 being an emotionally intelligent product manager so before we get into the details just a little bit about me and my story so personally I live in Greenwich Connecticut I have a married of two young boys who are incredibly energetic and my oldest is seven and my youngest is four and a half from a career point of view I graduated Sunni Binghamton I grew up in Staten Island and then graduated Sunni Binghamton in 1997 I have a degree in math I didn't know anything about computers and really had no computer experience until my senior year of college I took a couple math classes that required usage of some VT220s and VI and using Pico for email so stuff you guys have probably never heard maybe yeah so I learned of it so that was my first exposure my first exposure to the internet was in the library they had a big sign that looked like Interstate 95 which was for the internet and it was mosaic and my first exposure there and I remember thinking like well who would want to sit in front of a screen all day in front of this computer and little did I know I'd spend 20 years doing that but I got I was lucky enough with a math degree to know what I was going to do I interviewed with a company called Raytheon if you guys are familiar with Raytheon it's a defense company I had never been to Boston so I grew up in New York hated the Patriots still hate the Patriots hate the Red Sox still hate the Red Sox but I moved up to Boston I worked for Raytheon and I started my career in QA as a QA engineer working on advanced missile systems so having no experience with software it was like a great it was grad school for me of software development so it exposed me at Raytheon it's waterfall cycle and it's you got critical systems so it's not like today's agile but there it was the process was so important so dotting the eyes and crossing the T's through requirements design code and test it was a really great way to stop my career from Raytheon I was living up in Boston and I joined a couple different startups because there was this dot-com bubble and I remember if you know the Boston area there's the route 128 corridor and driving to work and seeing blimps of different dot-coms and all these companies and all the buzz they were getting which kind of now we're seeing it reminds me of all this bit all the cryptocurrency blockchain stuff it all kind of is cyclical but then it was this dot-com bubble that was growing so I thought hey let me join some of these dot join a dot-com see how it goes so I joined a company you've never heard of it was called I want com nobody wanted but it was sort of like a reverse eBay at the time and it was cool going 180 degrees from Raytheon which was crazy process to then website company where it was you know just you'll launch anything to the web page as soon as it's ready from there I after that we ran out of VC money and then I joined a couple other startups and got into digital video and interactive television then the bubble burst and I got into a company doing video chat then I moved to this area or back to this area I worked for Nokia which was an amazing experience I worked on some of the first smartphones ever launched one Nokia N95 if you ever heard of it was a amazing product but then you know Steve Jobs had to come around with an iPhone and Google and Android and kind of destroyed all that but it was a wonderful experience in product marketing product management so I had been doing QA for a while and I realized you know after finding all the bugs and finding all the design flaws I said how can I get involved in a career where I can I don't have to like find the bugs but we can fix them before the bugs even happen and that's what got me from QA into product after Nokia I joined a company called Gartner which is an IT research company also worked on a video portal for them and now currently for last year and a half I worked for a company called a Claro a web based in Irvington we have an office in Boston office in San Francisco an office in Thailand and we are we do translation and localization services so if you have a website or you have marketing content and you need it from one language into 50 languages we have freelance translators we help you do that and I've managed a platform we've built a portal and an API that allows content owners to submit orders to us we then receive the content and send it back to them so that's kind of what my career trajectory has been how I've gotten into product and the different experiences so when the product school reached out to me and talk we were talking about me giving a presentation I went through the product schools suite of the meetups that I saw like incredibly impressed with all this amazing content and what I realized is like I like can't compete with all this amazing product management stuff so what I was thinking is what could I present about that actually I'm not really good at or things are an area that I could be so much better and that was emotional intelligence all right so in essence the way I view it is emotional intelligence is being aware of not just your emotions but also other people's emotions and how many of you are in product management right now and how many of you obviously aspire to be in product management okay so when you're getting into product management and then this is really any field you just gotta there's going to be tons of highs and lows so and I listed these cliches here which is these are things that I've heard throughout my career and I think these span outside of just product management and the thing that that ties these cliches I feel that if someone says these things to you they might be triggering something that's a an indicator of an emotional response that they're getting from you or an emotional feel so high level you know I think you've heard these before don't get too high don't get too low don't accept status quo you guys know what kiss is right everyone knows kiss keep it simple stupid so don't over engineer things and when you get into product don't take product failures personally be a good loser and be an even better winner so high level I didn't want to put these up here because they're negative anyway I think they're wonderful advice but for me when you hear these things just my advice to you is keep a trigger is like oh if someone's saying that to me are they feeling a certain way are they you know based upon the an emotional response that I'm giving so again it's all about being aware so next step of the of the talk is to get into I thought it might be good to talk about emotional intelligence in the realm of a product lifecycle so every product you've just become a new product manager at your company or at a new company how do you think you're going to feel right so you're going to be inquisitive through the moon so everything if you take on this new job in product