Leadership is often having an idea that is contrary to what people expect, especially like visionary leadership is often about having an idea that people are not quite getting.
But there's a difference between people not understanding your vision and just not believing you have anything worthwhile with it.
And so the first step in having a strategy is to actually have really come upon something compelling.
And one of the ways to do that is actually involve the team in coming up with strategy.
The space for creativity, I think is created by two things.
One is having what we've talked about before, some set of things to align to, some sort of creative constraint, a healthy creative constraint.
And the other one is flow. And so people talk about flow state.
Like an athlete, you get into a flow state.
You can be very creative, you can unlock a lot of ideas, all of that.
Flow applies not only to the day, it applies to the project.
If you give someone an OKR and then halfway through it you change your mind and there's no real reason to.
There's no evidence that someone has learned something.
Then it's hard to be creative because you're in the flow of that success and you don't achieve anything.
And it will disrupt. It will be a lot of context switching.
So contact switching and anything that disrupts flow can impact that.
Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers.
It's about how an organization supports products as a whole, the systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers.
With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions.
We'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader.
This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
Hey, product people. You might notice something a little different today.
There is no Dear Melissa segment in this episode.
That's because we're giving it its own spotlight.
Starting this week, Dear Melissa will be released as a separate episode every Friday.
Why the change? In a world where attention spans are shorter and time is tight, we want to make it easier for you to get the insights you need when you need them.
So that means shorter, more focused episodes that deliver the same value in a more intentional format.
So stay tuned. Dear Melissa returns this Friday in its new format.
Don't miss it. Welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast.
Today, I'm joined by Keith Lucas, author, advisor, and former product and engineering leader at Roblox.
We're diving into Keith's new book, Impact, how to inspire, align, and amplify innovative teams, which releases this month.
It distills 30 years of startup experience into battle tested frameworks for building high performing teams that scale without losing speed or purpose.
Having helped scale Roblox into a global platform, Keith brings proven insights on creating mission-driven athletes high performing teams that balance collective focus with individual autonomy.
And today we'll explore his frameworks for aligning creativity, building culture through daily behaviors, and turning teams into engines of innovation.
Welcome, Keith. Thank you. Happy to be here.
So can you tell us a little bit about why you decided to write this book?
Yeah, so I wrote the book. I've been an advisor for about five to seven years.
And in working with companies, The same questions kept coming up over and over again about people and culture.
And they really were very much a part of the experience that I had. in at Roblox, before, after, and it made sense for me to write it down.
What I love about it is that there's so many books out there about building teams that are like generalized. about how do you hire people or what should you look for.
But yours is specific enough, I think, for product and technology leaders or people who are actually managing a product company as well.
So when you think about how this book is different to what do you think sets it apart compared to the standard leadership or team building advice that you see out there?
So I'll start by saying there's actually, it's a good time to be alive in terms of learning about product technology and leadership.
There is a lot of good stuff out there. I've read a lot of it.
There are two things I think the book, at least for me being the audience, what I find different.
One is it's an end-to-end approach. It's really looking at holistically the entire team and the entire individual's life cycle on your team?
And how do you lead and put a system together end to end, from individual to team? but the other one is I think leaning creative innovative teams is is sometimes counterintuitive.
And just by talking to people, seeing a lot of leaders, talking to leaders, and in my experience, it can be challenging.
It's not always intuitive. We tend to go either passive, meaning I don't want to crush the creativity, I don't want to crush the ownership, I want them to be an owner.
And so you've pulled back a little too much.
Or you go the other direction, which is another style of leadership, but that tends to be too forceful. either maybe true aggression or potentially micromanaging.
And what I try to do in the book is point to this other way that is not a blend of those.
But it's really about disciplined leadership.
It's systematic leadership. having a vision, leading by vision and values, but it's also have people knowing that you're committed and you're committed to not only the mission, but to the team.
And so it's really another way of thinking about leadership.
And for me, it's what I've learned to be an effective way to lead specifically creative and innovative teams.
