Build Thinkers, Not Just Features

To build great products you need to start asking great questions.

A simple question: “What problem are we solving?” will shift a team’s mentality from execution to purpose.
And you can feel the exact moment when task-doers start to solve problems.

It's when they talk less about delivery and shipping features and ask more about business challenges, user pain points and the market.

Questions fuel curiosity and curiosity drives collaboration. Teams that ask deeply create better products.

What’s really important: Understanding the customer problem and the “why” behind it.
What’s not: Blindly following a requirements document.

Results First

Your first responsibility as a manager is to deliver results.

Too many managers focus on processes, meetings and checklists. "Let's just keep things moving; let's be busy," they think. But none of that matters without results.

Set clear goals, align your team and remove blockers for them. Hold both yourself and the team accountable for results.

Let Go to Move Forward

Centralised decision-making will always create bottlenecks. Sooner or later, this will prevent your company from growing.

Traditional and rigid organisations value hierarchy, and leaders often think they need to control every decision.

But this slows innovation, delays time to market, and prevents teams from learning.

Create a culture of ownership at every level. Empower your team to make decisions within their areas of expertise. Trust fuels faster progress.

Starting Strong as a Leader

Joining a new company as a leader is tricky and sometimes it does feel like stepping into chaos.

There’s so much for you to process – new people, culture, challenges, expectations, competing and unclear priorities and pressure to deliver results.

I like to slow it down. I don’t try to fix everything on day one. I focus on the context, the big picture first, understand the team and what they need my help with. Once I get where we are going and why, I can focus on the culture and processes to get to the destination faster with stronger teams.

Know Your Team

It's crazy how many leaders don't know much about their team. They are not curious about their motivations or aspirations, not only professionally but also on a personal level.

Get to know your team. What are their hobbies? What are they exploring? How are their families? Where are they planning their next trip? What are they watching? What are they reading?

Make it a weekly session. It takes just half an hour but builds a much stronger connection. This is important. Stronger connection = more trust. More trust = better feedback, better communication, higher quality of work and more motivation.

High Standards

Push the people around you - peers, colleagues, and your boss. Hold them accountable. Push yourself even harder.

Start small. Don't force all your standards overnight. Patience wins.

The Trust Battery Effect

The concept of a Trust Battery is that it typically starts at 50% and then every interaction charges or drains the trust battery.

It's interesting how, once you pass a certain percentage—let's say 80% (mind you, it's a bit abstract)—on the other person's Trust Battery, a shift happens. Walls drop. And suddenly the next level of collaboration unlocks.

Love these moments.

Progress motivates action

Progress motivates action. It’s not just the reward; it’s the feeling of progress that drives commitment.

Two groups of customers were given punch cards awarding a free car wash once the cards were fully punched. One group was given a blank punch card with eight squares; the other was given a punch card with ten squares that came with two free punches. Both groups still had to purchase eight car washes to receive a free wash; however, the second group of customers—those that were given two free punches—had a staggering 82 percent higher completion rate.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Engagement Isn't a Number

What's the point of measuring employee engagement?

If you want to know if people are unhappy, ask them.

Then listen carefully.

You need insights, not stats.
You need truth, not pie charts.

The secret to a message that sticks

Success comes from repeating the right words, not just saying them once.

Outsourcing kills your product instincts

The best way to kill your product instincts is to outsource your customer research.

When you get answers neatly packaged in a fancy PDF with cool graphs and slick design, you feel good about it. It looks like the hardest part has been done, and you just need to look at the numbers and insights. On the surface.

As you go through the research prepared by someone else, you realise you only gain surface-level knowledge of the space.

Real research is about developing a good understanding of what your customers are experiencing - the small problems they face, along with all the nuances and frustrations.

You have to speak to them. No surveys or written responses will give you true insight into their challenges.

When you outsource research, someone else builds that understanding - not you.

Your product instincts start to fade over time.

Write It Down Before Misalignment Costs You

This is such a great example of how important written communication is. Misalignment happens all the time - on the problems, the solutions, the details and even the language we use. So, as soon as you sense there's misalignment and nothing is written down, the best move is to put it into words.

The Two Types of Product Teams

There are two types of product teams - the slow-learning and the fast-learning.

The slow-learning team wants to deliver. They manage projects, write tickets, attend internal meetings and ask colleagues for design feedback. They mostly care about delivery and managing expectations.

The fast-learning team wants to learn. They talk to customers, read market news, push hacky code to production, and sometimes break things. They embrace ambiguity, but they learn fast.

The difference? The slow-learning team builds products for their bosses, and the fast-learning team builds products customers actually need.

Shift your focus. The best products come from deep insight, not just efficient delivery.

Framing is Everything

Recently I wrote about the most important skill for Product Managers.

Regardless of whether you are a Product Manager or not, the communication will help you with all aspects of your career. If you want to manage or be a leader, you have to be a good communicator. Specifically, you need to get better at framing.

What’s your goal? Are you looking for feedback, sharing information, wanting to influence, asking for approval or something else entirely?

What are you sharing? Is it a problem? Maybe a solution? A vision? Or a mix?

How much detail are you planning to share? Is this a helicopter or detailed view? Or perhapse, both?

Who’s your audience? Your team, the entire organisation or the executive group?

Your communication needs to be adjusted depending on the answers.

Early in your career, you use the same message no matter the context.

To grow, you need to get better at tailoring your message - what you say, how you say it and when to say it.

The Cost of Indecision

Misaligned leadership hurts teams. It's unintentional though. But still when leaders can’t align or make the call ("disagree and commit"), their teams suffer. The damage is often invisible to leadership but felt deeply by those executing.

It’s not disagreement that breaks teams. It’s hesitation.

Make the fucking decision!

Trust breaks when promises break

Trust breaks when promises break. People notice, even in silence and they remember. Honour commitments - trust depends on it.

Empowering Without Overdirecting

This afternoon I spoke with the team about the challenges for any leader and their team in finding the balance between telling them what/how to do (Directive Leadership) and letting the team figure it out themselves, make some mistakes and learn (Empowering Leadership).

The balance is hard.

You definitely wouldn't want to over-index on either side. So you’ve got to find a sweet spot.

But it also could be multidimensional, and the balance might shift depending on the area.

For example, you might want to give more direction in terms of the problem the team is solving compared to how the problem is solved. Or you might want to give less direction in the team's communication style but more direction in terms of the standards of produced work.

Regardless, it might be helpful to be open about that balance and have a regular conversation about it.

Because that balance isn't static either. As the team gets better and better, it requires you to adjust the balance.

Hack Constraints

When your team isn’t experimenting enough, it's most likely due to experiments taking too long to build, track and measure.

But every missed experiment is a missed opportunity. Insights go untapped. Ideas remain untested. Innovation stalls.

If the bottleneck is tech, hack it. Find workarounds even at the cost of degrading user experience but push forward.

Constraints spark the best solutions.

Tough Love, Strong Teams

Currently refreshing my memory on Radical Candor by Kim Scott. These quotes are amazing:

The best way to keep superstars happy is to challenge them and make sure they are constantly learning.

As you probably know, for every piece of subpar work you accept, for every missed deadline you let slip, you begin to feel resentment and then anger. You no longer just think the work is bad: you think the person is bad. This makes it harder to have an even-keeled conversation. You start to avoid talking to the person at all.