the core difference between a good team and a great team is the Judgment of the leader of that team that's shreyas Doshi he's worked as a product manager at stripe Twitter Yahoo and Google and is now an advisor to over a dozen companies he's amassed over 200 000 followers on
Twitter by coaching and helping others become great product managers but then if you come into this kind of product review and you kind of drown the group in all sorts of execution level detail you are going to lose the audience their documents had all the right ideas but it was hard to find those ideas one of the
reasons I joined stripe was because I saw this as what a wonderful opportunity to really understand if product management can create unique value at a company that has already been very successful without product management foreign I think when I was thinking about where to get started I want to start with the
three levels of product work so the execution level the impact level and the Optics level can you expand on these levels and where conflict arises yeah for sure so uh this took me many years almost two decades of working on products that mainly at high-tech companies to really realize
that oftentimes conflict between people and teams arises mainly because um we're not talking at the same level and we might have a you know similar missions and similar goals and okrs and whatnot but if we are not aligned on the level at which we are talking that can lead to
a lot of confusion a lot of just stress among individuals and teams um and so the three levels of product work uh that I discovered through my observations were the execution level uh the impact level and the Optics level okay and sometimes what happens is when perhaps it's best to share it with an example
uh oftentimes there would be product managers or other folks on my team who would be very nervous before presenting to an executive some proposal or plan for a product maybe it's a product strategy or something else and they'd be very nervous and so I'd have a conversation with them about like
you know hey nervousness is normal in these situations Etc uh but what's really going on what is your real concern and so they'd often point to past examples where they they would say oh you know I was talking to the CEO in this last product review and uh you know I was telling them about you know they
asked about how this certain initiative uh can be made even more ambitious uh and I shared with them exact details of how uh we can you know make this uh these goals more ambitious or whatever the case might be and that just did not land with the executive uh and you know I shared all
the details with them but like I felt like they were confused and now they've asked for this other product review uh and so now I'm frustrated right and and in that example my observation is that uh again it's it's the case of people talking and expecting different levels where somebody who's close to the ground
like a product manager or an engineer uh you are fixated at the execution level which is you know what is it uh that I can get done uh in a short amount of time with the resources and constraints I have okay so that's the execution level uh but oftentimes in these situations
the executive the CEO is wants to start at the impact level right they are more concerned about uh well is this product going to resonate or uh you know how exactly is go to market for this product going to work like how are we going to find we'll build the product but how are we going
to sell the product have we thought about compelling ways to do that and how is this going to affect the company's brand right so they they want to start with the level of the impact and they want to engage in a dialogue with you of how we can make the best possible impact but
then if you come into this kind of product review as the product manager uh and you cannot drown the group in all sorts of execution level detail which you think are the right things to share because these are challenges you're facing right now if you lead with that you are going to lose uh the audience
uh and so and this is merely just one example of where like you know executives are probably thinking at the impact level product managers or Engineers are thinking at the execution level uh and uh you know I've also encountered uh Team issues inter team issues you know famously there are many
organizations where two teams can't work together uh and they complain uh and each team complains that we can't work well with this other team even in those situations I've often found that it's actually the leaders of the team that are fixating uh on different things maybe the leader of one team is very
Optics focused so they are thinking about you know what are the Optics going to look like if we combine our forces together and work on this initiative uh uh how can we make sure that my team gets the credit uh that it deserves uh for doing this work and perhaps another team leader is more fixated uh on the
impact level at the execution level um and so so they want to really proceed they want to make the right choices uh for this joint initiative regardless of the Optics of the situation um and so so they sweat and you know they kind of litigate and re-litigate a lot of details
oh of you know the conflict Without Really realizing that oh the conflict is present mainly because one is operating at the Optics level and the other is operating and the execution or impact level uh so that's really the observation that once you kind of understand this now you have a
vocabulary for kind of uh both communicating in a more effective way uh with others as well as recognizing the root source of conflict and trying to address that one thing that you said there that stuck here to me was they litigate the details are they litigating sort of like a different lens into the
same problem and they keep rehashing their point of view because they think the other person doesn't see it but they're coming at it from a completely different lens how do you get out of that how do you become productive in that in that sort of litigation or argument then look what what we end up
doing when we feel like that the other party is not listening is uh that we just keep repeating our message and we do it louder each time hoping it will stick and it doesn't and then we are frustrated that it doesn't it's like you know I've told you this five times or we've had this meeting three
different times and I just don't understand why you don't get it right like that's at least the feeling even if it's not vocalized that's the feeling we have the real solution out of this is uh to kind of you know use a corporate cliche take a step back and recognize what is going on recognize that
oh I see this other team is really concerned about the Optics of the situation so let me explore that more right like you know one of my challenge my personal challenges in my own kind of you know journey and growth as a leader was um it was easy for me to judge uh other individuals or other teams
saying like oh these people are only focused on Optics whereas I am focused on impact and execution which are the right things to be focused on um and when you start with that sort of feeling it doesn't create or make any room for True collaboration so instead you know later on in my
career when I had this vocabulary and this way of looking at things when I saw these situations where perhaps somebody else some other team leader that I'm trying to collaborate with is really focused on Optics uh I wanted to take a step back then and really explore their perspective a little more
and perhaps you know the reason they were focused on Optics is because they've been burned before that they helped various other teams with their initiatives in the past and they did not get the credit uh that they felt they deserved and so naturally now they're going to be a little bit
more wary about uh collaborating with my team on this initiative and they want to make sure that the Optics are set right so it's only through you know taking a step back and truly taking the time to explore their concerns like like for instance concretely I noticed that uh you know in the past
couple of meetings you've talked a lot about making sure um that executives are aware of the division of responsibilities between our teams and certainly my team's perspective is that it is a very ambiguous project so we can't really clarify all the strict division of responsibilities at this
very moment but uh I wanted to ask you uh you know what uh you know what your rationale is for this perspective because I really want to figure out a way to make this work uh and so just kind of having that conversation engaging in the dialogue trying to understand where they are coming from uh
I've found opens up opportunities for us to recognize oh I see I see this is what is going on uh you care about making sure that these responsibilities are clear for reason XYZ uh so uh perhaps we can both achieve our objectives here of moving quickly while yet clarifying you know who owns what uh
and let's now brainstorm about that right um and so so really I found that to be the best solution is kind of the recognition the taking the step back and uh you know developing that empathy for what they are trying to do uh and uh sort of on the what not to do side don't be very quick to judge the other
