Stakeholder Alignment

"How do you manage stakeholders? And this is hard in growth because often growth can be viewed as at odds with really thoughtful and quality craftsmanship and product building, but it's not. Those things go hand in hand. And so you really have to win people over on what it means to do growth."

"The hardest part is taking my own shoes off. Basically going, Yo, okay, I came into this, there's something I wanted, I wanted to get rid of that. Now just talk to this person and try to understand what's going on with them... Once I have the empathy, I'm then able to think about what we as an organization broadly want to achieve."

"Surfacing those [experiment wins] across the company... the onus is on them to clearly articulate what their hypothesis is, what they found such that then as a growth leader, I can encourage people to swarm around that and try a bunch of different ideas."

"Working with Ami, it was like watching an alien because she could have the most profound disagreement in the world with somebody and they would say something that she thought was not just wrong, but crazy wrong, and she would respond, 'Fascinating, you have to tell me more why you think that.'"

"Assume that executives have a little tiny dinosaur brain. We all have a little brontosaurus brain and we can really only hold three facts at the same time. We will never be able to go deep in the way that you are able to do on everything that crosses our desk. And so the best service you can do is actually do the work of making a recommendation."

"One of the tactics I use is I ask people to present their strategies for things that I think we may need to do a course correction on, and I have them come in and then I ask them questions and then I make suggestion. And I'm able to do that in a forum where it doesn't feel like I'm coming in and rewriting the entire strategy, but I'm giving them there an opportunity to present their best thinking..."

"I really try to understand what drives that person. What is it that they really care about? ... I just need to understand what it is that they really care about, and then if I need something from them, what is it that I can do to motivate them to find what I need from them important?"

"if we're going to fix this thing, we can't just have the marketing department or just the product managers sit down and cook up new positioning and then heave it over the wall to everybody else, it actually needs to be a group effort. It's a team sport."

"if we're going to do a positioning exercise, ideally we've got marketing, product, sales, customer success, and anybody else we need from the executive team, particularly the CEO, together in a room when we're building it. So that we can all bring our expertise to the table, bring our understanding of what customers do and our product to the table, thrash around on it a little bit until we get agreement on it."

"I think that this person, the secret sauce is more of how good of a cross-functional team player are they. I almost view them like a true quarterback... marketing technology because it lives between so many departments, it plays that role of having to call plays and pull on different departments."

"I found this framework... called managing complex change. It's got these five components to it, vision, skills, incentives, resources, action plan, and you need all of those to have change."

"A big part of rebranding also means that you have to bring the whole company along too and make sure they feel really good about the outcome. And that was probably one of my big takeaways, is just at that time, we were already about a hundred people, so it wasn't a super small company, and everybody had thoughts and feelings and the company had been around for quite a long time before that."

"With the rebrand at Miro, it was very much rebrand as a product approach. It was very much a product development process with sprint teams and agile, coming back, and you had owners for different parts of things and all reporting back and it really required everybody in some way to be involved... mobilizing, having a really strong clear process and delegating and letting go in the marketing role."

"I think part of why we publish these things is we want other labs to be aware of the risks... I think if you talk to policymakers, they really appreciate this kind of thing because they feel like we're giving them the straight talk and that's what we strive to do, that they can trust us, that we're not going to paper things over or sugarcoat things."

"the job is fundamentally a leadership job. And it's a tricky leadership job because nobody is actually reporting to you. So it's like this influence, how do I get people to do what I want even though I'm not paying them. I can't fire them. I can't promote them"

"The way it works is there's somebody who's got to consolidate, get all the good ideas, prioritize them, decide which good ideas we're going to do, and then get everybody on the same page, so that they have very high fidelity understanding of what that is."

"I knew that design can't bring you this stuff into the world on its own. We can't raise this baby, we need the village, and we need the village to fall in love with the baby. And so until that happens, you're not really quite sure if this thing's going to take off or not."

"What it means is that have backbone and disagree, meaning when we are making any kind of a decision, important decision, if you are part of that team, part of that unit, it is your obligation to voice your point of view if you disagree with your approach that's been taken. The point of that disagreement, by the way, is to provide usually additional information or a new point of view that people have not considered."

"The point is you provided your information, they've processed that information and they've decided to go this way with the knowledge of that. That is the point for them to commit. Because the point is you provided your information, they've processed that information and they've decided to go this way with the knowledge of that. That is the point for them to commit."

