Episode 89: Becoming the Hero of Your Own Story with Donna Lichaw
Melissa Perri welcomes Donna Lichaw to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Donna is a product leader turned leadership coach and the author of The User's Journey. She joins Melissa to talk about how she helps leaders and executives answer questions like, “how do I get my team excited to show up to work every day?” by becoming the heroes of their own stories. They discuss the importance of being clear on what untrue stories you might tell yourself and the importance of self-awareness, common challenges Donna faces when working with leaders, the helpful side of imposter syndrome, and how to identify your own superpower and use it for good.
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Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Donna explore:
Donna talks about what led her down the path of leadership coaching.
A big sign that someone isn't ready to be a leader is when they resort to the blame game. It also indicates a lack of self-awareness.
"What I found is that the stories you tell other people are only as powerful as the stories you do or don't tell yourself.”
The main challenges that Donna has seen leaders encounter are a lack of trust for their teams and executives, a lack of mentorship, and letting go of control.
Imposter syndrome can actually be helpful in a certain way. Donna talks about ways leaders can use it or combat it to perform better at their jobs.
The behaviors that aren't serving you are actually your superpowers. "They're your superpowers because you're really good at defaulting to that behavior. And that behavior is really strong. It's so strong that it guides you all the time, even when you don't want it to."
Telling stories as a leader is not enough. "The trick is really to involve other people and bring them along on your journey; and with everyone you work with, you always want to think, ‘How are they going to be a hero, and how do I make them feel really excited to work with me?’”
To tactically make someone the hero and help bring them on your side, you must first connect with them one-on-one. Understand what makes them tick, their goals, and challenges. [37:11]
Resources
Donna Lichaw | LinkedIn | Twitter
Transcript:
Melissa:
Hello and welcome to the Product Thinking Podcast. Today we're talking all about leadership and how you can be a great leader and use some techniques from storytelling in there as well. And we're joined by Donna Lichaw, who is a product person, now turned leadership coach, and she's also the author of the book, The User's Story. So welcome Donna.
Donna:
Thanks Melissa. It's good to be here.
Melissa:
It's great to have you here. So, uh, you were a product leader, uh, and now you specialize in leadership coaching. Can you tell us a little bit about, uh, you know, your career path and why you ended up in leadership coaching? I know this is what you specialize on now. What kind of led you to that path?
Donna:
What led me to the path was I was working as a consultant for a bunch of years and things were going great. I was working with cooler and cooler companies and people higher and higher up in leadership, which was really, really fun. And I would come in, I, um, had just published my book. Um, what I found was that when people would bring me in, the book was about, had to turn, had to think about your customers as heroes of a journey that they would have when they think about and use your products. And so companies would bring me in to help their teams really think about the stories that they were building. Not a marketing thing. Usually it was product teams, design teams, engineering teams, um, sometimes others, but usually the one of the, the, the trio or all the above. And they wanted people to really think about the stories that they were building around.
And as I was working higher and higher up with leadership, what I found is I would come in and talk about products, customers, heroes, and people would just tell me, You know what? Our customers are fine. That's not our problem. And it was one company, I'm not gonna mention who it was, but they um, they have folks who are very kind of nerdy and and blunt, which I, and I love working with them. Um, and I was, um, at an offsite with an executive team there and they were the first ones to just straight up call it out and tell me, Hey, this, we don't have these problems <laugh>. And um, it, it was a bit embarrassing cuz I had, I'd done my due diligence. I thought I knew why I was there and my hunch was that, uh, customer stories wouldn't help them either.
And they basically called it out when I was there. And um, what one of the executives said to me, and I appreciate it to this very day, which is just simply, what about my story? How our customers are fine, They're not going away. How do I get to be the hero? And at the time I did have an answer which is, well, your stakeholders are your customers, they need to be heroes, so how go turn them into heroes? And he, he didn't like my answer and he said, I don't think so <laugh>. Then he walked away. And um, I just, once I, when I have a question in my head, I can't let go of it. And so I ended up spending what's now the next, um, God, how long has it been? I've lost track, uh, a handful of years trying to find the answer.