person and of course easier said than none right I think you hit the nail on the head with sort of perspective taking and everybody if you could see the world through other people's eyes you would make the exact same decisions that they're they're making so there's something that you're missing that
enables this gap between what you would do and what they're doing and putting yourself into their their mindset or taking their perspective on a problem what would have to be true for me to behave this exact same way is often a good way to sort of see a different perspective into the situation
one of the things that you said online that was interesting is that there's a difference between evaluating how something is going and measuring how it's going can you expand on that yeah it's often the case Shane that um you know you hear in business meetings right that uh well
if you can't measure it you cannot improve it and um in certainly in most of the highly rational company cultures that I have seen these kinds of uh you know statements are taken as truths and over time I realized that used in the wrong context they they tend to you know cause a lot of damage that
we don't even realize because we feel like we're being smart when we say oh this thing must be measured before we can improve it and really the way I I realized some of the flaws in this thinking of you cannot improve something that you don't measure is uh kind of looking at my personal life
and starting there and sort of evaluating so I'm a parent and so at one point like I asked myself um you know am I measuring am I measuring how I'm doing as a parent right or or am I measuring how I'm doing as uh as a spouse right and while you know there I had clearly improved in certain areas of parenting
I had not done any measurement there right so then I started asking myself well if I've clearly improved in this area of parenting or this area of being a spouse but I I don't measure it I don't track it on a daily basis I don't have any metrics associated with it like you know
the number of times my kid said I love you to me right I don't have metrics like that uh and yet I can tell that I'm improving in these areas uh with some effort so so how am I doing that right like how many of us are doing all sorts of activities and improving in those activities without explicitly measuring
uh those upfront or measuring those in an ongoing basis so that's when I realized that actually the way I know that I'm improving is because I'm evaluating right and and that's where I feel like there's a difference between the idea of evaluating how you're doing and measuring how you're doing
right and so so that's kind of that was the insight for me and then I started seeing uh at many cases uh in many cases at work it was quite similar where you know if we start everything with oh we need to measure this thing first before we embark on this project or this
initiative to improve set thing uh there is certainly value in measurement so don't get me wrong right like again we should not think binary about this um but in some cases the effort to measure something is so large that it sometimes dissuades us from performing the action that makes sense
and so that's where even in my own management style over time uh I started kind of you know differentiating between situations where evaluation is enough versus situations where you need you know strict or precise measurement and again you know it goes back to judgment which is leadership judgment
which is uh you know there's no recipe for this there is no you know clear algorithm for like okay in these situations you evaluate and in these other situations you must measure um but uh the fundamental sort of observation here is that sometimes evaluating how something is going is enough
and sometimes if you try to measure a thing you might think you might improve the measurement right uh but you might not actually be improving the underlying thing so that's the other danger as well um and so uh so anyway those would be a couple of kind of core observations uh that led to this Insight okay but you're
you're a manager or product manager or a leader within an organization and you have scarce resources to allocate uh the organization has scarce resources you have scarce resources on your team often you need other people to buy into what you're doing uh with with their I guess
not of approval depending on where you are at some level uh and if you're in a culture that is very measurement oriented saying that you know we're going to improve this but not being able to quantify or demonstrate how it's improved is very tricky to get the buy-in how do you how do you go about
that yeah it is very tricky and uh I would say this is why the solutions to some of these problems lie not with uh an individual or individual contributor within the company but they lie with the company leadership right like so ultimately the company's leadership needs to have the judgment and if they
do not things are just very hard this is why a lot of the work the both the writing I do the coaching I do and so on is focused on leaders and Leadership because uh without leadership understanding these ideas and these principles it's just very hard now all that said uh what I've found interesting is
that it is possible sometimes to Pivot um this kind of intense desire for uh you know showing uh you know numbers on a graph um with other ways of showing impact because ultimately the measurement is not the goal right the impact is the goal we hope that the measurement is uh just a proxy
for the impact we made right and sometimes we we forget the the we can't differentiate between the proxy and the goals right and so we make the proxy the goal um so uh so so once you kind of understand that that ultimately it's about demonstrating impact right and in real organizations impact
oftentimes takes a really long time to demonstrate right like the features you launch this quarter oftentimes will not show direct Revenue impact next week right they they will so show some Revenue impact the following quarter and hopefully a meaningful Revenue impact the next year
right uh and uh you know when we are kind of evaluating the impact of the work uh one of the core things we need to realize is this idea of you know leading indicators right so so what I like to show what I like to remind people in these kind of corporate situations is that ultimately we are after this impact
right whatever that is like customer satisfaction or higher retention or greater revenue or greater Revenue per customer whatever the case may be right that's the impact we are after right then I like to sort of clarify uh and perhaps using even examples that features like this in the past have
taken you know three months six months a year year plus to show the full impact right so so and and that is likely to be the case with this feature too so therefore what I want to share with you today is some of the core leading indicators we have of how this feature is working right
and so and and then I'll go into the leading indicators and now these leading indicators might be other metrics so they might be things we have measured right which is like you know the conversion rate in sales calls for instance right which is a which is an early indicator um of potential resonance uh or the
number of customers who've actually purchased the product and listed this feature is one of the key reasons why right so so I'll talk to my sales teams and can I get some of those leading indicators to me from them right and again these could be measurements right these could be numbers but the numbers
are so small that like you know all we might be able to say this quarter is like oh we got five new customers who said that this feature was one of the key reasons why right uh and you can't really run an A B test of any sort or some like large-scale experiment with that uh so okay five is good and
we've done some measurement but this is where I like to also add some qualitative criteria right which is uh and I did this a lot at stripe for instance when we were working on B2B products that you know in some cases they took a year or year plus to show direct Revenue impact or volume
impact is I would call out some very big customers that we were able to sign up and their qualitative feedback on this recently learned feature and I would present that in a in a document right saying uh okay this is what we are hearing from this customer as a leading indicator right so there are ways even
in a highly kind of you know qualitative uh quantitative kind of environment uh to kind of pivot folks attention towards what really matters which is impact and then help them understand uh how that impact has multiple components some of which may be measured components
While others are qualitative components because ultimately at the end of the day uh you know regardless of um you know what one might cynically think like you know your company leadership is primarily interested in Impact right now sometimes they're fooled in thinking that the
numbers are the only way to be confident about impact uh but if you if you can make a compelling case of an in you know tell a story about how it is actually a combination of some of these leading indicators and they may be qualitative or quantitative uh then you'll be surprised how much buying you can get it
