John Mark Nickels
JM Nickels is a Senior Director of Product Management at Uber. Previously, he was Head of Product for Commercialization at Waymo and led product teams at DoorDash. JM is also a coach and advisor focused on conscious leadership.
Communication Skills
Effective presentations create resonance by constantly alternating between the current 'flawed' reality and the 'ideal' future state.
"I love her book Resonate... she said what all these things do is they alternate tension between the world as it is and the world as it might be. And it's like, here's that beautiful future of transpor..."
Externalizing all tasks and thoughts is a prerequisite for the 'empty mind' needed for high-level creative work.
"The most powerful takeaway from that book for me was if it's in your head, you're screwed because it's like you're trying to keep track of stuff and be creative and come up with the future of transpor..."
Deep strategic work requires 'defragging' the day and removing digital distractions in favor of physical collaboration tools.
"We recently had an all-day Monday thing where eight of us came into the office to talk about future of marketplace, and it was super productive. It was like, laptops down, we're going to spend all day..."
Senior leaders should prioritize hearing from others first to avoid biasing the room and to mitigate power imbalances.
"I really try to spend more time being mindful of that and say, I want to hear from other people first. I want to create space and I don't need to win the argument in the meeting. There can be a follow..."
High-quality written preparation allows for productive, rigorous, and 'messy' verbal debates.
"I like a crisp dock and a messy meeting. The whole Amazon thing, if you have the three-page or seven-page narrative, it's written with the clarity of angels singing from on high, at least describing h..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Conscious leadership requires deep self-awareness of internal biases and taking full responsibility for one's influence on the team.
"The conscious piece then is becoming more aware, waking up. To me, it's like learning more about my interior world, what my background is, my biases. We all inherit certain belief systems from our par..."
Treating emotions as physical data points (whole-body intelligence) can provide critical signals that logic alone might miss.
"To me there's wisdom in emotion and I can start to access noticing them more. Like where do I feel sadness in the body? I notice I feel fear in the kind of center of my chest, and then sadness is like..."
Product Management Skills
Effective vision building involves deep visualization of the future state of the world, independent of your specific product.
"I try to just close my eyes and imagine the future as far out as I can. It's like five years from now, 10 years from now, whatever. And it's develop a really salient picture of what that looks like. I..."
Use first-principles thinking to identify fundamental inefficiencies in the current world as a starting point for vision.
"One example might be, why do we need a 4,000 pound vehicle to move a human three miles? Okay, well... Or even a couple of humans. We do an Uber Pool or a Share, and you move two humans or three humans..."
Product leadership is the art of balancing the polarity between high-level theory and ground-level execution.
"I think you can go too far either direction, right? It's like everything in life is about balancing the polarity between two opposing forces. And so in this one it's like, yeah, you go too hard in div..."