Well, how could a leader who's not feeling so great be a hero? And that's when I, I realize over time that it doesn't come from launching great products or just meeting business goals or just feeling like your stakeholders love you. It has to come from within. I if you wanna be a hero as a leader, you have to know your own story first and then bring your story to life and then you can make the rest happen, products and stakeholders and everyone else, but it has to start with you. And for me, once I figured that out, I, um, I couldn't, like I just, that became my singular focus is really developing leaders. And so that's what I, I do now I work with senior leaders, executives, and founders and help them be the heroes of their, their own stories. And we start with them and then let it trickle out to the rest of the business.
Melissa:
So with this person who is like, I wanna be the hero, right? Like how do I get there? I think to some of us it sounds like they want all the credit, right? Is is that what they were talking about? Or was there something deeper in there?
Donna:
Well, and I'm glad you asked cuz when he first said, How do I be the hero? I, I had a knee jerk reaction because I had spent years in the product world really focusing on what we called user center design and user experience, which is a mix of what do the customers need, how do we engage them and meet our business goals. So it was about both. But when I would hear my clients say things like, Well, our company's the hero, or I wanna be the hero. I've always had this extreme reaction of, no, you don't <laugh> like, your customers don't care about you and they don't care about your company, they don't care about your brand, they care about yourselves. And um, and I would just, I would say that to a lot of people over time, what, um, he, he meant in this case, and I'm glad he clarified it for me, was, um, he gave me a couple of examples of how he did not he feel like a hero.
And what he told me were things like, you know, my, well my head of engineering is a jerk and they don't <laugh>, they, they don't listen to me. How do I get them to listen to me? Um, you know, that would be one example or my team, you know, morale is kind of low. Like, you know, our products are fine. Again, how do I get my team excited to show up at work every day? And when I heard things like that, especially the, you know, my head of engineering as a jerk, how do I get them to listen to me? I had another knee jerk reaction, which is like, you can't tell them stories that they're, they're not gonna care about your stories. That's not gonna win anyone over. There's something else going on. And my only real answer at the time was, cuz I had worked with executive coaches and uh, I was like, Dude, you need <laugh>. You need a coach <laugh> like go hire a coach and they'll help you figure out these problems because this is, you're right, it's not about your product. And um, I don't know what to tell you other than, you know, you need to turn everyone else into a hero. But something wasn't connecting in my head suddenly it was like my world was not quite right.
Melissa:
Yeah. Do you find that, um, like I, I find with some leaders, right, in those positions and who are, who are telling those things that there's like a lack of self awareness when it comes to some of those, you know, those situations where it's like, hey, um, you know, my, my head of engineering is a jerk. I, I, well I'll preface it with this too. Like, I, I come into a lot of places and I'm, my job is to like evaluate chief product officers and tell them are they gonna be able to like fulfill this number? One thing that I look for, um, that tells me this person isn't like ready to lead is when they're blaming every single other person and they have none of the things together that I need to evaluate if this company's actually gonna succeed. So like one company I came into, I kept asking for the roadmap and the CPO of this like giant well off company was just like, oh, I don't, like, I couldn't make a roadmap because, you know, sales was yelling at me and technology wasn't doing this and we have no agile process. So I had to make the agile process. And I've been working on that and I'm like, you've been here for 10 years. Like, how do you not have a roadmap when you're the chief product officer of a company for 10 years? Um, so I feel like there's this inherent like, blame everybody else. Is that like something you're observing in the leaders that you're working with? Or do you are like, are there some people that you can help and you can't help? Or what do you look for there? I guess
Donna:
There are a few questions in there. I'm
Melissa:
Gonna, Yeah, sorry, I just covered you with questions too, but
Donna:
Yeah, this is, no, and I have thoughts about all of them. The, um, here I'm gonna tackle first the, the thing about blame, actually I'll start at the end, which is if you're someone, if we're working together and you absolutely cannot figure out how to stop blaming people, I can promise you it, it won't work over time. And so I, I do work with, I work with, um, yeah, I work with a bunch of heads of product chief product officers or, or the, the kind with, I don't even know what the titles are, but something, something, and founders suffer from this too. Um, actually any executive can suffer from this. It's it, when you've come up the ranks very quickly and you were an amazing individual contributor when you were doing that kind of work, I was gonna say when you were younger, but a lot of times the, the executives and the founders who are very much into that blame game are still fairly young because they've catapulted themselves or they've been catapulted into leadership position very quickly, probably because they're brilliant or they were an amazing ic or they had an accidental path or they founded their own company and then suddenly they're in charge of all these people.