seems Maybe I'm Wrong here but it seems from the outside the professional managers would sort of gravitate towards quantitative uh indicators whereas Founders would gravitate more towards the qualitative what do you what's your reaction to that I think if we were talking about General
patterns um that matches my understanding and my observations too but I'll add an interesting additional observation which is uh what happens when the company starts to scale okay so you're a Founder very you're very close to the details uh you're very product focused you're obsessed about
the customer the brand the customer experience customer satisfaction all of all of the right things um and now the company is scaling right and so uh so and you you're starting to find that your time your personal time is not enough to be just on top of everything right so so now you're going to have to
rely on other signals uh and one of the things that uh you might end up learning along the way and it's usually in the form of somebody else telling you okay so now that you're in this kind of hyper growth phase right things are going to be different and one of the things uh that you you might end
up learning is that uh oh yeah so from this point onwards you have to manage by the numbers right because you know you you're not close to the customer anymore you don't have as much you know strong empathy for customers as you used to and uh it's at certain scale your instincts uh may
actually be wrong right the instincts that actually worked very early on may not work now all of this I have found in in my own experience as a product leader uh to be true okay so this is um you know this is reasonable advice the challenge though is sometimes uh some Founders will kind of lose their
way entirely right and they they again they make the mistake of treating the proxy as the goal right and they lose sight of the real goal uh which is impact uh so while I do want you to manage with numbers because that's the only way you can scale uh I also want you to not forget um that
uh the numbers will only tell a certain story and so what you've got to still continue to do is expose yourself uh to some of the signals and these might often be qualitative signals uh in the market with regards to your competition with regards to your customers um and so you know the founders that
have been able to scale really well and their companies have been able to build incredible products over the long term I have found uh they kind of strike this balance really well they do stay very close to their customers they do stay very close to some anecdotes and don't just kind of manage by spreadsheet
it's almost like a map territory problem right eventually you have to use a map because the territory is so big you have to distill it into something that you can comprehend but if you don't understand when the territory and the map are different then you you sort of drive yourself off a cliff exactly
you worked at stripe and you know from the outside looking in stripe is one of the most interesting and considered to be one of the most uh well-run companies in the world we've had the Good Fortune of having Patrick on the show I'm curious uh we're talking a lot about the lessons that you're offering I'm
curious as to what did you learn being inside that culture that you've taken away with you and how do you use it yeah I just learned so much at stripe uh you know I was there for uh over five years and I joined as they were just uh thinking about what product management means at
stripe and so you know this was a company of a few hundred people at the time and uh you know already building really had had already built a very compelling product and sort of you know at least by Silicon Valley standards what it was adding product management a little late
uh you know usually you'll have product management added at you know several dozen to 100 or so people uh so stripe was adding product management a little late um and uh had done just fine without product managers so one of the reasons I joined stripe was because I saw this as what a wonderful opportunity to really
understand if product management can create unique value at a company that has already been very successful without product management right uh and so uh so that was one of the motivators for me as somebody who started my career as an engineer but had been a product manager for you know over
a decade by that time um and you know one of the first things I I really learned uh when I joined stripe is um that when product and thinking about the product and thinking about the customer experience is everybody's job which it certainly was uh and and has been at strike for a
while um you know kind of thinking about the product and fixating on what kind of product we're building and why we're building it and how it's going to resonate with our users when it is everybody's job uh you know engineers and designers and even sales and marketing and other functions uh then
you can you have at least the ingredients for creating Magic um and you know too often what happens uh and I've seen this at many many companies in the valley some of the most successful and modern companies uh in in the technology space is uh that at some point uh this idea of like okay are we
building the right product are we building a product uh that our customers will really love and are we building a product uh that uh that will win in the market that's those concerns get relegated to one function uh or or a couple of functions while the other functions get
more focused or somehow are asked to get more focused on just like stay in your lane do your thing you know ship your code right because and do it on time and do it at reasonable quality but that's your job right and nothing else and if it's something about the user experience well you know you bring in the expert
the product manager uh or the designer and they will tell you what to do uh you know in those environments you just like don't end up building really inspiring products um and so you know what I really saw at stripe is this kind of you know the entire fabric of the organization and the culture uh was
enabling me as a product manager to launch the right product in the right way um and and so you know while this sounds great in theory and so you know this is something I observed um but then you know I I'd seen enough companies by that time to know that you know yeah many companies would want
this but how do you actually get it done how do you get it done as you scale right and so what I saw at stripe were perhaps like two things I'll flag uh one was um that really every function was treated as equal right and in most companies you will have some sort of implicit functional
hierarchy where like you know some companies say well engineering is the most important role here uh and the most important department here some other companies will say product management is the most important department uh some other companies will say sales is the most
important department now whether or not they some explicitly say it most explicitly don't say it but in the day-to-day there is some implicit functional hierarchy right and at stripe uh you know certainly you know during the time I was there that hierarchy was absent right like really you treated every function uh
equally right and now they might perform different roles right but but it wasn't like one function was better than the other so one function was higher than the others right so so what that enabled is a much more focused and much more authentic conversation between functions of what
is the right thing to do here right like not once in my five plus years there did somebody play the card of like well so I am the product manager so yeah I realized all this debate and all of that but since I have this title and this question is about the product so therefore I'm going to make the call
right so it wasn't really about like you know pulling rank or title it was about really discussing the idea right so so so that's one way uh that I think stripe put this in practice and look the other way of like the entire sort of fabric of the organization kind of pushing you to build the right
product uh was that the founders kind of lived these values as well right so you know Patrick and John until a very very long time as the company was scaling and to a point where you wouldn't expect the founder to do so uh they were talking to customers they were talking to users and and not
only that in many cases they would kind of you know have a meeting with the customer and send out notes right and another interesting thing I I think I found is you know normally when a CEO of a company is talking to a customer it is usually they're talking to the CEO of that customer right but at stripe
oftentimes you would get these notes uh from the founders saying oh yeah so you know I went I was visiting this customer and I talked to their customer support team I spend time with their customer support team to understand whatever it is how they're using the stripe dashboard right
and and here are some observations uh and so so as you saw this as an employee you know you realize right like that this is what the company cares about right like when the founders are actually living the values um that are put up on the wall uh that means that they're not just words on a