"We really did not communicate effectively, I think, with the market around our future investments... we had to tell the company, 'You don't want to work at a company that, when times are tough, kills all future growth...'"

"I actually found that writing externally and getting momentum externally was a better way to influence internally what was happening, to the effect that Tobi would read my post here and there and he'd be like, 'Great post.'"

"There was a bidirectional feedback loop that wasn't super strong and that feedback loop was basically when the EPD teams in San Francisco built new features, how do we effectively put it in global markets and then how do we effectively get input from global markets to better build features."

"In terms of board meetings, I think it's been very helpful that our financials and our growth have been amazing for so many years that we don't need to focus on it and we can just have that one slide with the graph going up and to the right. We've also attracted investors who believe in us and who understand that us driving product and getting as much product value out to our customers is probably the most important thing we can be doing. So that's why the board meetings do focus on that because what we are launching in the product, what's ahead is really determining the success of the company."

"Leadership interviews are a very important part of a strategy formulation process... It could be made so much better if you just engage with your leaders before you actually build a strategy."

"I would start with what I call gatekeepers. And these are people who are absolutely... You have to get their one-on-one alignment and blessing on this before it moves forward."

"We created this product digest... it's more about here's how you get ready for it, here's how you get jazzed about, and then the handoff... we don't teach them to sell... but we know that the product intimately enough to help them understand the new value."

"you think that customer research is all you need to build a product at a company, but figuring out how to create excitement internally and get buy-in from other teams because they're the ones that are going to build it. They're the ones that are going to help market. It's all a team effort."

"when you push so hard for your ideas and you have really strong beliefs, you have to also make sure you state your intent. Because sometimes people think you're acting out of self-interest... 'Hey guys, I've got some crazy ideas, but before I say them, I just want you to know that all I care about is that the company is successful.'"

"Process knowledge allows you to understand, how do you deal with an org chart and get things done partly because you understand the motivations of different groups?"

"Never think that one communication, meaning an email or an all hands, reaches the audience. You have to be smart about how you communicate... Just like a marketer, use different channels. Some people read emails, some people watch videos, some people attend the meeting. Repeat."

"Most clients... come to a naming project absolutely believing, with full confidence, that they're going to know it when they see it, and the truth is it almost never happens."

"We look for polarization. We look for tension in a team arguing about these things. Polarization is a sign of strength in the word."

"We really try to give that advice for it because it is about being successful in the marketplace. And so first of all, we try to separate the clients that we work with. We really want to work with clients that play to win, that want to win, not just want to not lose in a marketplace."

"I realized that Silicon Valley did not talk to Washington DC and or Brussels or other parts of the world. And given how important this technology is, we need to bring everybody on board. So we created multiple programs from congressional bootcamp to AI index report to policy briefing, and we especially participated in policymaking."

"What if I called it educating your manager about all the great work your team has been doing? What if I called it helping people see why your team should get more resources, you have to actually share what you do."

"It also requires a product owner to be able to get things done, just getting people down to consensus and understanding how your stakeholders, how to get them to the necessary decision and then blocking UTM so that eventually the value is shipped to customers."

"One of them is just, how do you unpack context? How do you get the context you've got in your head and really unpack it for a group? Another is, how to make sure that you're showing up in a way that folks know that we're all working towards the same goal?"

"I think it's your job as a leader to always try to investigate those areas, push on them, and if something's not adding up, really ask the hard questions and not shy away from them... I just try to keep pushing through that until we get to a point of, 'Okay, we at least know what we're trading off.'"

"We are doing a science fair. Where, each product team has a little booth. And they get to stand there, and anyone who has questions about the product can come... from the go-to-market side, can come and ask questions, and get demos, and go as deep as they need to."

"A big part of my role is, can I explain how we're going to approach those technical problems in a way that builds competence with the content team? Can I try to understand their content strategy in a way that sets the technical teams up for success and we understand what we need to be able to deliver on here in terms of requirements."

"We had a list of areas of responsibility which is just who owns what, it's not your job title. It's what are the things that you are the DRI for? It doesn't mean you're not going to collaborate with people on those things. So what are you the directly responsible individual for? And this made it really easy to know who to go to."

"The starting point for influence is to choose your character and choose your mode... Am I the devil's advocate approach, or I'm the break it and see if it still stands after I hit it really hard with a sledgehammer kind of guy."