When you come up that way very, very quickly, I do see a lot of people blaming other people for things not working. Um, anything. Our numbers are not right. We don't have a roadmap. They didn't listen to what I said. It could be anything. You do have to get over that as, as a leader and learn, the way I see it is. So part of what I eventually learned when I went on my, um, my quest, my journey, which <laugh> after this workshop, I realized, oh my god, I have to have a better answer for this person. And so, uh, many years later, what I found is that the stories you tell other people are only as powerful as the stories you do or don't tell yourself about anything. And so they're a jerk or they never listened to me or they screwed up. That's a story.
And it may or may not be true. And the trick is to really unpack that and figure out, okay, what's true here? They're a jerk. Well no, what's really going on here? Okay, what was the situation? And you unpack it, you unpack it just like you would a technical problem. Most of my clients still work in tech and ton on the product side of things. So you already know how to already know how to do this. You unpack it, what happened? Well, I brought them a not fully formed idea. Okay, what happened next? They attacked me <laugh>. Okay, what really happened? Well, they asked me 10,000 questions <laugh> and fine, they asked me many questions and then I snapped at them in response. Okay, then what happened? Then they started, you know, and they creates war. That's truth versus fiction. He's a jerk, she's a jerk, whatever.
So the trick is really you have to see what stories are getting in your way and what stories you're telling yourself in place of actual reality. So you can write better stories with the other people you work with or, or with yourself. So, um, that's, you know, a long answer to your question, but you have to learn how to find the true stories in life or you're gonna let your stories lead you and they're gonna take you places where you don't wanna go. And blame is the most toxic, one of the more toxic stories that you find with individual leaders and with teams, especially leadership teams, you see it a lot. So yes, you have to get past that.
Melissa:
Oh yeah, I've seen that a lot with leadership teams and it's usually, usually the crux of why things are not working. And I, I think people forget about that,
Donna:
Especially, especially with leadership teams. It's, it's a big one. And um, you know, to your point earlier, if you're interviewing someone for an executive position, yes they should, they should have that, um, self-awareness to know when they are or not doing that. I think what I love about who I work with is often it's people who are, it's not necessarily the career CEOs or the career CPOs I work with. I work with the ones who created their job from scratch or created it at their, what was a startup that became a scale up, then became an established company and suddenly they're like, they know how to do their job, they're good at that, but it's all the people stuff that's really hard. So not everyone has learned to do things like not blame other people or be self-aware and sometimes you can easily help them figure it out. And that's, that's what I love to do. So it's all easy, easy to learn.
Melissa:
Does it take some level of self-awareness though to be like ready for a coach or what, what kind of state are you walking into to help these people at?
Donna:
It does take a lot of self-awareness. So typically when people come to me for help, they know something's wrong and usually it's a, it's a, a business problem that doesn't feel right. So if it's a founder who's coming to me, they'll be in a position where either they're burnt out cuz they're working all the time and why is no one listening to me and I can't sustain this. So burnout is a big one. Another one will be business results are metrics. So what happens a lot when you scale your company and a few years ago you were a lovely agile, nimble team of 30 and everyone was all on the same page and you all had the same vision and mission and goals and you worked lovely together and everything was great. When suddenly you scale and you're a thousand people, you're not getting the same results that you used to get.
And oftentimes it's this paradox when founders come to me, they have often just secured a really nice series A or they're on their way to series B and things were great, but something's not right and their numbers are not what they should be. And you do have to be self-aware to say, Hmm, I think I'm doing something wrong and I need help cuz you could easily just spend all your time blaming everyone and then your company's gonna go outta business. I've seen that <laugh> happen many times. So yes, you do have to have self-awareness or more typically, um, I would say if you're a founder in coming to me, you're, it's not as much self-awareness as you have amazing trusted advisors. Whether it's a board member or someone on your executive team or a co-founder telling you, Hey, stop it, <laugh>, you need help <laugh>, this is about you. You're getting in everyone's way. I love you. Please get a coach. If, if you're in house, I find um, maybe your boss or manager might tell you, please get some help. I know you have so much potential, I just promoted you what happened. Um, often you do have a little more self-awareness when you're in house and you come to me burnt out and you're like, Oh my god, help I know I could do this. I was just promoted. But something's not right. So yes and no self-awareness are amazing, trusted advisors you listen to.