wall right like you are expected if you want to do well here you are also expected to do these things to be close to customers um so that was another kind of like really valuable lesson I learned about like you know we can all say you know yeah sure you need to be customer
Centric and so on uh but the the actual process of doing so uh involves a lot of discipline commitment and consistency one of the things you said there that I I found fascinating is that everybody was seen is important and it was seen as everybody's job to look after the customer which intuitively I I really
like because I always hated people saying that's not my job that's not my responsibility or conversely I hated people putting up that card and being like I'm the product manager this is this is my decision with no sort of like uh basis for making it that's grounded in in sort of rationality
I'm wondering who is the arbitrator of a tie in those situations how does that work when you have maybe two people who are both looking out for the customer but they're coming at it from very different perspectives and you have to pick one path and you can't have both in the case where all functions are sort
of equal and everybody's responsible for the the customer how do you make that decision yeah and this is where it gets uh messy right because there is no uh you know again there is no here's the algorithm we'll use when we are uh you know in disagreement uh so so in practice
uh I'll observe a couple of things number one this is where a writing culture helps intensely right so stripe famously uh has a writing culture and um a lot of these discussions uh would start with a document right and they are asynchronous discussions and and the reason I think it's key is
because just having to write these things down forced a degree of clarity that is often missing when you are kind of having just these debates verbally right uh and so so I think what ended up happening is that while we might not have started in the same place or from the same perspective uh you know before
we really started kind of engaging in this conversation which again most of it is happening in a document um by forcing ourselves to kind of write down our thinking right and to put it in words uh it enables the reaching of consensus or a decision uh better than if we were
trying to do it all just verbally in a meeting yeah because again oftentimes you know uh when we are doing it in a meeting we there's also like other factors that come in right like it's not just a lack of clarity and the lack of comprehension uh but also ego factors that become
quite you know prominent and dominant in how then we decide right so so I think that just like you know that writing culture helped address a lot of this where yeah we might disagree but now we understand the root of our disagreement better because you're trying to optimize for this metric and I'm thinking of this
other metric so let's have a conversation about that first instead of again litigating the minutiae of whether there should be a three-step flow or a two-step flow right uh so so that is one kind of mitigating tactic uh to this um the second one is um you know oftentimes yeah you kind of had to take
this decision uh to somebody else uh typically somebody hire uh up in the hierarchy uh to make the decision which is like look we've had this uh you know what we called rigorous conversation and discussion and it's all documented here in this Google doc or what have you uh
and we can't seem to decide I think one of the reasons that it fails is because it becomes judgment based and as much as people like to say that they make judgment decisions they don't actually like to make judgment decisions because they like to have a lot of rationale behind or numbers behind or
authority behind why they make a decision and when the judgment is subjective in this case you have a tiebreaker somebody has to be an arbitrator of that whether it's the founder or somebody up the line but what they're really doing is they're exercising judgment and that's where you
get a lot of Leverage from when that judgment's correct it's really powerful and when it's not correct it can destroy a company absolutely I I like to observe that you know there's a difference between very good teams teams that operate quite well and really great teams the teams that are not only able
to operate quite well on one project but on multiple projects and are able to kind of uh you know crossfall in it uh you know their goodness to other teams that they work with right and I I my one of my observations about the core difference between a good team and a great team is the Judgment of the leader
of that team what other observations do you have about the difference between a kid and a great team you know the uh there are a few few things I've observed on that point uh the first one is really the best way to describe it is what is is there a is there Clarity on how this team makes decisions
and I mean it certainly from a tactical kind of process perspective but I mean it more from a almost a philosophical perspective right which is that you know what are we optimizing for and if you look at all those sort of like you know the great companies out there right like they have some way of
deciding what what makes sense uh what product to build and how to build the product how much uh attention to detail to give certain things and how much to build fast right um and hopefully some of those are codified in the operating values or the operating principles of the company
but does this team have clarity uh on that kind of philosophy for how they're making decisions uh is is I think a really important factor and then are they actually following through on it in their day-to-day so that is one thing I like to call out second thing I like to call out is to
what degree is the team willing to bend rules right I'm not talking about like breaking laws because you shouldn't do that but to what degree are you willing to bend rules right uh and it turns out that rules exist for a reason whether it's a rule for like uh you know how you launch a certain product
or a rule for how you get approval for a certain thing um and so on and so forth right like over time as an organization scales a lot of rules are created right um and there are teams that like want to do the right thing that will follow all the rules right and they do it for two reasons one
is there is usually kind of um you know a little bit is perhaps some insecurity perhaps a lack of adequate courage on the part of the leaders of the team uh but the other is being able to defend when things go wrong right so uh you know following rules is very comfortable because if we follow all the rules
and it doesn't work out we can just point at the rules and say look we followed all the rules we followed the process we came to all the product reviews we showed you all the mock-ups and all the intermediate artifacts as the rule said yeah right and so therefore now if this product
failed in the market or failed to win don't blame me right like I followed the rules right and this is how a lot of operators operate in organizations I call that the McDonald's problem because uh you know I used to work in Tech as well and people would do this all the time where it's
like I followed all the rules I get the wrong outcome and I would say well if all you do is follow the rules you should be getting minimum wage because what we're paying you for is Judgment you need to know when to opt out when that doesn't make sense or where it's leading down the wrong path and that
drove people crazy yep yep yeah it's it's it's so interesting that people don't see that the reason they're they're getting paid the big bucks is and the reason they at the way they'll create Alpha for their team or for their company is uh through that judgment right because if if everybody could just
follow playbooks yeah um then uh you know and they might be wonderful playbooks but over time even wonderful playbooks become the industry standard so now if you want to outperform you need something else and that's something else is always judgment uh and so uh yeah absolutely you know
that kind of like willingness to bend rules and now the question is kind of well how do I know which rules to bend right that's the next question I get uh when I write about these things it's like again it goes back to judgment um uh one you know I have quite a few on the list of like the attributes of you
know good to Great teams but another one I'll share um that is often not discussed is just um you know High agency among the individual contributors of the team because I I think like at some point um you know a team say it's like 10 20 30 40 people 50 people more uh it becomes very important uh not just
for the leaders to be ambitious and have good judgment and so on but for the individual contributors to be very high agency people where they feel that they have uh the ability uh to end the sort of desire to influence outcomes right and they are going to execute creatively uh to do
that and in some cases they are going to bend rules uh and in many cases uh you know most teams have constraints right whether they're Staffing constraints or funding constraints or whatever else and it's this ability of at least a few individuals on the team you don't need the entire team to be extremely high