When you're in the beginning of the book, you talk a lot about how the leaders need to set directions for the team. and that allows them to be autonomous.
Can you tell us a little bit about what are the things that you look for as a leader and what do you have to put in place to help bring out that ownership and that autonomy in the teams.
Yeah. So there's a number of pieces in the book, but To start simply, and this is where I do like to start, either if I don't know, Anything about a team, or even if we've put together a really complicated or complex plan, I still love these three questions.
What are we doing? Why are we doing it? And how do we know we're making progress?
And those questions are simple, but they encapsulate a lot. what are we doing is really about mission.
It's about the focus of the team. The why are we doing it is about purpose.
It's about vision. It's about inspiration, strategy.
And how do we know we're making progress really is about not only initial alignment, but continuous alignment in course correcting.
So that's like a foundational element of that.
And if people start there by having a clear vision, having a clear vision, mission, having clear values to operate by and then working together on strategy and goals and metrics. then I think you can unlock autonomy.
So I find that the concept of like vision, mission, vision, strategy, like people confuse them.
They don't know what they're used for, right?
They get them all mixed up. Can you tell us a little bit about how you think about the difference between those things, why they're important and what do you use it for?
Yeah, and so you're correct in that even if you do an internet search, of mission and vision and you look at how companies can find them, Companies often flip-flop on these.
And so the definition on your team of what each of them are is less important than the fact that they're different.
And so for me, a vision is what is the world I want to see?
This is really the highest level cause around which everyone is involved.
And at Roblox, for example, you can imagine that a vision is really an infinite world of online engagement and play through physical environments, virtually simulated environments.
Mission is the next step in bringing about that world.
So mission is the rallying point and the focusing of the team to go next.
So we had a mission. at one point in Roblox, which was to get to 10 million monthly active users.
And then the next mission was 100 million or something like that.
So vision the world you want to see, mission the next step in getting to that vision.
And then you talked a little bit too about Roblox, how you made it like the year of growth one year.
And the first year was a year of revenue and then it was a year of growth.
Can you talk a little bit about... Like that focus, how do you get a team to rally on it?
Because one of the biggest issues I see with so many product teams is we're all going and 8,000 different directions.
We haven't chosen a focus. How do you roll out a focus like that How do you think everybody will always ask as well?
Like, how do you think about stuff that comes up?
That's not quite aligned to it, but you just gotta get it done.
Yeah. What does that do? And how do you set that as like a leader?
I actually really think that it is awesome when you try to roll something out and no one is buying it.
Yeah. And the reason I think that's awesome is it means you have a good team and it means you haven't come up with a compelling idea.
And so you should look at leadership is often having an idea that is Contrary to what people expect, especially like visionary leadership is often about having an idea that people are not quite.
But there's a difference between people not understanding your vision and just not believing you have anything worthwhile to say.
And so the first step in having a strategy is to actually have really come upon something compelling.
And one of the ways to do that is actually involve the team in coming up with the strategy.
So the example from Roblox, and I'll use myself in this example, but I will say that Dave, founder and CEO of Roblox, was a master at engaging people in the development of strategy.
But I'll use my example in year of growth.
So I became chief product officer in late 2014.
And... Probably just because I got the role, a lot of people kept coming up to me and saying what they thought we should do.
And one of the recurring themes was growth.
And it became apparent when you looked at it that it wasn't just a groundswell of... interest by the team, it was also something that made sense for the company.
We were growing really respectably at 25% year on year. but we all felt we could do better and so that was an easier sell because it was something that was And this is important, why you want to hire people who themselves are leaders. is that you can get some groundswell, which is different than consensus.
And so that was an easier thing to pitch to people.
We then had to pitch that and demonstrate competence But the idea of it was an easier pitch.
And there are other examples of when you come up with something that no one believes in and they fall flat and that's good too like then you know So when you're out there declaring this as the year of growth, how are you balancing that direction with what the teams are coming up with?