Melissa:
Yeah, I wish more VCs and investors and advisors would encourage first time founders or first time leaders to go get that coach that they need. Cuz I, I see that so much and I I try to remind people as well cuz I, I'll I'll hear from, I get like a lot of questions and dear Melissa about this too. Like, hey, my, uh, my leader has no strategy or my, uh, you know, my founder CEO is still dictating to the product team what to build. Um, they're still in the weeds, they're still a micromanaging me. They're still doing these things. And I try to remind people like, this is the first time they've ever done this role like this. Like you have to remember that they don't know how to be a fantastic CEO cuz they've never done it before. Like they're learning it while they're doing it. Um, and I think people take that for granted.
Donna:
Yeah, it's like learning to ride a bike without training wheels. You can do it but you have to, if you're a toddler you do it really easily cuz you don't have a lot of things to unlearn. You're just a fresh <laugh>, you know, canvas and you can, if you've ever seen balanced bikes, they don't have wheels or training wheels and little little kids just learn how to do it cuz they're just like little amebas picking things up when you're older. It's really hard to learn how to ride a bike without training wheels and cuz you've just internalize so many other muscle memories and being a first time ceo, first time executive, first time head of anything, it's, it's a lot of that. It's like, yeah, you're learning to ride while you have no training wheels, but you have to keep everything afloat because otherwise your business will go out of business. It's, it's intense and everyone's, everyone's trying their best. You just don't know what you don't know. And that's where yeah, tell those people, just send their founders to me because perfect, it's all easily fixed. And the great thing is you can use your product brain. So half the time founders are amazing product people and they probably had product roles before and or engineering, but you can apply that same product thinking to yourself and the problems and the challenges you have. And so you don't actually have to learn a whole lot of new skills.
Melissa:
What are some of the most common challenges you see with the leaders that you work with?
Donna:
I think it's the ones you've mentioned so far. So one is not trusting their teams, not trusting if they're a founder, not trusting the executives who work for them, if they're a senior leader in another type of organization. Um, the issue is less trust. The issue is more on the flip side. They don't get a ton of mentorship or leadership from their boss whether their boss is the ceo. So when I work with C level folks at, at startups, it's their boss is always the the CEO and um, you know, the CEO is that founder who's learning how to ride their bike. And so they're, they can't always provide mentorship but often a lot of people I work with, and this happens at the fangs and all the big tech companies as well, when you're senior enough in some type of leadership position, you probably are the senior most expert in the thing that you do and you're reporting to someone who doesn't really know what your thing is.
So you're not gonna get the mentorship you need. You also, a lot of senior leaders and executives, even at the big tech companies themselves are not the greatest leaders. So often if I'm working with one of someone in the middle tier at a fang company, let's say they're um, they just don't have a of models of how to do things and a lot of mentorship. So they're learning it and the founders are learning it. So lack of mentorship, lack of letting go. I think that probably the number one thing is letting go. They, when you were an amazing individual contributor, you were used to solving all the problems yourself, doing all the work yourself and getting credit for doing all of the work and you probably loved what you did. When you're in a leadership position, you're suddenly having to rely on other people to do the work for you.
And it takes a lot of unlearning and a lot of letting go to be able to do that. There's also a level of an element of imposter syndrome and I think that that comes up, that's probably one of the other more common things that comes up when people come to work with me. And I'm actually surprised that I work with a lot of women and underrepresented folks in tech and I've been working with more and more men and I've been shocked at how the men I work with still have it <laugh> as well to um, the same, same, not the same degree of the same frequency, which is you just feel like, wow, I'm a fraud. I was promoted by accident or I got my funding by accident, I shouldn't be running this company. And the more you feel like an imposter, the more you're gonna drive everyone nuts and you're gonna drive yourself nuts too. So I think those are the top, top things. Lack of mentorship and models for success. Um, inability to let go and trust other people to do their job and just stay up in the realm of the vision and not the tactics of how the work gets done. And imposter syndrome,
Melissa:
Imposter syndrome I feel like comes up a lot in our industry. What do you do to help people like work through that? Is there, is there any kind of like steps you can take to start really looking at it and getting over it?
Donna:
There are steps you can take. I, the way I see it is any thoughts or behaviors that you have that are habitual? So, and when I say habitual that they, they work like a habit. Um, and I'll, I'll come back to that in a second cuz I, there's a lot from the product world where that i, that I borrowed from here. When a behavior or thought is like a habit, it, when you overuse it, it doesn't serve you and that's when it creates problems. But you started to use it for a reason and when you can unpack why you started to use it, you can figure out how to use it to move forward. And so the um, and when I, when I say habit loop, that's something that when I was working on products, I, I thought of a lot because um, a lot of the products that I worked on were in the educational technology space or um, I think that's where it came, that's where it came up most.