agency but the ability of at least a few individuals on the team to have and embody this High agency approach such that oh actually yes we do have this obstacle but here's how we're going to creatively execute around that obstacle in order to make impact uh so those would be a few you know items I would
share in terms of kind of that difference between you know good and great teams we're going to go back to writing in a second but we just hit on the agency so I want to I want to go down to Rabbit Hole here which is you came up with the agency Talent Matrix wondering if you can explain what that
is and how you use it yeah and so uh you know I I sort of as I was thinking back a few years ago about like the the people I've seen that have outsized outcomes consistently uh both for themselves and for the teams and the companies they're part of um I'd realized that there were some patterns
um between those uh individuals and um that's when I came across this term High agency which I believe Eric Weinstein coined the term uh and you know essentially it's a high agency is about uh it's basically about you know doing certain things doing taking on hard things uh without waiting
for condition to be conditions to be perfect or otherwise blaming your circumstances right so uh so I wanted to kind of marry this idea of high agency that I came across with the idea of your talent right the degree of talent you have or the degree of competence whatever kind of term we use there
uh and so then you can kind of start to imagine this uh you know two by two Matrix of like you know uh low agency uh High Agency on one axis along one axis and then low talent and high Talent along the other axis right and so you get this kind of um you know these kind of four uh quadrants if you will where uh if you
have low talent and low agency right uh then you are going to be a cog in the wheel you're going to perform some undifferentiated work uh and uh maybe that's essential work but whatever work you do uh is not really going to substantially change uh or improve the trajectory of the team or even of your
own outcomes right uh so that's kind of the low Talent low agency uh quadrant then you have the high Talent but low agency um person okay so like these might be you know really brilliant people uh maybe they went to you know really amazing schools they have great pedigree etc etc
but uh and we've all worked with such folks over time where uh you know they have tremendous potential but somehow there is probably you know something that's kind of stopping them and they're often kind of looking around them and complaining about well but this is not right and but like we don't have Clarity
on the cross court goals and we don't have uh you know we don't have the resources we need uh and we don't have the cross-org support we need and the cross-functional support etc etc um and look like pointing these things out by them by itself I don't think is a bad thing right like you would need to
confront the reality of your situation uh but but what happens to kind of when you have low agency but High Talent is you have the ability to point these things out but you don't quite demonstrate uh the drive and the resilience the confidence uh and um sort of the creative execution
to do something about it right you're waiting for conditions to be perfect and you have this fantasy in your head that when conditions are perfect I will be able to achieve uh the potential of myself or my goal of my team uh so that quadrant I call the frustrated Geniuses and what happens the
reason like they get frustrated over time is there is no situation that is ever going to be uh be up to the standards of perfection that they're hoping for um so so that's kind of the low agency High Talent then you also have the high agency but perhaps low Talent uh group
and that group I call go-getters right so these are folks that are just like they're very ambitious they want to get things done um they are uh you know often very creative they're very excited they want to take on new projects um they have a high degree of optimism um but uh perhaps they're early in their
career right and so they don't yet have the talent and the full competence right um so go-getters is an interesting group and like one other observation um that I made over the over the years is that uh you know given generally this is more a guiding principle than a rule but like uh given a choice between
hiring a frustrated genius and hiring a go-getter um if it is a role that has a high degree of ambiguity I would rather hire the go-getter than the frustrated genius because I know the go-getter will work hard to resolve the ambiguity versus uh you know complain about the ambiguity
and in many ways product management uh you know the role I have done for many many years is a role whose primary responsibility is to resolve ambiguities and act in the presence of ambiguities so for PMS it becomes really important to kind of have this High agency and then lastly the
last quadrant in this Matrix is you know the high agency and high Talent quadrant and these folks I just call them game changers right like they they change the game for the company for the team for themselves um uh and but the reality is that there are very few of them right so if you
come across a game changer early in their career uh you better hold on to them right and you better provide them with the opportunities and the support uh that is necessary for them to achieve their potential um and uh last thing I'll see on this topic is sometimes go-getters over time become game changers
um because you know with enough experience now you can increase your competence so you can go from the low perhaps on the low Talent side to the high Talent side just by virtue of having that much more experience um and and so again you know in many cases you know for certain roles I would
rather prefer a go-getter who's perhaps a little bit lacking on certain of the certain experience factors uh because I've found that those experience factors can be rapidly made up for I like that Matrix a lot and I think it's very helpful for sort of uh generalizing or stereotyping people into
quadrants but it also helps you with hiring with layoffs with who's contributing uh it helps you identify who's easily replaceable and who's not and so it you know if you're honest with yourself and you know which category you're in you can especially if you're a frustrated genius you can sort of get
out of that category with a mindset change that would be a pretty easy one to turn into a game changer I want to come back to the writing culture uh just for just for a second here because I always think about writing as making the invisible visible so you're taking your thinking which largely happens in your
head and now you're forced to explain it to other people because you're forced to explain it you have to walk through all the steps by which you arrived at your thinking it's actually forced to walk through your thinking step by step and lay out some sort of rationale for why
you think the thing that you do in the process of writing things down is thinking right it is a form of thinking and it's often the process by which we we come to realize we don't know what we're talking about so the act of writing it is very helpful for the person writing it but the act of
consuming somebody else's writing is also very helpful for what we talked about when we first started which was perspective taking right so you're showing me what the world looks like from your Vantage Point what variables matter why this matters to you and how you arrived at this conclusion assuming
you're doing that honestly I'm curious as to in practice I've never worked in writing culture uh with the exception of Farnham Street but what is it like in practice being on the inside where is it helpful and where does it slow you down yeah I think one of the areas where it's extremely
helpful is when you have a writing culture you it becomes more of a permissionless environment because you know in our you know you know say non-writing culture where perhaps the way big decisions are made or proposals are shared it's usually in some meeting where perhaps uh you know we have a
discussion uh or I walk you through a slide deck well the observation is that uh all of a sudden if that's the way that big proposals need to be made or even small proposals need to be made now you need permission right you need permission to join the meeting you need permission to present at the meeting you need
permission you need to ask for permission to take asynchronous meaningful slot of everybody's time to be able to share what you want to share right and a true writing culture kind of removes a lot of those constraints right so if you spot something um that you think needs to be improved
in a writing culture in a in a true writing culture you can write about it and share the document and uh see what people have to say see if it resonates and uh certainly you know at stripe as a writing culture I saw it often where uh there were people you know regardless of their role
um and their function within the organization uh kind of wrote down something super insightful and as they shared it it kind of spread through various slack channels saying like oh this person wrote this doc you know you should check it out and now all of a sudden people are going in the dark
