Day 17/30: Product leaders to follow
What does Tiffany look for in product (thought) leaders? 🤔
Here’s my own spin on this prompt.
Before sharing my list of product leaders whose wisdom and knowledge I admire and learn from, these are the things I look for and treasure in the people I follow.
Interacts with me authentically: I feel like I get to know them as a human beyond their expertise. Perhaps that’s a bit parasocial of me, but it reminds me that we’re all human! Naturally, there are certain aspects of ourselves that we rarely—if ever—share with others; however, for the layers that folks choose that they're comfortable with expressing, I'd like to feel as though it's natural and a representation of who they are in some respect.
Balance of holistic vs specialized expertise: one of the most interesting aspects of product people is the diversity of everyone's backgrounds. Folks can be heavily generalist or be more skewed towards spiking in different areas of product development. I prefer following a collection of folks who are generalists, specialists, and somewhere in between.
Acts with integrity: this dimension is hard to measure, so I look for a couple of proxy behaviors, such as someone who:
Is mindful of their internal moral compass and noticing its evolution over time
Seeks to understand alternative perspectives over winning discussions or being right
Treats people how they want to be treated
Uses their voice and privilege to create space for those with less privilege than they have to share a voice at the table
Lends a hand whenever they can, be that time, perspective, or something else
Demonstrates courage by setting aside their ego and owning up to when their judgment might have fallen short of reality
Diversifies their lived experience: over the years, I've come to learn to appreciate the diversity and divergence of thought that leads to the due diligence required to make well-informed decisions. The more spiritual side of me also likes to believe that God, the powers that be, fate, RNG, or however else you might label it put us all on this one place we call Earth to figure out how best to coexist together.
Prioritizes lifelong learning: I’ve always been curious about the people and the world around me. Particularly during university, I realized that the more I learn about a subject area, the more I realized how much more there was to learn about it. Such is true in life and in product—hence why I deeply value continuous learning and maintaining childlike wonder.
For the list of product leaders and product thought leaders that I recommend following, take a look through the list of folks I follow on Twitter to see who resonates with you.