So I luckily, I didn't have to think about habit formation in any nefarious, not nice ways, but in education we always thought of learning loops and game loops and I would extend that to narrative loops and how game works and narrative arcs and little loops. And so what you find with a habit is let's say, um, you have an itch, you scratch it, you feel better. So the initial first loop, loop zero, it served you well to feel that itch, scratch it, and then you felt better. It's when you do it too much that it's gonna hurt eventually. And so imposter syndrome is like that, which is, if you spend all your time trying to fight yourself, I'm not an imposter. And, and um, you know, I dunno if you remember Stuart m and the olden days on Saturday Night Live, his character and he would look in the mirror and I'm, I'm smart and you know, Doggon it, people like me like it, you could spend all your time trying to trick yourself and fool yourself otherwise, but if there's a kernel of truth to hey I'm an imposter and you develop a habit of thinking that way, if you can go back to the beginning, figure out, okay, how might that have served me the first time I thought of it, you might be surprised of what you've seen.
And so what I've seen is some, um, just one client I'm thinking of when she went back and looked at how feeling like an imposter served her initially, it really helped her prove herself. So she was a, uh, a chief product officer in a men's men's world and came up as an engineer initially and constantly had to prove herself cuz she would be the only woman on this team, on that team. And so what, um, you know, that little, that little kernel of, ah, I'm not one of them made her work her ass off. And the better she did, the more successful she was in her, uh, in her career and her path and in, and the trajectory that she ended up going on, it's just over time it really started holding her back. And over time it became really infuriating for her team and everyone she worked with and her ceo because they, over time that imposter syndrome led her to not work her ass off, but to doubt herself.
And after a while people were like, What, who are you? You know, like you're not the person you used to be. Why are you doubting and changing your mind all the time and you're never telling us what you really think? And so she had to go back, embrace how it served her, and then figure out what to do next. And so it's kind of like you were talking, we were talking about blame earlier. When you blame everyone else for your failures, you're not gonna go anywhere. When you're blaming yourself all the time for your failures, you're also not gonna go anywhere. But when you can appreciate other people and appreciate your own ways of doing things, you, you know what to do about it. And it might be gonna change my behavior, it might be something else. In this case, I think she just chilled out when she realized, oh yeah, that's why I used to, it made me work my ass off. I don't need to work my ass off anymore. <laugh>, I'm chief product Officer, it's fine, it's fine. I'm not an outsider, I'm good. And she ended up developing new habits that were much more productive. So I don't know that makes sense at all, but it's um,
Melissa:
Completely,
Donna:
Yeah, it's I think honor it, honor it. Don't fight it, it's not worth it. I
Melissa:
I love that cuz we always think of imposter syndrome as a bad thing, right? I've never heard of anybody talk about it as like something that could have helped motivate you at the time. And I think like for myself, if I look back on it, um, you know, when I first got into consulting when I first, you know, moved here, a lot of, there was a lot of doubt of like, you know, do you deserve to be here externally? But also I felt it internally and I was like, I'm going to do everything I can to prove that I do. And I see a lot of people with that as well. So it, that's really fascinating to look at like how some of these things actually were drivers at one point, but then you just let them manifest for too long and they, they disrupt what you're actually capable of in the long term.
Donna:
Yeah and it's, it's like that with any kind of behavior as well. One of the core things. So one, one of the other things I I discovered along my journey is I, as I set out to figure out, alright, what makes a leader feel like a hero? Like how can someone who's leading something big be a hero? What I learned was that customers need to be heroes. So that's what my previous consulting work was and my in-house product work and my last book, customers need to be heroes. As a leader, you need to not just be a hero, but you need to be a superhero. It's a pressure cooker. It's hard. You're constantly challenging yourself, you're constantly challenged, you're in new situations, you're doing things you've never done before. And so when you think about behaviors that are holding you back, the way I like to think about them, and this is, is a concept that I borrowed from Gestalt therapy, which the idea is that the behaviors that aren't serving you are actually your superpowers.