and posting comments it's like oh this is actually an interesting point can you expand more on it or like you know I don't quite agree with this what's your perspective and all of this is happening in a fairly permissionless manner so I think that is a very key aspect that people tend to ignore of kind of
this writing culture and it has you know done right has like really profound effects on the degree of transparency cross-organization clarity and really kind of Innovative big thinking uh that you can engage in um just via a writing culture right so that's one aspect I I definitely want to
call out uh that I've gonna see play out really well um look another aspect um is that when you kind of write things down one of the challenges that arises um is that not you know the the problem is that not everybody is a good writer right and that kind of some people have also told themselves
stories about oh I'm not a good writer right and and so one of the challenges is that such a culture makes it hard for people who kind of think they're not a good writer to be able to influence right because ultimately you know any form of communication in an organizational setting is
is a form of influence right so I would you know I managed you know and mentored a number of people who'd come to me and say like look um I wrote this document down I shared it um it took me two days to write it and nobody looked at it yeah or none of the execs looked at it right and even
though they had asked me to write a document but I barely got any comments or feedback right so so then I wrote another doc you know two months afterwards and same thing right and and now we are being asked to write uh a third document on the same topic and I just don't know if like it's worth
it right it's maybe that you know the executives don't care uh or they're just like cynically they're giving us busy work right and um that challenge is a real challenge for many folks so one of the things I did uh you know in these situations is uh and this was often situations where somebody on my
team or in my org was kind of bringing me this problem uh I was like what do we do um it kind of became important for me to start sharing some principles of how you influence we are writing in these kinds of writing cultures um and one of I'll perhaps share a couple of observations uh from this uh
from from the work I did uh with folks on my team number one is oftentimes when this was happening when they were describing this type of frustrating situation with a writing culture uh I observed that in that the documents had all the right ideas but it was hard to find those ideas
and it was hard like here's 20 pages but there's like three good ideas in here go find them yeah and it was hard to understand the true value of those ideas right in that noise right and so so when I observed that I started trying to identify why is it the case right and then I realized after some time
that the reason that some folks do this when they are writing is because they want to communicate everything they know about this topic yeah they have this deep desire to like you know I know all of these things about this thing so I'm going to communicate everything and I'm going to communicate
every single angle and every single detail and anecdote and statistic about this thing and and of course when we do that the story We Tell ourselves itself is oh I want to build a bulletproof case right yeah so I'm going to provide all of this detail um and of course what actually ends up
in practice is uh regardless of how well you you write this thing the the reader is lost right um and so oftentimes people would come to me and say like look I have this document uh but I feel like I'm not using the right words uh so can you kind of lightly edit it and then I look at the
document I'm like you know I have to tell you like and this is not gonna sound uh like happy news but I would rewrite this whole thing right uh because uh you know here you are you're saying like well maybe you can just use a few better words but the problem is not the words right the problem is that we need to
create greater Clarity and that means we have to rethink the structure we need to we need to write with empathy uh for where the reader is likely coming from yeah and that is much more work than changing a few words here and there um so so that is kind of one challenge uh I have seen and and like once people
understand it right uh and you can even as a leader if you're helping anybody through this you can even you know create a vocabulary around this right like uh whatever that might be uh but uh once we kind of like start talking about it in terms of no no the goal is not to
communicate everything we know about this topic um the next step to step to take is then to ask which is what is the most important thing I want to convey right and start with that message in any kind of document and proposal in the work setting um and you know share that message very early
on in the document whatever that might be you know our core Insight is X and based on this core inside x uh our proposal is that we do a b and c right now actually your proposal to do ABC might be informed by you know 10 other insights you know pqrst Etc right but that can come later yeah
totally right or that can come in an appendix section right if for for the more curious right but if x inside is actually the core insight uh then that's really what uh Executives need to know it's not a movie right like lead with lead with the best here don't don't build up a climate like don't
build up for it because most people stop reading you have I think about eight seconds to grab somebody's attention in an email or document at work you got to use that time wisely absolutely I think we we also need to the other the other tactic uh related there um is like look all of these things are
experiences right like a movie is an experience uh a book is an experience that somebody is creating a podcast is an experience and so similarly a document that you're writing is an experience you're creating for your target audience so it it helps to be very intentional about what do you want them to
experience in fact I go you know I even go to the extent of kind of really brainstorming in these situations like you know what is the core emotion we want to evoke right in the reader and I'm not talking about fiction writing right I'm talking about like just like business
non-fiction writing about a certain product or a certain whatever but it's really important to work backwards from you know do I want them to be excited do I want them to be slightly concerned uh do I do I want to kind of clarify that like we should be afraid about a certain you know competitor or whatever
the case might be uh and then you know kind of keep that in the back of our minds right because then as we kind of write the words we choose the structure we choose the things we choose to emphasize uh you know change drastically based on kind of this working backwards view of what it
is that we really want to evoke in the reader I want to switch gears from writing come back to decision making for a second what do you know about decision making that most people miss you know there are certain truths you know or maxims that um we learn or we discover about the world and how the world
operates and then we use uh those maxims for uh making many decisions and uh and the insight for me um and this was you know maybe three four years ago was that sometimes we should use the antithesis of that truth or Maxim uh when it applies to us okay so I call this the antithesis
principle um and um it explains a lot of bad decisions or principles that we kind of adopt as individuals um and uh and it's kind of best shared with a few examples so let me just take a few minutes to kind of share a couple of examples so so first example I'll share is uh you know
one kind of truth that we might know about the way the world works is that most people learn better when the content or the teaching is entertaining right when when it's entertaining it's like it's got great stories amazing analogies people just learn better right and there are many people who proudly
say right like you know and I come across such folks all the time as a teacher myself or as somebody who writes online and so on is uh and well I only learn through engaging writing right now as a smart person who wants to make a big impact on yourself and on the world right if
you think really deeply about this kind of truth let's just say right which is most people learn better learn the best when the content and the teaching is entertaining is uh that if you want to help people learn something make it very engaging and entertaining okay so that's the obvious conclusion
that almost any smart person will reach right but it turns out there is actually one more conclusion you should draw to be a better decision maker and to have better results for yourself which is it is actually not in your best interest to be the kind of person who only learns from entertaining content
right in fact to go even further than that you should not even be the kind of person that needs any sort of entertainment as a prerequisite to learning right and so I would say that most smart people don't consider this second conclusion right and we make decisions for ourselves and we create identities for