"The moderate influence... is the concept of teaching people something. And then when they live with this new knowledge, they'll see things that they weren't seeing before."

"It is not just your job to get what you can get done with the resources in front of you. It's your job to marshal resources both inside your org and across your organization... you need to go out and do that work now. It is not just your job to get what you can get done with the resources in front of you."

"As the company gets bigger, you can actually create alignment by causing internal virality... we would create these prototype products... and then we would just share the build and it would explode."

"It made communicating with especially the product team and the engineering team a lot easier for me. So we were using a shared language. The rest of the company who aren't necessarily customer facing really understood, I think, at a different level what we were all doing together in KPIs."

"Whenever things went wrong at Ramp, it was when I was being prescriptive with regards to the solution without actually explaining and aligning upstream on the goal, the hypothesis, and the data."

"I think the promise we should make to all employees is that even if they don't agree, they should be entitled to understand why you're making the decision. What I don't think is acceptable is to say, 'No, we're going to do it this way because I'm more senior.'"

"What is much more helpful than understanding what your CEO thinks is, I think understanding how your CEO thinks. And that goes for all sorts of levels of the company. I want to understand how all the strategic leaders at my company think, and I want my team to understand how I think."

"I talk about what I like to call the magic questions, but the thing about magic questions is they're not actually questions, they're statements and they end with, 'Do you agree?' Or 'Is that right?' ... I have found this, the most helpful way for kind of trying to understand a person's mental model is to just put facts in front of them and see what they say no to and what they say yes to."

"Separate out my opinion from it, from the, 'Well, what is the insight that makes it make sense to this person' and explain their rationale. Even if I'm comfortable saying, 'I don't necessarily think this isn't how I would do it,' or 'I don't even really agree with how they're thinking about it, but from their point of view, from their perspective, their professional experience, whatever it is, I could see how this makes sense.'"

"A product manager role is a very influential role and a lot of the things you do is influencing other people... You need to influence the engineering team to build a product that you want them to build. You need to influence the revenue team to go with a go to market and sell the product the way you envision it."

"When I'm coming to something and I see all the issues that need to be fixed... you don't take people with you through that journey. So really analyzing that not everyone appreciate change the way you are... taking a step back and assessing what is happening so you can take the team with you on that journey of changing."

"Trust is the currency of a product leader... Trust is just built by repeatedly setting and meeting expectations. And I think that's a good mantra to think about as a FM. Am I meeting the expectations that I set? And not just doing good things, but calling your shots, forecasting, setting a goal, and then hitting it."

"I think it's trying to really understand, work backwards from that person and what are their goals and what are their organization's goals and honestly spend the time and the energy to try to get to alignment in the same place. And be willing, not just bullheaded... but taking some more time to try to forge an alliance with someone."

"I've seen cases where team B put aside their own ideas to jump on the ideas of team A, because of this model [the metrics tree]."

"All of our changes at Duolingo go through product review that are reviewed by Luis, so Luis reviews every single change that we propose, every experiment that we run."

"For the next two weeks, say yes to everything... I think you can find a way to do your job and still say yes to people. You can say, 'yes, I agree. That is a real problem. Yes. I think we could test this design with users' and just see what's different with two weeks of saying yes to people instead of no."

"Anytime you have these disagreements that feel really torny or they feel like a disagreement in values, that's a sign that really have a disagreement in strategy and that it's worth it to write down what your strategic framework is or what your strategic principle is and address the problem at that level, rather than fighting over individual features or individual decisions."

"Every quarter, give your head of sales a certain budget, whether it's story points or 10% of the pie chart... you've got to decide now each quarter. And if you want to change during the course of the quarter... you can do it, but understand there's a high cost."

"Pushback is, I couldn't imagine a word more viscerally that makes you feel like you're sort of physically going against what somebody else wants, and it gears people into a mindset of then, well, how should I push back. It starts from a place of I need to disagree, I need to say no. It's a very negative mindset, purely based on the word that has come to label a behavior that alternatively could be about how do I shift the direction on something, or how do I help the business actually succeed when I disagree with somebody about something, and that's a very different mindset."

"Storyboard some solution visually with a Sharpie and not a pencil, not Figma initially... What is the unconstrained perfect solution to this burning problem? That's Pixar-style storyboard."

"There's designers that will really fight you tooth and nail, because they're like, 'That is wrong, that is wrong,' but I know that some people just have to see it before they can let it go. Sometimes you have to walk down a path before you're able to understand what the right thing to do was all along."