What does that kind of kickstart for everybody?
How do you provide that focus? And what else should leaders be looking at?
Because you do say in the book too, there's leaders who are like, Oh, we need to make money at all costs all the time, right?
Or anything that will make us revenue, right?
Or anything that will make us grow, right?
So how do we do that? How do you think about creating the system where people can come up with ideas that are aligned to that year of growth, but they're not so off base that they're Something you don't want to do is Roblox.
Yeah. And the example you're talking about, I worked in a company one time where the CEO just wanted random money.
And we were a software engineering company, and I threw out there, what about... selling T-shirts, and he was like, great idea, great initiative, let's go.
And that was a jerky thing to say, but it revealed that there was no guide, there was no North Star to the revenue.
In terms of that, of having a North Star and how we rolled out the year of growth, I will say that it was... and I didn't talk about this in the book.
One, it was very collaborative. But at the same time, collaboration is something that allows leaders to be part of.
They are collaborators too. And what I think everyone should respect in working with each other is the value of their work. whatever, like, purview they have.
And so a leader might have, a CEO might have high-level, systematic view of everything, but as someone on the front lines of customer support or moderation will really know the user experience.
So you have to collaborate and get a lot of ideas in, but you can slowly start putting in framing for the strategy that slowly aligns and focuses people.
And so for the year of growth, what was really...
Dave was adamant about was nothing gimmicky.
Pandemic, fundamental improvements, that improves the product for the audience.
And in case of growth, also influenced a set of well-known growth metrics, whether it's first-time user engagement or Long-term retention, short-term retention, and all of that.
So you have this North Star of value to the audience of like substance. and you had the metrics and you put those two together and it gave people a lot of ways to be creative.
So you are setting there like these guardrails around it, like the direction, but then the guardrails of this is what we want.
This is what we don't want. Right. And then inside that they're free to explore.
Yeah, and I want to add one other thing because it's a really useful analogy.
And it's very meta in a way. So Roblox was creating a...
Really, one way of thinking about it is creating an entire virtual economy.
And so what we... you have indirect influence over that economy and over everyone.
So if you wanted... If the users, the players wanted more mobile games, you couldn't go to creators and say, you must make mobile games. you had to do other things that felt natural to incentivize them.
And so one of the things we did is we just gave them a dashboard of bounce rate and monetization and engagement on their games on desktop versus mobile.
And everyone saw that they didn't do so well on mobile.
And so then they were very incentivized on their own, naturally, to work on mobile.
The same thing is true with culture or setting goals.
If you think about it as an economy... What are the signals you're creating that create productive effort?
And so things like having a north star of metrics and guide rails, as you're talking about, aren't just about constraining.
They're more about these incentives in a productive economy.
So like a lot of it is like creating a small economy.
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You talk about two OKRs when it comes to this. and you're not the biggest fan.
What have you seen with OKRs that turns you off?
I'm a fan of the idea of OKRs and like in a in a, what I feel gives me a lot of credibility as someone in product Is that like, I'll set personal OKRs for myself at home for work around the house.
So like I do use them and I think they can be valuable.
What I critique in the book is they tend to drive artificial cadence.
And they also tend to drive almost like if you're developing a parallel running parallel code, they'll create lockups between teams because one team is done with their OKR and it's not time for quarterly planning yet.
So I have seen this repeatedly, that OKR is an amazing way to focus.
They're really great at goal setting, the audacious objective, and the concrete key results.
But if you implement them on a cadence, that cadence will be the speed at which you can move. which is why I've leaned, as I continue to work, more to a Kanban style of OKRs, where she's unending...
OKRs that can operate in teams at different tendencies.
And when you say like Kanban style, are you meaning like the pole-based methodology there to like pull in the OKRs?
Yes, so if you think about, like, you have two teams.
Let's just think about the simplest case.
You have two teams. And in Roblox, he's a great example, but same true at Instrumental.
You'd have an app player team, and then you'd have a core tech team.
And often the core tech team moves at a slower cadence.