ourselves around these kinds of areas because we see these truths in the world and we assume those truths must apply to us right and that's why it's the antithesis because you know actually what you should do if you want to optimize and maximize outcomes and your impact on the
world is you should turn yourself into the kind of person that doesn't need any sort of entertainment uh to learn something right so because that way uh you know while most people will discard a profound book that doesn't have an attractive title you will actually take a take the time to read that book and to
kind of really learn from the book uh despite it having a terrible title right so so that's just like one example there's just like once I sort of saw this um in myself first I realized that this actually this idea of the antithesis principle applies to you know all sorts of things and I'll
just share one more example and kind of would love your thoughts afterwards is uh you know one of the things that uh you know if if I post on Twitter that you know a great manager is really important for your career right I will get a gazillion likes because it's something people love right
like which is like a great manager just follow great people great leaders and you will have an amazing career etc etc right um so so that's kind of perhaps the truth You observe about the world um but now what are you to conclude from this right how do you kind of like act on this observation
well the first conclusion you can draw and this is the more sort of more obvious conclusion is that you should try to be a highly competent manager yourself and you should try to be a really great manager of people so you can attract uh you know highly energetic highly talented people and you can help them do
really good work so that is the obvious conclusion that one can draw but there is a non-obvious conclusion that the antithesis principle suggests which is when it comes to yourself you should turn yourself into a person who can do really good work even without having a great manager
even if you have an okay or absentee manager you should turn yourself into a person who can do really great work now this second conclusion is the non-obvious conclusion that very few people draw right and in in fact most people will blame in some way uh you know the fact that their manager doesn't do
one-on-ones with them as frequently as they expect and say well of course this is why you know I'm not performing as well or whatever and you know perhaps that is a reasonable statement kind of your early career but if you're 10 years into your career 20 years into your career right and you
are in a career which kind of rewards you for your judgment and your agency and so on right it is actually in your interest to pay attention to the antithesis principle because again if you just rely on great managers around you then you're kind of limited in terms of how much impact you can make right so yes by all
means be a great manager yourself and try to be the best possible manager you can but at the same time don't always expect that you can only do good work if you are working for a great manager so again this kind of applies to so many examples and I think people make this fundamental mistake when they're
kind of just making decisions for themselves for like what works for them and what kind of person they want to be I think that's a powerful encapsulation of an idea which boils down to you need to be able to operate regardless of the circumstance that you find yourself in
if you can only operate in ideal circumstances you're only going to be average because circumstances are never going to be ideal and you need to find a way to operate no matter what the circumstances are yep yeah and and I think the the challenge for many people is that the reason and
it is the antithesis principle is not extremely intuitive and certainly it wasn't for me early on in my life is because it requires us to embrace inconsistency right like we we just like habitually look for consistency so the thing we observe in the world we want ourselves to act consistently
with the thing we observe in the world but the antithesis principle says that the very fact that you made an observation about this thing in the world the way the world works and in all of its imperfect ways um it indicates that yeah sure by all means to have an impact and to be effective
you need to recognize um the way the world works but that doesn't automatically mean that you also embody that in yourself right like and and perhaps just to kind of you know Drive the example home the first time I really realized this is when you know I was just kind of reading we've all heard this kind of
anecdote uh and I don't know if it's true but like it's the what is that the idea that um you know people form a strong impression of you within seven seconds of meeting you right and so so what that suggests is um uh that like you know if you want to be influential if you want to you know
make an impact uh you should work towards creating a strong positive impression right in the first few moments of any interaction uh and I think many people do that right but when I started thinking about it for myself I realized that but wait if I fall prey to that same bias
right I am going to unfairly judge other people who are otherwise great perhaps but perhaps they did not make a strong great impression in the first seven seconds so I need to actually follow for myself I need to follow the antithesis of that when I am meeting somebody new right and again that kind of
inconsistency is not natural uh to us as humans and so it kind of like we really need to be intentional about developing it I want to ask you about how you think about opportunity costs as they relate to decision making you know one of the things is um that most of us and most teams certainly are
Roi machines they are return on investment machines and the way we evaluate things is evaluate work whether to do a certain work or not is is this going to provide us with a positive Roi right um and um and again during my own career as a you know as a person who kind of was responsible for deciding
what should we build when should we build it what should we build first uh for a long time I used Roi as a core uh kind of way of thinking about the work we do um and what I realized is that in practice so while this sounds good of course we want the highest Roi from the work we do
so it sounds good but the challenge is like you know the the formula for Roi is like yeah you know the value you got minus uh the you know the effort or the time or you know expense you put in to get the value divided buy the effort time expense right whatever the case might be um so so it's a ratio right now whenever
you have a ratio and you want to increase that ratio so in this case Roi uh you can increase the numerator or you can play a trick and decrease the denominator right so you can keep the numerator constant but if you just decrease the denominator you can increase the ratio and so I saw that
tendency play out very often in making decisions about what to work on next what to prioritize how to think about our priorities is uh oftentimes uh you know teams will gravitate towards things uh where the denominator is small right so practically what that meant is this is low hanging fruit
this is a quick win right oh it will only take one day to do it right like and then I'd ask like what's the impact of it well it doesn't have a very high impact but again because it's quick let's do it right and and so so we get kind of really seduced by this kind of you know tendency to
want to reduce the denominator uh and and what does that do what that leads to is a lot of me too products it leads to us kind of just meeting table Stakes it leads to kind of uh picking the safe things because the safe things are uh you know easy to quantify and they're safe because they're easy to quantify
and look I have nothing against those kinds of improvements I think those are important those incremental improvements are absolutely important but I find that a lot of product teams when they're making decisions about where to spend their time they are solely working on those kind of
high Roi things and typically things which kind of just reduce the denominator and they are afraid to pick up the ambiguous thing which might have a very large return uh but uh might require some effort right and might involve just working through the ambiguity uh so that's when I realized that
actually um you know a better way when you're in a very high leverage role a better way to think about these decisions is through the lens of opportunity cost right where opportunity cost is you know roughly it is uh you know the the value uh you get out of uh you know the
optimal option right like uh and and the value you got out of the option you chose right so so the Delta between those two right the the option you chose and uh the value you'd get out of the optimal option that's what kind of your opportunity cost is and when you look at things through an
opportunity cost lens uh what you really realize is uh that for certain things you want to kind of minimize the opportunity cost meaning you want to pick the thing that is as close to Optimal as possible um and so that's kind of how you'll minimize the opportunity cost so that's why I like to say that you know in a