They're your superpowers because you're really good at defaulting to that behavior and that behavior is really, really strong. It's so strong that it guides you all the time, even when you don't want it to. So like thinking I'm an imposter or apologizing or, I mean there's so many behaviors will we do in the day to day blaming people, all of those things that drive hold us back, they served you at one point and they're a part of you. The trick, just like with a superhero and the comics or a movie, is not to deny your superpower, it's to identify it, learn how it works, and then figure out how to use it for good. And that's, um, so if you look at superhero stories, I mean that's what they all are. So, um, uh, you know, Spiderman sticky webs could have gotten him in trouble and in stuck he had to learn how to use them or Elsa and her ice power, you know, she spent years trying to not use her powers and then eventually learned how to use them for good.
So it's, um, it's the same thing. The things that are holding you back, and this is for individuals and for teams as well, the things that hold you back. If you admire them, see how they work, then you can figure out how to use them for good. It's, and to bring it back to product. I mean it's just like a, it's just like a discovery. It's like product discovery, a customer development. It's just superhero development I guess. <laugh>, it's what it is. Like you're finding out what makes your customers tick and then how to amplify your products so that it helps them do their thing. It's the same thing, how do I tick, how does my team tick had as my organization tick and how do we do more of that, but use it for good.
Melissa:
So one of the things you've been touching on too is, you know, storytelling and the stories that we tell ourselves, um, to get out of this habit. What about how does that intertwine with the stories that we tell as leaders throughout our organization as well? Uh, like one of the biggest issues that I see for product leaders is that, uh, a lot of times if sometimes there's no strategy, like they just haven't made one, but a lot of times there is something, right, Some kind of vision, some kind of semblance of a strategy. Maybe it's not fully flushed out or sometimes it is actually, but they are not great at telling it to the rest of the organization and the rest of the organization is like, wait, what? We have a strategy. Like we didn't know that. So is there some kind of connection between those types of like internal stories and external stories or how do you help people through that?
Donna:
There is a connection and, um, I can't believe I'm gonna use Steve Jobs as an example because we just spent all this time talking about how self-awareness is so <laugh> so key to leading. But like it or not, I think there was an element of self was going on there with, with him. Um, but okay, let's see Steve Jobs as an example, which is, he was an amazing story teller. He could do that in presentations, he could do that in demos, he could do that in little one off anecdotes or tiny little stories. What you see if you go back and you analyze all those stories is that they had a thread to them, they had a common architecture and that was all based on the impact that he wanted to make in the world, which is, if you go back early on, the story was always the same.
It was, you could have the world at the tip of your fingertips, you could communicate with the world around you inward outward. That was always what he was building back to before Apple was the thing. And so that story was easy to tell. You could just go out and tell it. My, my book, The user's journey. I highly recommend that for understanding the stories that can flow through you customers and the stories that you tell about the products that you're building, roadmaps included. The thing is just telling stories to other people. It can be like an eggshell with a hollow center and that eggshell is very fragile and the stories you tell other people are only as powerful as the stories, you know, deep in your heart and the stories you feel and you experience and you bring to life for everyone around you. And then eventually you could tell them.
And so with someone like Steve Jobs, he had all of those elements for his inner circle. The people who worked most closely with him, I mean they would do anything for him. He really connected with them more broadly across the company. Maybe not so much. There's so many stories of people walking out of his office crying and then executives having to to fix, fix things so it can, it can work. It can't scale when you don't have the inner awareness and the inner capacity to know how you're impacting people. So he kinda, he had it with his inner circle. It didn't, didn't scale more broadly and the rest of the company had spent a lot of time and energy having to figure out, all right, how do we manage this person? And eventually, luckily they figured out how do we manage Steve? Okay, these are all the things we need to do.
It's like scaffolding that they put up. Other people, what I found is that you can be an amazing storyteller. I was once working with, um, a VP of product who was, when she came to me, what she told me was her, her team's biggest complaint was stop with the storytelling, enough. And this is when she got her new performance reviews, people told her and she was like, what? <laugh> she had been spending years trying to learn how to be a better storyteller and she was really good at it and everyone wanted her to stop with the storytelling. What happened with her is she was not connecting with herself or with other people. She had no self-awareness of what was going on in any given moment in terms of how she felt about the work she was doing or how she felt about any challenges that they were having or how she was connecting with other people.