It just paints longer than either. make some changes in the graphics engine or laundry and make some changes in the AI code that it knows can change your app layer or user experience.
So they have different tendencies. If they each have a strategy, So they each have a strategy that complement each other.
So they might roll up to a higher level strategy. then it's a little artificial to say, let's have quarterly goals and measure each team quarterly.
I don't know if a long-term AI team objective will, maybe it'll take the whole quarter, but that might be an eon for... app level.
So I like the Kanban where you stack your OKRs and then each OKR gets the amount of time it requires.
Yeah. So there's no, it's the end of the quarter.
We're done now. Move on to the next thing.
Yeah. Like all of them do bug things. Maybe like we should do bug fixing all the time anyway.
But yeah, it can tend to feel like make work.
Or the other thing that can happen is people then plan for too long.
Oh, we're done early, so planning's coming up in three weeks, so we'll take three weeks to plan.
And so it's very much like having too many lockups in parallel code.
So when we're talking about having the mission, the strategy that we have here, a lot of it is in place and you introduce it here because it's about alignment teams and then also allowing them to be autonomous.
So let's talk a little bit about the people.
When you look at these high performing teams that you built, What is essential in the team, right?
Like the people there that really set them apart.
What are you trying to coach for? And what are you trying... to build in that team that says they can be creative.
They're going to solve these hard problems.
They're going to go after it. So I'm going to describe it at the high level and then we can get into some details.
So I call them in my book, this idea called mission athletes.
And I really like this idea of a mission athlete because it's someone who's focused on mission, but in many other ways behaves like an athlete.
They're growth-oriented, which means that they embrace feedback.
None of us really like feedback on a human level, but the athletes do embrace it. to get better.
They're okay with getting measured. They're constantly in pursuit of higher levels of mastery.
And so having a baseline makes me a mission athlete, a mission driven person. who is growth-oriented both in frictional and collective capacity and mastery. but also aligns with the team's operating system, and we can talk about what that means.
That varies from team to team. But if they don't have impact, in a way that aligns with how your team likes impact to have impact, it could be that impact comes at too high a cost.
So they also have to align to the team's operating system.
And with these mission driven athletes, one of the parts that you went in on really deep was mastery, which I liked.
Talk to me about like, you go over a couple different types of mastery too, right?
Not that somebody just has to be a master at one type of thing.
When you're a leader, how are you evaluating mastery?
What should you look for? What makes you go, okay, that's mastery, right?
This person is striving for mastery. They're actually going after it.
Yeah, I'll give a quick story in a second, but just to answer your question.
I think there is a, one is if you're evaluating a skill-based mastery, and I need to talk about this in the book, you do need someone around them who has or can evaluate that skill.
So if otherwise you can't know if they're getting better over time, there are signals that someone is getting better over time, meaning They move faster.
They are able to take on more without sacrificing quality.
So there are definitely external signs we all know of the expert versus the non-expert.
It helps to have someone who knows the craft.
You can make the matter nice, a craftsperson type of thing.
But the mastery on a team is actually also being able to master teamwork, which means...
You have to get better at communicating, inspiring others, helping others align, helping others helping amplify others, meaning bring more out of them.
So at a high level, there is a craftsperson-like aspect to it and then the macro aspect.
But I'm happy to tell a story of one of the examples I put in the book, if that makes sense.
So I give about five or six examples in the book from early Roblox because That early culture coming from Dave, coming from Eric Castle, who an amazing person and inspiration. really set the tone for mastery.
And so mastery at Roblox was like we had a term that it was like you got all over something.
And I often call it that you work without a net.
As teammates, we should have each other's back, but as when you're seeking mastery, you should try to work without a net.
And so I often would tell people, like, don't wait for... me or the CEO to catch something, you put yourself in the CEO's shoes for the quality of this work.
But the story is about Christina Schielecki, who had to remove a feature.
We had two currencies at Roblox. Tickets and robots.
Robots are still around. They're tied to the US dollar.