high leverage role your goal should not just be uh to increase Roi uh you should also think about how you're going to minimize the opportunity cost and the last thing I'll say here is oftentimes people say oh well you know we can work on a number of different things because
who knows what the optimal thing is right we can work on a bunch of different things and as long as those are generally positive uh we will be fine right and we can always backtrack if they're not but the problem I found in practice is that it's easy to say in a meeting when we're trying to just like
decide on something we're like yeah yeah of course if it doesn't work out we'll just backtrack right but in practice I saw us never doing it right like and and so I also looked into why and what I realized then is that you know uh it's kind of like the the Ikea effect takes hold right where we we put
in a bunch of work behind this and so now we think it's more valuable than it really is right and now we are going to just like uh you know stick to it uh despite uh the world telling us or giving us evidence to the contrary so that's the cognitive bias there but there is also more than just cognitive
bias there's a practical issue which is you know our code uh so I'm talking about software products for the most part but it applies to many other products and initiatives as well but uh our code is not as malleable that as we think right we just think how we're going to write this code ship it and
then ah if it doesn't work we're going to undo it we're going to change it uh we're gonna learn Etc and all of that is good uh but our code is not as malleable as we think and so it takes us much longer than uh to kind of you know try to find that kind of optimal thing uh we are making
changes to the code and at some point our code just refuses to cooperate and so we left we get left with this kind of Highly sub-optimal product one of the things that you've given a lot of thought to that I do want to ask you about today is how do we systematically grow our competence you know one of the
cool things in kind of systematically growing our competence is um the idea of decomposition and um you know anytime we say okay we want to get better at uh decision making or you know in the product world a version of that for product decisions is product sense okay I want to get better at my product
sense which I Define as the ability to usually make the correct decision about a product or a product feature um whether it's macro or micro uh even in the face of very high ambiguity right and so so so when somebody is confronted with something like that and that being a core part of their
competence uh it is very confusing confusing because like for how what step do I take here uh so that's where decomposition comes in very handy because you can look at almost any uh area of competence and you can decompose it into its constituent elements all right and so so let's take uh in
this case again let's take a product sense well product sense which is again the ability to make the correct product decisions this is by the way by the way like some people are really great at consistently building very good products this is why some companies are very good
at uh you know Building Products uh that resonate with their users is because they really embody that product sense uh in the work they do right so well it turns out product sense has three components uh the first is cognitive empathy which is do I understand how you think as a user how customers think how
they approach situations what will resonate for them or not right that is cognitive empathy second is domain knowledge right do I understand enough about this domain about the technology about the market about the competition etc etc uh such that I can make a decision that will differentiate us such
that uh you know I do understand regulation and the limitations of what we can get done Etc right so that's kind of domain knowledge and then the third piece is creativity and and creativity is about taking these two inputs which is cognitive empathy and domain knowledge and turning it into
a concrete proposal for what we are going to build so you can have the first two but if you don't have the creativity on your team uh then you can take all those inputs but you won't be able to convert those inputs into a compelling product proposal in a compelling ux and a compelling go to market approach and a
marketing approach and so on that will actually then resonate and you know lead to product success yeah so these are the three components of product cells so now if I want to increase my confidence grow my competence systematically right uh it becomes much clearer how I do that
which is okay in order to grow my product sense I need to grow my cognitive empathy I need to grow my domain knowledge and I need to grow my creativity um now there are details of how you might do that but the point is now you have um you know much more clarity on kind of this systematically growing your
competence um one other tactic I'll share on this topic of systematic um competence is you have to understand a lot of people think that um the at some point in their career they reach a stage where they start making the assumption that the only way that they'll grow their
competence is through projects they do at work which is hey I'm clearly doing all this work and I'm learning all these new things right and that's growing my confidence and absolutely it is no doubt whatsoever uh but the challenge is that some what I ask people to do instead of
just being focused on learning from projects at work is you know look you have 168 hours in a week like you know take some number of hours and call it your career time and I don't care if it's 30 hours 40 hours 50 hours 60 hours 70 80 90. whatever you do you do you you pick some number of hours in a week
which is your career time and your career time certainly involves all the time you spend on your work on your projects at work right but let it not be 100 percent right I want you to carve out five percent ten percent twenty percent of your career time uh and I want you to allocate that time
on learning outside of your work projects right and this is something I personally did you know like since the very early days of my career and I found that what what happens is that kind of even if it's five percent right say five percent or 50 hours right so the in a week so that's two and a
half hours a week where I'm explicitly not learning just from you know doing projects at work and what that does is that compounds like crazy over time right and and the interesting part is some people say well but I can't do it because I'm so busy at my work right I already like don't have enough time uh
to do all the things I need to do and now you're saying like take two and a half hours less so take three hours less uh but what what they miss is that those two and a half hours or three hours a week if you invest consistently will make you much more effective and efficient at the remainder of your
project time right so you'll naturally just be able to do things uh you know much faster and much better in the time that you're spending on your projects uh and in fact will take you less time now to do uh you know to have the same degree of impact so you know of course the last piece here is this requires you
know a mindset towards growth this requires some degree of ambition and this requires taking responsibility for one's own competence and so those are prerequisites right without those mindset changes none of what I said will actually be put in action or resonate with somebody
um because if you are going to say well it's the organization's job to grow my competence then sorry it's not going to happen goes back to the agency right so this has been a fascinating conversation we always end with the same question which is what is success for you oh I love that question
um so for me uh success I Define as uh the optionality I have with my time and it took me a really long time to um to really understand this well um because I I was always very ambitious as an individual and so I wanted to be very successful but when I achieved certain goals that I thought you know
work towards my success I was still left a little unsatisfied and so I kept looking for this kind of what is success for me and I finally cracked it in my very late 30s uh which is success for me is time optionality but particularly it's about am I able to spend the time I want to
spend uh on the top three things in my stack rank of my life priorities and so I have about like a few things that are like you know buckets of my life priorities so one is career uh another is a family uh third is interest fourth it might be friends uh fifth might be Community uh Etc right so like um I kind
of like to think about these buckets uh in terms of like a stack rank so at this point in my life what are the top three things in my stack rank right and and that stack rank changes uh and then I like to evaluate you know am I able to spend the time I want to be spending on the top three things in my
stack Rank and if I am then I'm successful and so by that metric I wasn't really successful in my 20s or mid 30s uh because I was not able to spend all the time I wanted to spend on the top three things in my stack rank uh but uh luckily now I am uh so I feel like I'm kind of successful