you're going to be asking why about everything why does it work this way why doesn't it work another way why haven't you done this before and how can we make this better so so you're gonna have tons and tons of questions you may be confident I'm ready for this job I've got the skill set or maybe you won't maybe you'll get in this and what have I gotten myself into I'm confused but no matter what you're going to be eager to impress everyone around you and so that's how you're going to be feeling but the thing that's not so obvious is how are others going to be feeling when you start a new project when you are the new sheriff in town the new product lead how is that going to is everyone at that company going to be rah rah for you or or are you taking over a product that maybe was failing and then somebody else isn't going to be so excited or are you coming in with all your new ideas and all your ways of making things better but there are certain people who are kind of set in their ways and comfortable not everyone is going to be so accepting of the changes that you're going to want to bring out because you're you're gonna have all this energy and all this excitement when I joined that calm I want to come I had I was one of the first employees but they had already done their like two month seventy eighty hour weeks to launch the first version of their website so they got the website out and then they brought me on and I was super excited to be at this calm and I had all this QA QA mindset of like I'm going to find every bug I can look under every single web you know every web page and find all the bugs in the software so I spent same thing I did seventy eighty hour weeks my first like two weeks on the job finding every broken link every every every 404 page everything that was wrong with the website and I built this huge list of errors and I was like I can't believe how excited everyone's going to be when I send this huge list of everything everything that's completely wrong that needs to be fixed so I emailed it out and I was ready to impress and I was so excited and some of the developers there were pumped they were like this is awesome we're gonna get right into the code and start fixing everything that you found but only later after like you know a couple months down the road I was with one of the developers and we've become friendly and got to know each other and you know we had a couple drinks and he was like I thought you was such a jerk when you started the company because he when he saw all the bugs he was like why are you ripping our product to shreds instead of talking about all the good things all you're doing is talking about what's wrong and I didn't think about that when I sent that list so you know think about that when you're getting a new job and you're as a in a product side your job is figure out what's wrong what can we improve what can we make better so yeah you're gonna have to indicate things that are wrong with the product but just be weary like there might be other people who it's their baby that you're you know you never want to tell anyone that baby isn't pretty so just keep that in mind as my advice be a bull in the China shop like you can't make an omelet without cracking some eggs but crack them really carefully so just tiptoe through that China shop be the bull you know be a changemaker but just think about okay like if I break all these glasses over here what's going to be the impact has everyone gonna feel so just keep that in mind alright next phase you've been working a couple of weeks or a couple of months you've completed the first sprint you're ready to do your launch you're ready for your MVP everybody knows MVP anyone don't know MVP okay so you're ready for that minimum viable product you how are you feeling again how are you feeling about that first launch you're excited you're nervous you're you're it's totally human that you're gonna be looking for praise I just busted my hump I mean you put in all these nights and all these days you've worked so hard you've aggregated requirements you've talked to sales you've talked to marketing you've talked to customers you've done usability studies and focus groups then you've worked with the develop the designers and the developers they've launched the product or you know they're ready to for that first launch but again all eyes are on you and you have to think about how is everybody else so when you're at that launch meeting like how is everybody else feeling in the room are there gonna be certain people in the room that don't want that launch to succeed that they don't want this rocket to take off they wanted to burst in flames so should you be mad at them no I think you got to put yourselves in their shoes be the leader but be subtle about it so I think when there's a launch and you're so excited about it you could get caught up and I've done this before well you get caught up and it ends up being about you and your product and your launch don't do that because you risk alienating other folks and you wouldn't you'd be nowhere without the rest of your team if you don't have designers and developers and support staff and sales and marketing you have nothing so unless you're an individual entrepreneur doing it all so get when you're you know bring everyone together make sure everyone is involved so there's this have you guys heard of go to market programs GTM programs so Nokia was huge on them it was really good and what GTM is all about is it's not only about the product just because the product the code works doesn't mean you're going to be successful you have to bring sales marketing support legal finance HR bring them all together make them feel like they're all part of the team that's launching this product and then when you need marketing to go the extra mile and do some extra campaigns for you and really help you with SEO and you need sales to really do the legwork they're going to want to do that because it's all a team doing a launch not you the product manager's launching your product but will what will happen as much as I hope it doesn't but I know it will is if you're getting into product or any anything you're going to face failures in your career so you're going to be so excited you're going to launch a product and no one's going to want to use it or you're going to have this launch you launch the product and ten minutes after you launch there's some monster error with it and the whole thing is blowing up so again same advice all eyes are on you so when that major failure happens how are you going to react how how are you going to make sure like take a deep breath and think about okay everyone's focused on me are you going to stop pointing fingers are you going to stop blaming oh you don't have any sales upset you don't have any customers sales messed up sales didn't do what they