And tickets were given out freely for daily attendance and other things.
And so tickets highly inflated. And you could exchange them in a currency exchange we built.
But they were causing a lot of problems, and the inflation was bumming players out because if you had a lot of tickets...
Things just kept getting more and more expensive.
And also, it was leading to some sort of... out of application hacking.
So people would try to like on... like some other app, train robots for ticket, someone would always get screwed in a way.
So like... we had to put a stop to it. Tickets were loved.
And I will tell you, I was talking about this story recently in a 17 year old Two months ago, we're still talking about wine and tickets have to go away.
Some people really love this. So Christina, there was no better person to do this because we knew what a comprehensive thinker and what a hard worker she was. and so she went and talked to everyone she talked to me she talked to dave she talked to people across the team internally.
She talked to people across the community.
She invited creators to come in. She talked to people on the forums. and got a comprehensive assessment of how are we going to do this.
And she talked to engineers because it was a hard thing to remove.
And what she ended up coming up with and putting together was a celebration of tickets. whereby we started selling virtual goods only in tickets.
And so rather than the currency crash the minute we phased it out, it actually became more and more valuable in the final month because it was the only way to get these very limited edition items.
And it was a flawless execution. There were no... real issues that happened afterwards.
People were often, some users were like, oh, I missed pickets, but everyone realized Boy, Christina really cared, and therefore Roblox really cared about how to remove this They took a lot of care in doing it.
It was not just rip it off and everyone be sad.
It was really very sensitive to the community.
So that really is an example of mastery execution where she got all over it.
And I'll add one other thing. I think this was the biggest learning curve for new people at Roblox is this level of getting all over it that we expected of people.
It was intimidating because if you came into a meeting, you would just be asked every detailed question on every aspect of what you were doing. and that was a way to learn, oh, I have to get all over it.
And so Christina was a great example of that kind of mastery.
You talk in the book too, which I think is really important and a complaint I hear from leaders a lot about ownership, right?
And how the teams and people have to feel this extreme ownership over what they're doing.
How do you, obviously Christina is a great example of that.
Like she owned tickets and like removing that with such care and creativity.
How do you look for ownership in the people that you're hiring?
So if you're going out and interviewing somebody, how can you tell if they're going to really own it?
And how do you recognize that in your teams as well?
Yeah, I think this is a great question. I think there's a third question as well, which is related.
You don't always get it right, so then what?
And we'll come to that. But in terms of what you look for, I think there is a way, sometimes ownership. focus and urgency, which are all super important, sometimes may present There are certain examples of where you can look at one or the other, but often they present intertwined.
And I'll give you an example of someone recently that I came across who demonstrated this.
And so I recently interviewed a head of product for a company.
And the head of product, in that role, For that particular company, the head of product was asked to do a little bit of a culture shift turnaround of the team to help the team move faster and have higher impact and And what you do often in these situations with a high level hire like Maddie, ask them to put a plan together.
And I think a average plan is something where someone gives a lot of information but it's either generic or it's not very customized or it's not very insightful.
What this person did He put together a plan, but really almost in his presentation disregarded it. to get to the meat of why the company was having these problems to begin with. and want to have those kinds of conversations with the people hiring him, to just address those. and the cut to the chase, and to have a common understanding about what would need to be done and how to do it.
And so I think it demonstrates all three of those things.
He... He didn't look at the role and, okay, I'm head of product.
But I'm not the CEO, so I'll make sure I'll find out what the CEO wants me to accomplish.
Directionally, yes, turn around, culture change, but not all the details. when it also showed focus on what the real problems were, the core of the issue, and urgency in that during the interview, probably because he couldn't help himself, and I'm the same way, putting the interview a little at risk by asking some hard questions to make sure that the questions were asked before the job started.
And so I think you've heard the expression leaning in, That's another way of showing ownership is how curious are people during an interview about what what's going on, about the problems they're solving.
How much can they dive in about how things are done?
How engaged are they? A lot of those show ownership, urgency, and focus.
