feedback. You are certain that it will create upsell opportunities within your existing customer base.
As you open up the floor for questions, a colleague from a customer-facing team asks bluntly, “How can you expect customers will upgrade for this new feature when our existing features don’t meet their needs 75% of the time?” Inside you feel your muscles tense. This isn’t the first time you’ve heard this opinion, and you know they are generalizing their experience with one specific difficult customer use case without the perspective of your broader market. And now, it’s too late, the floodgates have opened. Other support and success team members chime in about gaps in the existing product, the hours they recently spent addressing them, and when will we stop prioritizing new features and fix the old ones? Inside you are screaming, “It’s in your job description to address those gaps!” Instead, you attempt to explain that you are trying to grow the business in order to benefit everyone, that you are optimizing for scale and not building custom solutions for individual unhappy customers. You see eyes roll and conversations break out as your colleagues murmur about the disconnect between the strategic vision and the on-the-ground reality. “I’m working with short-sighted, self-centered people who have no idea what it takes to build a successful business,” you think. “If the company folds, it’ll be their fault.”
Level 3: Compromise
At Level 3, we take responsibility for the way we feel, think and act. We tolerate and rationalize situations in order to release the negativity we feel, and move forward and make progress toward our desired outcome. Even if we judge others, we seek means to forgive them or explain away resentment in an effort to ensure a win for ourselves while still maintaining peace.
Scenario
You are in your weekly sprint planning meeting with your engineering team. You explain a new customer problem you need to solve, and brace yourself as you reveal the tight release timeline. As expected, the engineering lead questions you on how you came up with the deadline without consulting them first. You explain the urgency of the matter from a business perspective with a calm, balanced tone, feeling momentarily resentful that you have to be the adult in the room while the others are up in arms and throwing blame on you. But you quickly remind yourself that ultimately, it’s the engineers that have to get the work done, and that it’s only fair they be annoyed given that you are springing this new deadline on them. They push back on the scope of the work and you eventually agree to deprioritize a few features down to nice-to-have, knowing well that you’ll now have to deal with a disappointed customer. You wonder if these engineers will ever just be willing to accept that plans change without freaking out, and then laugh it off to yourself saying, “Well, I guess that’s why they are engineers.”
Level 4: Concern
When we come from a Level 4 perspective, our focus is on others winning. Our actions are characterized by care and compassion for others. We want to solve others’ problems, and get a good deal of satisfaction from doing so. We put others’ needs in front of our own.
Scenario
It’s Monday and you are looking ahead to a pretty chill week. You block two hours for strategic planning on your calendar from 1-3pm every day so that you can be ready for next week’s offsite. As you walk over to your next meeting, a sales rep stops you in the hall and asks if you can help out with a product demo for a prospective client today at 2pm. You agree without hesitation, knowing that the sales rep is new and can really benefit from your assistance. You have plenty of time to prep for the offsite in the following days. There’s a production fire on Tuesday morning that you help fight until 9pm. You lead communication with the customers since the success team is already tied up with another urgent customer deadline, and communicate with leadership in order to shield the engineering team from interruptions. You stay on to provide moral support until the last engineer heads home. You feel oddly energized by the busy day, and excited that the issue has been resolved. Wednesday, when you sit down for your strategic work block, you stay on Slack in order to be available for any customer questions about yesterday’s fire, and regularly monitor dashboards to make sure everything is still going as expected. You make very little progress on the strategic plan. On Thursday, you come back to a quiet morning again and look forward to two afternoons of creative thinking. About half an hour into your work period, your colleague comes by to ask you for advice on a management issue, and you spend the next hour listening to them vent, and offering suggestions on how to approach the issue. On Friday afternoon, you finally sit down for two hours of dedicated time to work on next week’s offsite and get a great start, but realize you need several more hours to complete it. It was such a busy, productive week, and yet you feel so behind.
