Megan Cook

Treat buy-in as a collaborative journey of early partnership rather than a single high-stakes presentation.

"Most of the time when people come to me and they want to ask how to get by-in, they've got a date in mind, they've got a particular meeting and they have this idea where they're going to crop this per..."

Use semi-annual offsites to balance social connection with intensive strategy alignment and skill-building workshops.

"One of the other things we do is we get everyone together just like every six months. So all of the product managers get together in the same place and the idea is to have a bit of an onsite. Now we s..."

Maximize meeting efficiency by banning status updates and reserving synchronous time exclusively for problem-solving.

"I personally hate having status updates as a meeting. So I make it really clear that if we're having a meeting, this is to solve a problem. And if it's just a status update, that's fine, then I can re..."

Foster psychological safety and trust by implementing small, recurring peer feedback groups for unpolished work.

"We divided the team into these smaller groups for peer feedback groups and the idea is that they meet every two weeks or so, somebody brings something that's in a pretty rough draft that they want to..."

Schedule a recurring weekly meeting specifically dedicated to surfacing and resolving leadership conflicts early.

"What we put into place is something we call Fight Club. I'll probably get in trouble for talking about Fight Club. The first rule is you don't talk about Fight Club. But it's 30 minutes every week, an..."

Use a 'currency' allocation exercise to visualize time spent on priorities and identify where resources are being spread too thin.

"We've just started trying something new called the $10 game for priorities... you and your manager might come in and you can list out all of your priorities and then show you through just dividing up..."

Maintain a 'healthy paranoia' to stay ahead of competitors by obsessing over customer feedback and emerging technology.

"I don't think we've ever had this sense of arrogance of just... no matter how big we are, we've always got this healthy dose of paranoia that we need to keep working on improving things and being bett..."

Deeply analyze qualitative survey feedback to identify the specific usability issues driving quantitative satisfaction scores.

"First of all, I mentioned we had that survey and so we had really rich feedback. So it's not just a rating, what we get, we get people talking about why they gave that rating and that can really help..."