This was all easy to, easy to fix by the way. So I mean, a lot of us don't have self-awareness until we learn how to do it, but telling stories is, is not enough. So a lot of times when, when companies used to come for me for product where, I mean I think that's what happened with this executive team I was working with years ago. They came to me with storytelling. We need our product people to be better storytellers and I'm glad that they told me, no we don't <laugh> cuz it's true. No, they did not need to know how to be better storytellers because people don't care about your stories. They care about yourself. And so the key to making this all work is first you have to know yourself and your own story. That's who you are, what matters to you, what makes you tick, what excites you, what your purpose is, where you're going, how, what superpowers you're gonna use, what kryptonite you have to leverage or to watch out for, and who your super friends are.
That's your story then you can set out on your journey. And that's a story too. And so if you think about that, you can put your product thinking hat on. All right, where am I going? How are we gonna get there? Who do I need to bring along the journey? What might get in the way? Um, that's a, uh, it's kinda like a premortem if you do it right, but you're looking at the whole story, not just what could go wrong. And the trick is really to involve other people and bring them along on journey and everyone you work with, you always wanna think who, how are they going to be a hero and how do I make them feel really excited to work with me? It can be about telling stories, but I think not yet, which is that has to happen. You are a superhero and you turn other people into superheroes.
You do that in meetings, in hallways. When we used to have hallways or I mean even pre pandemic, half my clients were fully distributed. So you do it in Zoom coffees, you do it however you figure out how to connect offsite. You do it in brainstorming sessions, in workshops. You do it constantly. You do it in your emails, you do it. I was gonna say you do it over Slack dms, you don't do it over Slack dms. If anything starts to get too complicated, you stop your dms and you pick up the phone and you call up someone or you get on a zoom call or something. But stories are created constantly as you are moving yourself forward and moving other people forward. Eventually, there are times when you do need to tell stories. And so it's still an important skill. You need to have, let's say you've got that roadmap for example.
You should have involved everyone along your journey along the way as you were figuring it out. Let's say you need to sell it externally to key stakeholders across your organization. Well hopefully you've already been selling it throughout, but maybe you need to give a presentation. Okay, so you need to know how to tell a story. Maybe you need to give a demo or you need to train someone else on your team to do that. Yes, you need to know how to tell a story. Maybe you're in a meeting and you wanna give an example of something to illustrate your point. Yes, knowing how to tell a story is very helpful.
If you need to give a public presentation. If you're a founder, you're gonna have to do that a lot. Whether you're talking to the press, whether you're pitching something to future investors or demoing something, it happens. But if you haven't done all of the groundwork up until there, then all, if you haven't done all of the groundwork until that point, people are less likely to want to join you and they're less likely to listen to you or care about what you have to say. And if you haven't done the inner work and you're not feeling good about everything you're doing, no one's gonna listen to you. It's just not gonna happen. No one cares. So yes, stories, telling stories is still important, but it's like the, it's like the end of your journey and it only happens if you need it to happen. It's like the, you know the metaphor, we all love the iceberg. It's like the, the tip of the, everything else has to happen underneath.
Melissa:
So when you are trying to bring along other people on this journey or you know, typical product management request, how do I get my engineers to listen to me or how do I, you know, get the rest of the executives to just stop giving me features and like, let me make my roadmap. What are, you know, we, we talked about like making them the heroes. What does that mean, right? Like how do you tactically turn to somebody else and help make them the hero or help get them on your side?
Donna:
What it means is, so it's another thing that we preach a lot in the product world, and I'm gonna emphasize the importance of it, which is it requires empathy but not some fluffy. Yes, I check that box on my list. Empathy, Yes, I understand it requires really, truly finding out about the other person and starting one on one. So there's this fear mechanism that kicks in when we think about, ah, that team hates us, this team will never go for it. It's like you may as well be attacked by a pack of wolves. There needs to be a human element of connecting with single individuals first I find to kind of calm you down. So think about who key stakeholder is in any situation, whether it's a team leader or someone specific, you gotta find out what makes them tick. What are their dreams? Not, it's not just about you.
