Conscious Leadership Meets Product Management
Conscious leadership
Leadership to me is broadly defined as having influence. And by that definition, we are all leaders. Whether or not you are a manager, you have influence on your teams, your peers, your friends, your kids, your communities. Becoming more conscious is about waking up, expanding your awareness of your internal worlds, and taking responsibility for how you show up in the world. So conscious leadership = taking responsibility for my influence in the world. The key unlock to this is learning to cultivate presence: being here, now, in a non-triggered, non-reactive way.
Content vs Context
Content is what we’re typically talking about. The strategy, the business plan, the customer requirement, the roadmap, the debate on doing x vs y.
Context is popping out to ask the question, ‘from where am I / are we having the conversation?’
Am I in fear/threat or trust/curiosity?
Am I blaming myself/others or taking responsibility?
Am I committed to being right about my beliefs or curious, open, and willing to learn and grow?
4 Ways of Leading in the World
One of my favorite context models is asking myself and others if in this now moment I’m seeing the world from to me, by me, through me, or as me.
When I’m in a ‘to me’ mindset, I’m seeing the world from a place of fear/threat. I’m in a victim mindset, and I’m at the effect of people, circumstances, and conditions. My amygdala is activated, cortisol and adrenaline are running through my body, and I’m in a state of fight/flight/freeze. This is a natural reaction, and one we evolved in order to survive in the wild. The challenge is that this ‘lizard brain’ can’t tell the difference between a physical threat to my survival (saber tooth tiger in the grass) and my ego's survival (my boss looks at me disapprovingly during a presentation I’m giving). The physiological reaction is the same. And when I’m in this state, my tunnel vision and narrow focus means I’m not available for full creative expansion, exploration, discovery, and innovation.
From a product development perspective, this often means seeing bugs or customer pain points or missing features as a problem. I’m wanting to be right that there is a way that the product should or shouldn’t be, I’m holding righteously to those beliefs, and I’m finding fault and blame in myself or others for that not being the case. From this place, I start and perpetuate drama and conflict within myself and with others. I’m acting from threat.
From a cross functional collaboration perspective, this often means seeing the world in an ‘us versus them’ way. Where we find ourselves ‘othering’ people. The other person, other team. They didn’t do this or that, they put something wrong in a slide, they didn’t do what they said they’d do. Blame and criticism. Victim consciousness.
When I’m able to shift to a ‘by me’ mindset, I take responsibility for how I see the world, how I show up, and how I co-create outcomes with other people. I drop blame and criticism. I get more curious about how I can learn and grow from everything happening around me. It’s about shifting from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. Moving from fear/threat to trust/love.
From a product development perspective, this looks like getting radically curious. Why are people using the product in a certain way? Why did the ecosystem evolve the way it did? What opportunities are hiding in plain sight? How might setbacks or problems be turned into rich opportunities? From a feedback perspective, whether that’s customer feedback or peer feedback, how is this feedback for me, for my learning, growth and development? From this place, everything is a gift.
From a cross functional collaboration perspective, this looks like taking responsibility for how I co-create outcomes with other people and other teams. Can I move from 100% blame to even 99%, can I find the 1% role that I played in creating this situation?
Another key is creating and keeping clear agreements. Who will do what by when? Keep them 90% of the time, re-negotiate them, clean them up.
In by me, I still have preferences and desires. The mind still has judgements and opinions. But I’m holding all of them lightly, and I’m engaged with others and with life in a co-creative dance to explore new frontiers and possibilities from a state of wonder and curiosity.
I am the creator of my experience. I may not control the weather or the election, but I do have a great deal of control over how I am in relationship with and experiencing those things. Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is probably the best example of this in action under extremely oppressive circumstances.
In ‘through me’, I experience those personal preferences as fading away from the spotlight of attention. I connect with some sort of higher power or higher purpose that transcends my own identity - which can be God, love, the universe, the quantum field, or a cause/purpose/mission. I get less interested in either blame/criticism or my own preferences and beliefs about how the world should be. I start to trust that there is something larger than myself that wants to unfold. I begin to surrender. I get still and listen. Really listen. What wants to happen in and through me in these roles that I play - product manager, partner, father? What is mine to do on this earth? What would be most of service here, from love?
From a cross functional collaboration perspective, that looks like remembering that riders, drivers, regulators, and investors don’t see orgs or teams, they see one app.
One Uber. One mission. Transportation as reliable as running water for anyone anywhere. Packet switched network for the physical world. Re-wiring cities, how people live and move around, ending car ownership. Go anywhere, get anything. On our way.
30 million trips a day. How many lives have been altered, continue to be improved, by the work we are doing? Flexible earning opportunities for 7 million drivers. How is that shaping those families' lives? How many lives have been saved from drunk driving accidents as a result of creating reliable cheaper transportation options? How many groups of friends and families are breaking bread, right now, over a meal delivered by us? How many small businesses are flourishing because of access to new demand channels and revenue optimization?
The more I become incandescent with Uber and its mission, the more I cease to experience separation from the idea of what Uber is and could be, the more I stop ‘othering’ people/teams. From that place, imagine what we could accomplish.
‘As me’ is the most ethereal and slippery state, and it’s not necessarily one that most people are interested in. But it’s something that wisdom traditions across lineages have pointed to, from Christian mysticism to Sufism to Dzogchen and Zen Buddhism. It’s the collapse of the illusion of separation into the recognition that beneath all duality, all polarity, is a state of oneness and unity. From this place, there is no product X or product Y. There is no competition. While this may not seem like a practical place to do product development from, I do find that resting here regularly in meditation and contemplation helps me more easily shift into by me / through me states. Because it is helping me break the spell of illusion and pierce the thin veils over reality that I often get caught up in.
We all share the same base predicaments. Birth and death, finding meaning and significance, dealing with hardship and challenges, savoring the victories and sweet moments in life. I am in you and you are in me. Recognize yourself in everyone else you meet and work with and you will start cultivating a tremendous amount of empathy and compassion for everyone around you.