"My metric for success is when they won't have that meeting without you. That's my metric for success. If they cannot have that decision making meeting without the researcher there, that means you've developed influence, strong, trusting relationships, you're an active participant in the process."

"Did you read the last quarterly report, If it's a public company? Did you listen to the shareholder call?... Scour your Google Drive folder... look for all of the documents that are about this quarter, or this halves, or next half strategy. What are the OKRs? Understand the metrics and the conversion funnel."

"If you're like, 'My manager told me to do this, I think it's a terrible idea,' you've got to talk to your manager about it... once you engage in a dialogue, what will often happen is you'll learn more... you can probably decompose it from a blanket it's good or bad to like, 'Okay, this is a hypothesis, this is a hypothesis, this is a hypothesis.'"

"What we do, and I've been doing it for the last decade or more, is having people within the design team share as a screenshot or a prototype of what they're working on in a shared deck... And we send it to the product managers and the engineer leaders and the leaders in the company because it is also a really great way for them to understand what's happening and what are we building together."

"I really disagree with this product decision and I would really prefer that we make this different decision. I know it's not my call and I'm just one opinion and a lot of people are going to see things differently and that's fine, but it's important to me that you know that. So what do you think? Are you willing to reconsider this?"

"I'm hearing maybe you're lukewarm on May 1st as a date. What would be a hell yes day for you where you could say, absolutely, we can deliver on that?"

"The reason I say go out in concentric circles... is that's your way to control the message. Because each circle is going to assume that the inner circle knows better than them and they're going to follow the lead of the inner circle... If employees are not saying that, then people are going to look at employees and say, 'Well, they would know, they're closer to this than we are.'"

"It's not just about the product. It's not just about sales. It's not just about marketing... It's about everything, so you better be ready to be an orchestra leader. You can't just be playing the clarinet... You have to be constantly playing the whole symphony, and you have to have a big mind to think about, 'Whoa, I have a lot of stakeholders in my company, not just one stakeholder.'"

"Whenever I try to convince leadership about something that I want to do that's a big bet, I always use examples and I'm like, "Hey, this seemed crazy at the time, here's how they work. What I'm proposing is very similar to this crazy thing. And then I propose a little contingency plan, like hey, if that doesn't work out, here's the rollback plan, here's the maximum impact it will have done in a negative way, which is not going to be too much.""

"The first person I go to is typically speaking my engineering counterpart and I say, shred this, go through it, rip it apart, vomit comments on it, tear this down how it gets better."

"If you're doing product management really well, you never have to say yes and you never have to say no. You're giving people options and you're helping them understand the trade-offs."

"Options and a recommendation is kind of the magic formula... when you present a single option, people's instinct is just to... start poking holes in it... whereas if you come in and say, 'Here are three options, here are the trade-offs, here's the one we recommend,' then every little bit of back and forth makes those options clearer and stronger."

"The third is you have to learn the different parts of the business. You have to know how it's marketed, how it's sold, how it's paid for, how it monetizes. If there are any compliance, regulatory, privacy, security issues, you need to know what those are. So you have to convince those stakeholders that you understand what the issues are"

"The third is unencumbered access to the stakeholders because a good product is solving what's just now possible... in ways that work for the business, which is why the stakeholder access is so critical. If you have those three things, direct access to those three things, that's what's critical."

"You are the person on the team that represents the compliance issues, the sales issues, the marketing issues, the financial cost issues, the monetization issues, go to market in general. This is all legal constraints. This is all the product manager."

"If I want to make you really feel heard, I reflect back what I imagine are the thoughts in your head... I say something to you like, 'Lenny, I think what I'm hearing you say is you're off and you're thinking, screw you, Matt. How dare you walk into the office and not even say hello to me? Is that close?'"

"They're not going to handle hard stakeholder conversations about trade-offs for you, all of those things that you are going to want to keep ownership of because at the end of the day as a product manager, your job is to produce outcomes."

"One of the biggest issues I see in organizations is when executives all have different goals, and they're not aligned on the same goals for the company... And the executive team should be one team."

"What do we hope will happen when we release this? - best question anyone can ask."

"Escalation is a tool... People get stuck with two people with equal power trying to solve a problem. You can spend so much time bashing heads... actually what you just need to do is go up."

"When people can see that and it accompanies your verbal narrative, they can actually understand what you're conveying and move on... those moments of alignment are so, so important."