I think the same, it comes across... on the team really in their everyday behaviors by them doing the same thing.
How quickly do they focus on what really matters?
How are they easy to stay on track? And how do they try to intelligently and competently accelerate progress?
And so I think a lot of the same things that you look for in hiring show up in retention and promoting.
In the book too, you also talk about that third question, right?
What happens if you don't get it right? And you have this framework for coaching people. through it or coaching them out.
How do you think about course correction, especially on the ownership piece, if you hire somebody And you come in and they're realizing the urgency is not there.
The ownership's not there. It needs to be lacking.
What do you do? How do you intervene? Yeah, so a couple of things.
The first big picture item is you will face this.
I do not believe you can create a high-performing team only by recruiting and developing, and just do not.
And it's not that there's anything wrong with people.
It's that... You're not able to hit a hundred percent on hiring and developing.
You're just not. So it always comes down to turning around and exiting.
And the more competent You get at that, and the faster you move at that, the better for you and the team.
That's the only way to ultimately get to a high-performing team.
So how do you go about it? The first thing is to maybe a more sort of sophisticated answer in that it's not like the simplest thing, but I do think of it as a continuum, which helps me. meaning it is a continuum from someone performing in a way that is amazing To someone needing, when they're having like, oh, they had a bad at bat and you want to just give them some pointers. to, oh, they're having a lot of bad at-bats lately.
Now you now need to give them a little more like turnaround coaching.
Oh, now it's starting to get a little bit more serious or a lot serious.
Now it's like extreme turnaround. and then it's exit.
And so it is really a continuum. And the reason it helps to think about that is that You are constantly assessing and following the person, where they lead. they have to take ownership for their performance.
And you are there as a coach, and as a guide on behalf of the team.
But it is a progression. They walk and you walk with them where it leads.
And I could go into more detail about specifics and that if you want.
Yeah, you talked about the one thing I thought that was nice in the book as well is about what happens if you leave that person in there?
What does that do to a team? Yeah. So it's probably the one, when I get two by two business diagram in the book, is that I think there's two things And one of them is culture.
And one of it I call work routing. So the reality is when you have someone, and the way I think about it is just someone who is unwilling or unable to have the impact you need right now on this particular team.
That's it. It's an assessment, not an indictment.
That disruption has two consequences. It will either erode culture, or people will work around them.
And they will work around the person because they care.
So the extreme cases are the person who is... not showing a lot of competence, so people are working around them to make sure that job gets done. and simultaneously being culturally disruptive with anti-values.
So this person needs to be removed very quickly. because of any stressing out the team and eroding your culture.
And if you don't do that, you are just really indecisive and not protecting the team or the environment, and you will lose people's trust.
On the other extreme is the person who is mediocre at competence.
They're like, they're getting it done. But they're maybe a really great person to hang with.
They're not really eroding the culture. So there's some mild workaround.
When you are now creating a culture of mediocrity, So this is like what often people call them as like the B players or something like that.
I don't like that framing. But this person, like perpetuating mediocrity is really not good either.
And so you might be able to take a little longer exiting that person, give them a few more opportunities to turn things around, but you still need to take action.
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You mentioned in the book too, that this is not about being nice.
And that a lot of people confuse this with letting those people stay as being nice.
So if you're a first time manager or this is something that bothers you, right?
Like how do you get over that mindset of having these tough conversations or, you This confusion with being nice.
Yes. So the reality is, based on our... human experience in every other way.
There is nothing about having serious conversations about someone's performance or exiting them that will ever feel nice.
It's actually a good thing if it can feel nice.
And so worrying about the nice part or worrying about things like that will cause you not to take action.
And it's the wrong thing to think about because you can't achieve it.
What you can achieve is being patient. And decency to me is about transparency.
It's about honesty. It's about being concrete.
It's about giving people feedback. It's about respecting their ownership to take action.
It's about being really clear on what's at stake.
And so the focus should be on decency, not about being nice.
