Founder @Supra | Helping product leaders accelerate their careers through peer learning and community | Ex-Asana
"The Foundations for Exponential Growth" is by far the most popular video on the Supra YouTube channel 🙌 What I love about Brenton's presentation is the empowering message that anyone can level up their craft regardless of their background or IQ. Brenton's thesis is that intelligence, critical thinking, creativity, and influential communications are core pillars of product management. In the presentation, he breaks down these abstract concepts into actionable steps. If you want to sharpen your problem-solving skills, I highly recommend watching this video. Thanks, Brenton, for sharing this content with the broader product community. It's making a difference.
Product management is going through an identity crisis. I have a theory for why this is, and how to help. Product Management requires repeatedly tackling problems that are unique, complex, and ambiguous. This requires you to think for yourself, and influence others to adopt and extend your thinking, in ways that consistently lead to positive outcomes. As Product Management has become part of the standard org design for tech-enabled companies, it has become commoditized in ways that run counter to its original purpose. Today, many people with the title of Product Manager imitate the motions of the craft - agile ceremonies, user interviews, OKR setting, etc. But they are ineffective because they do not understand the underlying principles. This results in "product management by numbers", creating dysfunction at all levels of an organization because the needful problems aren't being solved. This leads to distrust and disempowerment of the product function, often resulting in it becoming a service organization to commercial business units (e.g., "feature factories"). Product management has an opportunity to re-establish its identity, and its value, within the tech ecosystem. I believe this starts with raising the bar for how we collectively develop our creativity, critical thinking, and communication abilities. In the presentation below, I share a theory I have developed over the past 10 years for how you can cultivate the ability to supercharge your critical thinking, creative problem solving, and influencing skills. I have applied these theories to myself, as I grew from a Group PM leading 4 teams, to a Senior Director leading 50 teams during my 5 1/2 years at Wayfair. Since sharing this presentation with the Supra product leadership community two weeks ago, the recording has been viewed nearly 500 times and continues to gain views through organic word of mouth. I take this as a sign that the material is resonating, so I want to share it more broadly. In this presentation, you will find: 1. A theory for the nature of intelligence, and which dimensions of intelligence are most trainable 2. How to grow your intelligence and creative problem solving ability through First Principles and Mental Models 3. A definition for Framing, and the critical role it plays in effective influencing 4. Examples of my own application of these concepts to the 3 levels of strategy: Market, Product, and Portfolio Strategy 5. An introduction to the Cynefin Framework - one the most useful, under-the-radar product frameworks you've never heard of 6. A set of world-class resources to get started on (or continue) your exponential growth journey. These are all resources I've used extensively myself (shout-outs to Shreyas Doshi, Will Larson, Elena Verna, Fidji Simo, Gibson Biddle, Nikhyl Singhal, Casey Winters, Tim Ferriss and of course the prolific Lenny Rachitsky) Direct link to the slides + YouTube recording in the comments. I hope you enjoy.