"Not pursuing this in both a top-down and a bottom-up structure, right. And I think that can really help drive success, and having good communication throughout is super, super important, right. So getting your ICs bought in and helping them understand that this is for them... And then chatting with leaders and understanding what their motivations are."

"In part, it depends on what your leadership chain really cares about... If they've been talking about market share? Losing market share or competitiveness in the marketplace, if that's it, focus on speed... if they're talking about profit margin all the time... look for ways that you can save money and then translate that into recovered and recouped headcount cost."

"My wife and I used to have conflicts over who's going to pick up our daughter... we take maybe five minutes a week. Sunday evening, we sit down together. Let me look at your schedule. Let me look at my schedule. 'Okay, now we're synchronized.' We prevent so many conflicts just by doing this simple schedule sync process."

"No one can be a bystander on product strategy. Just because you've got product in your title doesn't mean you're the only one that should be thinking about product strategy certainly at that level. ... The CFO, the head of people, everyone needs to have a seat at the table when it comes to product strategy."

"The problem of strategy inside an organization is diversity of interest and fear of action... action, when you do something in an organization of any size, it involves people changing what they do. It involves changing power relationships."

"I think the first thing was really treating my role in the beginning more as a facilitator than a decision maker when it comes to product... if Chris could have a really good sense of what all the teams are doing and if the teams knew where he was coming from and could start to get better at modeling him and his vision, that would be a win."

"I started a newsletter internally... in it I would mention anybody in the engineering team who had worked on my project and I would say something good about them. And then I would print it out and put it in every single person's inner office mailbox. And within three months, four months, partly because the project was really good, 40 engineers were working for me and no one was reporting to me."

"Jack was just listening through all of that... And then I remember very distinctly, he asked me one question which was something to the effect of, how does this make our users love Twitter more? Simple question. But then at some point I realized, yeah, we never really talked about that because we were so engrossed in all the other stuff."

"There are three levels of product work, impact, execution, and optics... we litigate the minutiae of whatever issue we are discussing, but we never really recognize that it's because we are default thinking at different levels. And so, this realization helped me better understand why there were conflicts between two very smart and well intentioned people."

"I noticed that actually, if you have a real product strategy, a real one that everybody is aligned with, that you have got pre-alignment on, then a lot of this nonsense we tend to do with annual planning actually goes away."

"We told every Slack administrator that this was coming weeks before it came. And we told them that we were going to set a default for their organization... but also that they could override that default, and also that the individual end users could override that system owner default."

"When you're working with let's say an engineering leader, being able to understand what are his or her constraints? Where is he or she coming from? What does impact look like to that person? And then understanding where you're aligned, where you're not aligned are things that you have to develop."

"I misread the appetite and sense of urgency around that topic... we need a very strong trigger for why now to go after it. And I did not do a good enough job at articulating this. Why now? Why do we have to do this now versus in a year's time, in two years time?"

"Internal comms is everything there... weekly updates... tweet-sized update... weekly demo of the product and everything that we built. Show the momentum as much as possible... snippets from customer conversations. No one is going to read a research report that takes 30 minutes to read. Everyone is happy to watch a three-minute snippet with four customers talking about something."

"The old adage of you need to say something three times before people understand it. I would wager you need to say it another three times before they internalize it. And having that be part of the day-to-day conversation, it seems like such a small thing, but it adds up to having clarity on goal, the KPI point, and then clarity on why, the narrative point."

"Are you disagreeing or misunderstanding? If you're misunderstanding, let's spend the night. Let's get to a point where you can articulate my point of view in your words and I can do the same, but if we're disagreeing, let's stop. Why are we spending? Why wasting time just arguing it through?"

"This is a game for executive presence. If you think about somebody who you feel has great gravitas or great executive presence, they usually have, there's something about them that's saying, this person really believes in what they're saying. And what this game is showing you is that, hey, there's a way to fast track myself to that place. If I want to have more executive presence, let me bring a little bit more conviction to what I'm saying."

"I implemented a system to manage that kind of intake with four different touch points or events. So we have weekly demo days, working sessions, breaking news dress rehearsals, and office hours."

"When I'm talking to my journalists I'm not using technical terms or like content management technology terms. They have a whole different vocabulary that they use... you have to speak many different languages as a product manager."