And one way of also thinking about that is it...
Always remember it's an assessment, not an indictment.
And in fact, it's a really narrow assessment.
You are only saying that on this team, at this moment in time, for this mission, this person is not contributing to the level that we need.
It is possible, and this happened with people I had to let go of at Roblox all the time.
They went on and became like serial entrepreneurs or like a key engineer at a really well-known company or something like that.
It is not a lifetime indictment. It's just an assessment of the moment.
I think that's so important for people to hear when they're getting caught up in those conversations and they're hard conversations, I think, to have as well.
But with your teams as well, you talk a lot about building them up so that they can be creative.
With that creativity... you talk a little bit about injecting intuition and ideas in there too.
When you have these teams that are working well together, how do you balance those two different things?
Like how do you create a space for them to get creative like that too?
So I think there's two related questions there.
I'll answer both of them. So the space for creativity...
I think he's created by two things. One is having what we've talked about before. some set of things to align to, some sort of creative constraint, a healthy creative constraint.
And the other one is flow. And some people talk about flow state, like an athlete, you talk about it in your work.
From programmers, I felt that when there were times I could program for 12, 14 hours a day, not realize it.
You get into a flow state. You can be very creative.
You can unlock a lot of ideas. All of that.
Flow applies not only to the day, it applies to the project.
If you give, this is where OKRs do help.
If you give someone an OKR and then halfway through it, you change your mind and there's no real reason to.
There's no evidence that someone has learned something.
Then it's hard to be creative because you're in the flow of that success and you don't achieve anything and it will disrupt.
It will be a lot of context switching. So contact switching and anything that disrupts flow can impact that.
In terms of the other question about intuition, I mean, intuition is so valuable and it took me a long time. to really understand how and why it was valuable and how to leverage it in a way that I felt comfortable.
And what I mean by that is I'm an analytical person.
I'm a disciplined person. I feel like you should have a reason for things.
And so I'm always going to be strong on the analytical reason to do something.
And when I have gotten older and done more like there is the intuition and that has to play a role.
So here's how I think about these things.
Analysis is linear processing. This is my mental model.
I don't know if this is like legit or not, but it's my mental model.
Analysis is linear process. And I take a bunch of data and I can predict an outcome in some way.
And therefore, we should do strategy A over strategy B. I don't think intuition is devoid of data.
I think it's nonlinear processing. And it is, how do I take all the things that I don't quite know how to quantify It could be like I had two conversations with people in the community and they I was like, you know what, they're right.
I knew this was a problem and they just told me it was a problem.
And it's a small sample, but it's two out of two.
So I think there is nonlinear processing.
And so you, I don't think one is more biased than the other because you can certainly make analytical decisions.
Presentation is extremely biased. So I think you just want to be careful about bias in all cases.
In the planning process, what I do and what was actually a lot of fun for people and people seem to like it is You start with an analytical thing and you just say, hey, and it doesn't matter what order you go, but you can do the analytics.
But then what you do is you get people in the room and you're like, okay, here's me analytics.
Forget everything about it. Even forget no strategy we had.
Write down the top five things we need to do in the next month or we look like idiots.
What are the next things we need to do in the next six months or we're going to fail?
Things like that. Or what do we need to do in the next six months can be like, having a game-changing positive outcome.
And so what happens is that is an intuition-based exercise.
And then you have the analytical-based exercise, which is everything that people talk about.
And then you put them together and you say, I'm curious, maybe they align.
And then you're like, wow. But if they don't align, you just want to know why.
And so it is going to be explicit when an intuitive exercise, because I think it can provide a lot of value.
You write too about how the intuition comes from mastery and from exposure and experience there.
And I think that was an important part too.
Everybody has opinions, right? And I've heard some people be like, you should just do this or we should just do that.
And sometimes it's out of their field sometimes. let's say, or the wrong solution on.
So when you're looking at those like intuitive comments How are you layering on top of it as well that concept of mastery?
