Stop Blindly Listening to Feedback
Too many people listen to feedback like a student.
I want you to listen to feedback like a product strategist.
Let me explain what I mean.
Let’s say you get a piece of feedback in your year-end review that says:
You have great ideas and insights, and you communicate them in a really compelling way…
…but you need to get better at making sure those insights actually get implemented in the real world.
When you listen to that feedback like a student…
You just jump into implementing that feedback right away.
Because you’re assuming the feedback is objectively, universally correct.
You think: “This is how the world works. Having good insights is fine, but I have to pair it with the ability to implement. If I don’t, I can’t succeed.”
And then you just get to work improving in the way the feedback told you to improve.
This is a very normal way of looking at feedback because this is how it works in school (and you spent decades in school).
The teacher gives you the rubric. The rubric is correct — you need to develop all of those skills in order to succeed in life (or so you assume).
You do everything the rubric says. You get better along the dimensions that the rubric requires.
And if you get an A, you’re a good, smart, hardworking, accomplished person.
(Or if you don’t get an A, you feel like a terrible, dumb, lazy, inadequate person.)
When you listen to that feedback like a product strategist…
You DON’T just jump into implementing the feedback.
You pause, and use this as an opportunity to evaluate product-market fit.
You don’t see your manager as your teacher and evaluator.
You see your manager as your customer.
And you don’t see yourself as a student trying to get an A.
You see yourself as a product manager trying to figure out:
Is this the best customer for my product?
Is this the best space for my product to play in?
It’s just that in this case, the product isn’t a habit-tracker app or a coupon-finding browser extension or a social platform for podiatrists or Uber for dogs.
The product is YOU.
So when you get that feedback, you ask questions like:
Q1: What exactly does this customer mean when they say “get better at implementing”?
Because “implementing” means very different things in different contexts, to different people.
It could be: In this context, for this customer, “implementing” means getting features and improvements that our team cares about onto tech roadmaps that our team doesn’t directly control.
It’s not “implementation,” the broad concept overall.
It’s a very specific flavor of implementation.
Q2: Okay, what would I need to get better at in order to do this very specific flavor of implementation?
In this situation, it could be…
I need to get better at influencing people. Given the way this company is organized, our team is never going to get direct control of a tech roadmap. So I need to get better at persuading people without having direct authority over them.
I need more technical knowledge. I don’t have a good sense of what’s easy or hard to build. I need to understand that much better if I want to get things built.
I need to care more about the end result. Right now, the changes we’re pushing for feel really incremental and boring to me. Who cares if this user journey goes from 10 steps to 7 steps?
This lack of excitement about the vision is making me demotivated. I would need to find a way to get fired up about this if I want to have the energy to carry me forward.
Notice that this is a very neutral assessment of the current state.
This is NOT “I’m terrible at influencing, and I’m a total fraud in technical conversations, and it’s so bad that I don’t care about our customers.”
This is just a calm assessment of where you are now and what gaps would need to be filled IF you wanted to serve this particular customer better.
Q3: Should I invest my resources into getting better at those things?
Or is this a sign of bad product-market fit, and I should invest my resources into finding a better-fit customer for Me The Product?
Whichever path you choose, it’s going to take effort, hard work, and courage to walk it.
So pause and make a strategic decision: Which of these two mountains do you want to climb?
I got this exact feedback in one of my own year-end reviews, and I made the strategic decision to change the market my product was serving rather than completely retool the product I was bringing to market.
If I wanted to “serve my current market” in that job, I had to “add a new capability” to Me The Product: the capability of getting things onto tech roadmaps I didn’t control.
I could add that capability — I just wasn’t excited about it.
So instead, I decided to double down on my strengths (ideas, insights, frameworks, and communication) and to figure out what new version of my product I could craft from those strengths and what market and customer would be well-served by that product.
There are no right or wrong answers here.
But these are the right questions to be asking.
You have a tremendous amount of skill and experience that you already bring to the table.
You are NOT a newbie who is still getting up to speed on how to have a job.
You are done with the “getting up to baseline” phase of your career, where you learn the basic professional skills that are transferrable to almost all jobs and career paths.
You have a real, valuable, unique product that you bring to the career marketplace.
It’s time to stop blindly listening to feedback and letting your “product roadmap” be controlled by whoever your manager happens to be at the moment.
It’s time to get strategic about:
How you take in feedback
Where you choose to invest your resources
What skills you choose to gain vs. consciously deprioritize
Which customers you decide to serve vs. which ones just need to be fired
Taking in feedback like a product strategist is how you find the intersection between:
💪🏽 What you’re good at
😊 What you enjoy
🌎 What the world needs
💰 And what pays good money
There IS an answer to the case here.
And the answer does NOT involve you being miserable for the sake of making money, being poor for the sake of fulfillment, or selling your soul because you have no other options.
This is a solvable strategy problem.
We just have to do the thinking + iterative experimentation to find the answer.
Just like you would with any other product.
But this isn’t just any product. This is your life.
Your career takes up a massive portion of your day.
It is a huge part of your identity.
And how you feel about work bleeds into every aspect of your life, even when you’re not working.
I want you to put rigor and discipline into this process.
I want you to get to the answer as efficiently and thoughtfully as possible.
And I want you to do it starting today.
So come talk to me, and let’s get started :)
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