"We went back to the board and we offered them two options. Number one, we give you your money back. And number two, this is what we're going to try. And the interesting part is that investors don't want their money back. They did not invest in order to have their money back, they invest in order to make a significant impact."

"There are three tenets that I define in working well as a product manager with others. Number one is raise difficult issues without being difficult to work with. Bring out important topics without drawing importance to yourself. And finally, you are in charge of getting the decisions made and not making all the decisions yourself."

"What I've seen that people who do pushback very successfully and are still considered not difficult to work with, they are also able to bring the tempo of the conversation to a more logical space from an emotional space."

"One thing that I've found is the best way to get to a no, if you ultimately need to get there, is to try to make it work. Start trying to make yes work and document how you've tried to make yes work. And do that earnestly, not as an exercise of just an alternative that you're considering."

"watch for these different eyes light up moments because their face can't lie... those are great fodder for content that you might want to write about, for the angle of your sales pitch, for how you might want to explain something in the future. And you really cut out all the parts that make people go dead in the eyes and just say the parts that make their eyes light up."

"Alex would always talk about trade-offs and he'd say, 'Wes, yes, I can design this PDF for you. That means that the thing that I was going to work on today, which was redesigning this page on the site, will have to wait until later this week.'... it went from being a conversation about yes or no... into, hey, how do we make sure that the important right things get done?"

"A sales note is meant to get people excited to do the thing you want them to do, and to agree to do it. And only then after they have bought in, does it make sense to share the logistics."

"I'm a big proponent of speaking accurately. You can avoid a lot of problems if you speak accurately about your level of conviction and about the actual amount of evidence that you have for something."

"MOO stands for Most Obvious Objection. A lot of times we're surprised by the questions that we get especially in meetings, we feel blindsided. When really, if you thought for even two minutes about what are obvious objections that I'm likely to get, you often immediately come up with what some of those things are."

"I don't have that number off the top of my head, but in the last quarter the number has been 60 to 70% and it's grown in the past year... Are you wondering if we are investing in mobile appropriately or where's that commission coming from, basically?"

"The importance of relentlessly repeating the exact same stuff over and over again, even if you feel like everyone definitely knows... I repeated the same three talking points about why what we were doing mattered 5,000 times... You just have to get used to saying the same stuff."

"In terms of evangelizing, I think about three concentric circles. So the core of your vision is your team... Then I kind of go to this next layer, which is the stakeholders... and then finally, once you've got the feedback from stakeholders, you then go to leadership, and leadership really as high as possible."

"One thing I found super effective in those contexts is I try to ask the other side. So, let's take the profitability side. I ask them to make the growth case. I say, 'Tell me the three best reasons why we should actually focus on growth here.'"

"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 perfect proposal... And that's the wrong attitude I think even to start with to getting buy-in. It's more of a journey."

"Extreme clarity means everyone's on the same page. It definitely doesn't mean that they all agree with each other, but they just have the same understanding of the facts. So we can disagree, but we all believe in the facts, which is that there's A, B, C, our options are X, Y, Z and here are the trade-offs 1, 2, 3."

"One way to ensure extreme clarity is we have the shared vocabulary... That is what canonical nomenclature is literally writing out all the words in their definitions, so when we communicate, we are using the same vocabulary."

"I've seen a lot of director level people through my career who will try to work on strategy in a vacuum alone. They'll write a document and they'll be like, 'Okay, team. Here's what we're doing. Here's our strategy.' And it never goes well. And it doesn't go well. It might be the right strategy, but because you did not bring people along on that journey to come up with it, they did not feel like they had a hand in crafting it themselves."

"I used Loom, which is another one of my favorite products... And so I just recapped, 'All right, here's what I presented to leadership. Here are the feedback that we got. Here's the strategic feedback that we got. And here are the changes we're going to make. Any questions, let me know.' And I posted it in Slack."

"Always answer the question that they should have asked... there's actually another altitude, another point of strategy when you've- in a meeting or in a conversation to make sure that you're covering the more important point, the bigger picture, the alternative that the person asking the question maybe didn't see or consider."

"When someone disagrees with me, I tend to immediately stop and say, 'Cool, let's figure out why there's disagreement.'... What I'm looking for is offer unstated foundational assumptions. What is our divergence point? Because you might be right. In fact, people often are, when it gets to this point, I found. Sometimes it's an unstated foundational assumption that I hold that is incorrect."

"Big growth levers can't be individual department goals without being cross company strategy."