Level 5: Curiosity
This is the win-win perspective. Level 5 is marked by curiosity, and acceptance that everything happens for a purpose. We recognize that there is an opportunity to grow or learn from every outcome, and therefore no longer see situations as good or bad.
Scenario
You accompany a senior Sales Rep for a two-day trip to meet with a prospective high-profile enterprise customer. The past few calls have gone well, and the Sales Rep is hopeful that the customer is interested in moving forward quickly. For this in-person meeting, your job is to present the product demo and roadmap for the upcoming year.
However, when you get there, only two of the eight intended participants show up and a senior leader at the customer explains that unfortunately, the budget for the year has just been finalized, and there is no chance of moving forward for at least 6 months. They offer to take both of you to lunch as a thank you for coming out. The Sales Rep is about to politely decline, but you instinctively agree. On the way to lunch, you see the Sales Rep is already looking to prepone their flight back home. But you, now relieved of the pressure to present the demo and roadmap, use the lunch as an opportunity to ask several questions to your hosts, ranging from their biggest strategic initiatives, to details about their workflow. They appreciate your curiosity and spontaneously offer you a tour of their process that afternoon. You and your colleague end up meeting several stakeholders, and make connections with two other potential sales leads. You informally present the demo and roadmap the next day to a small group of interested people. Without a specific goal or outcome in mind, you and your colleague are able to engage with and learn from your prospective clients in an open and authentic way. You return home feeling at peace about the outcome, and excited about new possibilities.
Level 6: Creativity
At Level 6 we experience joy. We feel creative and deeply in sync with those around us. We focus on synthesizing and creating a coherent whole and are no longer concerned about the individual parts. At this level, we are keenly in touch with our intuition and act with wisdom.
Scenario
You have spent the last week planning for a day-long product vision workshop that you initiated. The entire leadership team will be present, in addition to a handful of other participants whose work and insight you respect. You are the primary facilitator for the workshop, and you have planned several exercises to get creative juices flowing.
After an initial icebreaker session, the whole team jointly creates a vision for 5 years ahead by projecting future newspaper headlines featuring your company. Excitement grows as you all envision the potential impact of your business. As you work backwards from the 5 year point, everyone contributes suggestions, ideas and dreams, each one building off the previous one. The synergy in the room is tangible, and you are completely in the flow. Roles, responsibilities, reporting structure all fade away, and creativity takes over. You never hesitate to state your ideas, no matter how out-there they might be. You don’t have all the steps figured out for the vision you are creating yet, but right now, you know that you are exactly where you are supposed to be.
Level 7: Connection
At Level 7 we experience absolute passion for everyone and everything around us. When we tap into this level, we connect with the highest form of intelligence and allow our creative genius to reach its full potential. We operate in the world fearlessly, and free of judgment.
Scenario
It is your company’s first customer conference. You look around the conference lobby area and see it bustling with people who know and use your product every day. Earlier this morning, you watched them sit rapt with attention as your CEO gave the opening keynote, you heard them clap and cheer when the feature you just launched was unveiled and demoed. You feel a deep, tangible connection with everyone around you, and you are full of awe as you realize not just the impact you have had on your own customers, but the impact that they in turn have on others by using your product. You look back at the journey that got you here, and as you recall all those moments of self-criticism, conflict, compromise, concern, curiosity and creativity, you realize that each one served a purpose in leading you to exactly this moment in time.
The Choice is Yours
The purpose of this article, and all the work I do as a coach, is to help you develop more self-awareness around which lenses you tend to wear by default as you tackle everyday challenges. With awareness also comes the realization that all seven lenses are available to you. It really is possible to turn an unexpected question from the founder into an opportunity for an incredibly creative brainstorm session, or to approach a roomful of colleagues complaining about your product with deep, authentic curiosity. The more awareness you have around when and how you use each lens, the more at choice you become to see and act on situations in a way that serves you best. There may not be a one-size-fits-all approach to all situations you encounter, but there is always a choice.