Yes, you have goals and dreams and desires. Yes, that's very important cuz you can't get to where you wanna go if you don't know where you're going. Where do they wanna go? What are their superpowers? What makes them tick? What's their kryptonite? You know, what's, uh, it could be, oh my God, they're a total data person and I wasn't showing them all my data beforehand and that's why they kept shutting me down. Okay, that's super easy to fix. So find out what, So you kind of essentially wanna treat all of your key stakeholders as customers too. And you do the same thing. Flush them out. Who are they, what are their dreams? What makes them tick? And how are you gonna collectively, collaboratively move forward with them? That's key
Melissa:
To me too. That is the difference I've seen between like good product leaders and the most effective executives, right? They're like, I know how to go to the salesperson as a product leader and just be like, Hey, what do you need? Like, let's sit down what's on your plate? What are your goals? What are we doing? Um, and it's funny because every, every like CPO I interview and say like, how do you do it? That's what they said. Or like, talk to the other person, get to know them as a person. What are their goals? Like help them achieve their goals. And right there, you know, I think you can start exactly, you could start on the team as a product manager doing it with your engineers. Like it's something you carry with you at every, every stage of your career.
Donna:
They're, they're your best friends and if they're not yet, then you, you make them your best friends. And this is when I say go, go Macchiavelian here. Like, think about, you know, what are, where are the challenges and who are you gonna bring to your side? It's um, everyone's a human at work and yet we all turn into jacks when we feel under a threat, which unfortunately happens all the time at work too. So yeah, turn them into your best friend sales people. They are gonna be your best friends. I don't care what headaches they're creating for you right now, you can fix it. Customer service, engineering, whoever design, they, everyone, everyone can be turned into an an ally. And then, you know, to extend the superhero metaphor, like you all become a, a band of super friends or league of superheroes and do things together. Um, super then, you know, in the comics this happens all the time that superheroes don't wanna work together, but they have to. They can't work alone. They learn that all the time.
Melissa:
Such great advice for all the product people out there listening. I'm curious too, um, some of the stuff that we were talking about, it sounds like it's from the book, especially the ones of, you know, getting over your imposter syndrome, getting outta the weeds, becoming more of a leader. I read this book, uh, what Got you here won't get You there. Have you ever read that one?
Donna:
I have not.
Melissa:
Okay. I, that really like shook me up <laugh>, I have to say as a, as like a leader and as moving from, you know, individual contributor, product management upwards. Um, and I gave it to some VPs of product that I saw were really struggling. And I think it talks about some of the tactical stuff that they were talking about, like imposter syndrome may have served you and now it won't. But also, you know, is you were an individual contributor and you were fantastic at like the data pieces of it, but like, let your people do the data piece now you gotta do strategy. Um, and I just found it like so helpful, uh, to listen to it and be like, Oh yeah, I gotta give up some of the stuff that I was doing so that I can do the other things that are now my job.
Donna:
Yeah, it, I mean that's basically the idea. The, the more you can let go of, the more you have the space to do what you really need to be doing, which is be high up in the stratosphere and leading others with your vision and everything that you can give them to latch onto that way, it's, it's so important. And I do think the trick is on the one hand, what got you here won't get you there. And I, I say that all the time, it's true. On the other hand, if you just try to deny your your past and all of the success you have had, you're gonna fight yourself. That, that, that's just how humans are. No, no one wants to change. And so if you can figure out how to embrace the way you did things before and transpose it, I'm a musician. So I think in terms of like transposing an old story to a new story, that's when the magic evolving.
Melissa:
Yeah, it's like evolving, not just new key, throwing it out. Yeah,
Donna:
No, that would be a waste. So you got promoted or you started your company because of what you were doing. It was working just like scratching an itch until it, it, it wasn't. So you gotta figure out how to transform into something, something new.
Melissa:
Fantastic insight there. Well thank you so much Donna for joining us. If people are curious about your work, uh, where can they go learn more?
Donna:
So you can go to my website, donnaLichaw.com and I've got tons of stuff. I've got a, a newsletter, I have a new book coming out next, uh, in 2023. And um, I've got a toolkit also. You can download a lot of what we talked about. Uh, today is, is downloadable for free on my website and um, yeah, if you, if any of you ever have questions, wanna reach out, all my contact information is there too. Just reach out anytime. I love, I love, love, love chatting with product people and working with product folks.
Melissa:
Great. Well thank you so much for joining us and for those of you listening, if you enjoyed this episode of the Product Thinking podcast, uh, we have a lot more in store, so please subscribe, uh, hit that subscribe button wherever you're listening to us so that you don't miss out on a new episode every Wednesday. And next week we'll be back with another Dear Melissa where I answer all of your questions. So make sure you go to dear melissa.com and pop in all of those questions so that I can see what you are curious about and we'll see you next time.