9 March 2024

How Happy Couples Argue

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.

8 March 2024

In defense of defensiveness

Mandy Brown (once again!) cuts through with some tough love advice for all of us:

If you have feedback you want to share but you’re worried about how someone might respond, stop: back up and let go of whatever conclusions or interpretations you’re holding and think about what questions you have. You think someone was rude in a PR, or seemed unprepared in a meeting, or delivered research that was half baked? Set those judgments aside for the moment and practice asking about their own experience and perceptions. Questions like, what was your thought process when you worked on this? Or, what were you feeling when you added that note? Or even the evergreen, how are you doing right now? are much more likely to be generative than awkwardly lobbing feedback at someone and then ducking to avoid the retort.

Trust that just as you can be responsible for assessing the difference between when you’re in real danger and when you’re simply learning, they can too.

8 March 2024

No, but phrased in the form of a question

In No, but phrased in the form of a question the Raw Signal team gives some great advice about how to handle those seemingly out-of-nowhere senior exec requests as a leader:

The problem is that as you get more senior maintaining productivity and de-risking execution is no longer good enough. Your job is not stability for its own sake. Your job is to make your team an instrumental piece of the organization’s success. And yes, one piece of that is making sure they can focus on their work. […]

The more senior you get, the more your approach to change needs to evolve from concern and critique, to curiosity. Whether that’s the CEO and their team bringing forward a new strategy, or a colleague pulling you aside after a meeting with an idea. Just for a minute, park the questions about implementation, and look at the idea on its merits.

8 March 2024

Useful

I love Molly Graham’s career advice in Useful:

One of the most important lessons I have learned over and over again is that the greatest thing you can do for your career is to be the person that everyone in the room knows they can rely on to get things done. Be the person that makes everyone else look good. Be the person that everyone wants to work with again.

3 March 2024

Explorations On Leadership

Big +1 from me on James Whatley’s thoughts on leadership in the latest edition of his Five things on a Friday newsletter:

Demonstrating that you as a leader are imperfect, that you get things wrong; that you are fallible—and doing so in a way that shows that it’s safe to open up and be vulnerable—enables and creates the feeling of psychological safety. You’re saying “I, the person who is meant to be leading this team, can be vulnerable therefore this place, this team, that we all work in, is a place where you can feel safe to be vulnerable too.”

3 March 2024

On empowered teams vs. feature factories at sales-led organizations

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.

3 March 2024

The anatomy of a people-first job ad

I love all the advice Charlotte Carnehl gives in The anatomy of a people-first job ad. If you’re about to go into a hiring phase, definitely bookmark this one for when it’s time to write the job description. One example:

When looking for a new job, it’s not only the position and responsibilities that are part of the package, but also the people I’ll be working with. So please tell me in your job ad: Who will be my manager? Who will I work and interact with most? Once I know, I can learn more about my potential future colleagues, and look at their writing or social media posts—just like you will do your research about me.

3 March 2024

In IndieWeb interactions: what builds connection?

Tracy Durnell brings up a good point about the importance of “lightweight interactions” in our digital communication. I remember the blowback against these kinds of “reaction messages” when they first became a thing. But I think Tracy is right that in a lot of ways, they keep our relationships strong:

The idea that lightweight interactions like a thumbs up or a “love it” comment are not valuable has, I suspect, grown out of a distrust of corporate-owned social media platforms mediating, coopting, and commodifying our interactions and engagements with each other. But, start learning about relationships and community and you quickly realize that these little exchanges are the glue that bonds us together. That relationships are built on repeated interactions, and that they must be maintained through continued interactions.

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