Derek Thompson, whose writing for The Atlantic I always appreciate, has a really good article on How Happy Couples Argue (gift link).

The key isn’t that happy couples fight over the right things. Happy couples fight in the right way. In bad conversations and bad fights, both people in the relationship were trying to control each other. Rather than try to control their partners, happy couples were more likely to focus on controlling themselves. They sat with silence more. They slowed down fights by reflecting before talking. They leaned on I statements rather than assumptive ones. Healthy couples also tried to control the boundaries of the conflict itself. Happy couples, when they fight, usually try to make the fight as small as possible, not let it bleed into other fights.

I’m married to a therapist (20 years this year!), and I can tell you, learning how to argue well is a life-long journey, especially if you’re married to someone who helps people with this kind of stuff for a living. The article does a good job of summarizing the things we’ve learned together over the years.

As a side note, my wife and I have long been wanting to start a podcast, and I kind of want to put it out there as a way to make us actually go through with it, because I think it’s a pretty neat idea. It would be called So You Married A Therapist, and the premise is:

Interviews with therapists and their partners about life and love and learning to live with someone who exists to help people who are not you.

I would personally just love to talk to people from all walks of life who are in similar relationships, but I also think we could all learn a lot from getting insight into those unique relationships. Also, I think it would be really funny.

I think this is a really insightful comment (LinkedIn) by Ben Erez about the realities of being a PM in a sales-led organization. It’s worth reading his whole argument because it’s definitely a spicy take. But the crux of it is that sales-led organizations cannot function with empowered product teams (I think everyone who reads this blog knows what I mean by that, but just in case, here’s a refresher).

Here’s a key part of Ben’s argument, and the really spicy part:

I think sales-led companies should embrace the feature factory culture fully; stop evaluating PMs by their strategic contribution (a weight off the PMs shoulders given they never get time for strategic work anyway) and start rewarding PMs based on how many features they ship that the sales leaders care about. This will align the PMs in your org to think and work the way the sales team (and CEO) wants them to work. It’ll kill many unhealthy tensions in the org and get people rowing in the same direction.

Would I want to work in that environment? Probably not.

But most b2b SaaS companies are already sales-led. And there are thousands of PMs in those environments who feel the tension I’ve described. So I think most b2b SaaS PMs would celebrate their company embracing their feature factory and just calling it what it is.

Could this be seen as defeatist? Maybe. But I also think that the “just calling it what it is” part of the argument is really key here. It doesn’t serve anyone—not the product, not the company, and certainly not its customers—to pretend you have an empowered product culture when you do not. So remove the pretense, and just be honest about who you are.

If you want to become an empowered organization, that’s great! But that’s a transformation that has to come from the executive level, and it’s not a short or easy process. So go on that journey, yes! But until then, be honest about what the organization is, make expectations clear to PMs, and reward them accordingly.

The importance of async work and cutting down on meetings to allow for more Deep Work time won’t be new to regular readers of the blog. And yet I can’t resist sharing another article about it… How Asana and Slack’s meeting purges have paid off has the usual methods and recommendations in it (although “Meeting Rest” is a new one to me—read the article for details).

Instead what I want to focus on here is a few pull quotes about the results companies report once they were able to successful reduce their meetings. Here’s Asana:

A few months later meeting lengths had shrunk. Most 30-minute meetings were converted to 15 minutes, some weekly meetings were moved to every other week or month, and others were deleted entirely. That meant each person was saving an average of 11 hours per month, totaling about 3.5 workweeks per year.

And:

The 60 participants saved 265 hours per month in total when reducing unproductive recurring meetings. In the aftermath of our meeting reset, employees are much more strategic and thoughtful about removing items from meeting agendas that can be effectively handled asynchronously.

From Remote:

By cutting down on meetings, we’re not just saving time. We’re also empowering our teams to work on their own schedules. This gives our employees a sense of autonomy and keeps them motivated, fostering a culture of productivity and efficiency.

And finally, Typeform:

We sent another engagement form to the team to see how they were feeling after we made these changes. The ‘ways of working’ score went up more than 10 points. Trimming our meeting time has helped our employees and our customers, which is really satisfying.

It’s worth the effort, friends. Re-evaluate the need for all those meetings. Embrace async. It leads to happier employees and more effective communication in permanent places that can be referenced in the future. And, importantly, it leads to higher quality products because no one has to rush through “actual work” after all their meetings are finally done for the day.