Like, what are you looking for in a leader to make sure, hey, this is valid versus this is just noise?
Yeah, this is a great question. I think that there's a few disciplines that are really hard for a specific reason.
And I think product management is one of them.
Because you look at it and you're like, I can do that.
They just have ideas. Like I have ideas.
And I think it looks like a low mastery job.
And I think for a lot of new product managers, it might be a low mastery job.
But you have to try to seek mastery. And I think, again, it comes down to... getting all over the field that you are responsible for.
And for example, if you think about Roblox, If you were not regularly in, let's frame it positively, to be a masterful product manager at Roblox, You had to use the product, period.
You had to use the area of the product that you were managing. you had to engage directly with the audience like you just had to talk to people the players and the creators about what was important to them.
You had to understand the field. And mastery or intuition can really strike really when you have all of that data gathering that you can't put in a formula when you have that background.
Now, often people who are new to something have exactly the right intuition Because they're bringing another field to bear.
They're bringing expertise from somewhere else and letting you know that's an analogy no one thought to make and it's the right answer.
And so there is that experience. But I do think that really getting all over the craft, the product, the audience. the market. then data can help you have better intuition.
And in fact, Dave writes about that. He wrote the foreword to my book.
And he talks about how intuition is really important and how having the values, having the vision, having all of that really is an accelerator for intuition.
Keith, when we're thinking about leaders out there who are listening to this saying, hey, I want this entrepreneurial team, right?
Like I want to build it. Yeah. And- they're looking at their team and they're just saying, it's not it. what's your first step for them?
What would you tell them to do to start to dive into where do they start?
How do they approach this way of working?
How do they get a handle on what they need to get.
Yeah, no, great question. I love this question.
I'll answer it as what I would do. The first thing I would do is ask those three questions of many, if not everyone on the team, depending on how large it was.
What are we doing? Why are we doing it? And how do we know we're making progress?
And I would start there because one is, hey, there could be a lucky accident that everyone knows and everyone's thinking the same thing.
Likely not the case. And so it immediately gives you a dashboard of why isn't the team having impact and moving quickly.
And then it's also a good metric over and over again to ask to see if you're making progress as you're doing that.
But the second thing is, and I did listen to Roblox as I was, as we were went from one small team to start splitting up teams, is I asked every team to write down the vision of their area and the mission. of their area.
Not the values we had most common at Roblox, but the vision and the mission, and it's just a baseline.
And that was really rallying to people because now everyone understood, oh, I know where we're going and I know where we're going next.
But you don't need to do that right away.
You can start with the three questions. So then you do the mission and the vision.
And then I would start. with or after those two, I would try to figure out, and I think this is a really good tactic, let's say you have five teams working on your team.
Try to figure out what is the critical thing that each team must deliver and when.
And you can ask this by asking people not on that team.
In fact, that's actually just as valuable.
And he's trying to figure out, hey, forget all the other things we said.
What is like something that has to get done in the next month?
And then you use that to drive culture. And I would say, along with mission and vision, backing up is obviously think about your values.
But you can do that quickly. and you can iterate, and then you pick a project, everyone has an objective, you start working on it, and with each turn of the crank, each iteration, You try to make your culture better and better internally, but you start with those three questions.
Those are great questions for people out there.
And I'm sure all of our leaders who are listening really appreciate it.
Keith, thanks so much for being on the podcast.
If people want to read your book, where can they find it?
Yeah, so you can find it at wherever you like to buy books.
You can also go to my website, KeithV.Lucas.com.
I'm also on LinkedIn, Keith Lee Lucas. And on my website, you'll find all about my book and a list of different book stories to buy the book at.
And I will add that all of my Proceeds on the book are going to charities to help young entrepreneurs.
Amazing. We will put all of those links at our show notes at productthinkingpodcast.com so you can find Keith's book.
It's called Impact. And we'll be back next week with another amazing guest.
So go to DearMelissa.com and let me know if you have any questions for me to answer in the upcoming episodes.
And we'll see you next week.