were supposed to do marketing didn't send those emails marketing didn't didn't do a good SEO campaign that's not what you want to do don't be the stressed out like kind of crazy lunatic like take it all digested if you need to walk away for a little bit walk away deal with your kind of emotions and know that you're going to be the leader so when you come back after that failure it's glass half full not glass half empty handling success so now is a this is the fun part right so you've launched everything is going wonderfully you're energized you're proud again very it's kind of comes back to the same advice again don't make it about you so make sure the whole team celebrates and that's another thing I haven't done well in my career is sometimes in product you're so passionate and you're so eager you're always jumping to the next thing that how can I make it even better and better and better and better that sometimes you don't sit back and just take it in and say hey this just worked and I'm not sure about everybody here but the reason why I love product and why I want to come here and give back to you is because I've gotten so much from from being in product management in that it there's no better feeling from a career perspective than for me at least when someone comes up and says I used your product and I had a great experience or your product made my life better for this reason or made my work a little easier to do and when someone says hey and when they see something that's not working and they complain about it and then you can ease that complain or ease that complaint that's really special and wins are really special so when you do get a win you know make sure you appreciate it and share that with the team some of the best coaches say when the team lose they stand in front of a podium after a press conference after a big game and when they lose they say it's on me or it's on it's on us the coaches we failed but when they win it was the team the team did it I had nothing I had nothing to do with it was all it was all the team and then product you got to be prepared for that too so make sure when you do win it's a team celebration and share those share those moments make sure send you know do the individual thank you some sometimes there's another mistake I've made that I've hopefully learned from whether it was something that went wrong or something went good sometimes I would just aggregate a big email and send to everyone and that's okay to do because and you know but the the individual thanks sometimes will get you much further so take your developer and developers out to lunch take your designers out to dinner you know go to the sales meetings and and give a big thank you in that sales meeting so make sure that you're always appreciative because again standing alone like you're not doing the coding you're not doing the designing you're like you're not doing that the legwork of the selling maybe doing sales support and and tech support but for you to be successful you need everyone around you to be successful and you're going to need them to go the extra mile for you when times are tough when it's a Saturday night and the site is down and you need everyone to rally and get it back up so these moments when you can celebrate the wins these are the times that people people will remember and they'll be there they'll have your back when you need them all right so that's kind of the emotional intelligent part of the presentation but I also had in my mind I was just thinking well what tips what are like the number one tips I could give to you guys just more tactically speaking for those of you in product or wanting to get into product or in software development event any sort so you come up with an idea you want to go build something you need your designer you need your developer don't just tell them what to do why is it important for them to do it make sure you always package that always explain to them this is why it's important to the business this is why I'm asking you to do this work because it's go what they're going to come into different forks in the road as they're doing their development and if they know the bigger long term picture they're going to make smarter decisions so so you're going to get really busy sales is going to be hounding you a marketing is going to be hounding you and you might feel like I don't have time I just need you to you know just send an email mr. developer mrs. developer please do this but you don't give them that picture so you can really get caught up in the nitty gritty of an agile sprint you know you break every little test down you put it in giro you put it wherever and then you're going to just be handing out tasks but just remember always keep that big picture and that's what that's what your job is that's why you're the product person because you need to have that big picture and you don't want to keep that information just to yourself all right now I mentioned giro so now it comes to to methodologies and tools so in a methodology standpoint you're going to hear about whether it's agile scrum can ban waterfall you know you're going to hear all of these things and and this is just my two cents on it is I think they all have advantages and they all have disadvantages and what you should do is evaluate them all and decide which work best for you and your team so some of these like if you take a scrum class or go take a scrum certificate they say it's not scrum unless you follow all these steps entirely 100% and I disagree with that I think you can take elements of stand-up meetings and elements of agile releases and you can massage that to work for you and your team so whether it's two weeks or three weeks sprints or one month sprints or two month whatever just figure out kind of between you and your team because if everyone isn't make sure you get buy-in on the process that's more important than buying on the tool but speak and speaking of tools so now you'll be in product and you're gonna get emails about this roadmap tool or this prototyping tool and this again the tools aren't gonna give you what you need there's no tool that's going to be the magic bullet that's going to make you successful it's not about the tool it's going to be about the business requirement and it's about how you behave as a product manager and how you rally the team and how you simplify problems and go to market with things that your customers are going to find useful that's what's going to make you successful not the tool and I think with the tools to like again all these tools are pros and cons evaluate them get buy-in I mean I'm not a I'm not a huge golfer I'll golf once a year or so but there's a saying that like and my clubs are just ancient old but there's a saying like a good golfer just needs like two clubs and they could actually just go golf 18 holes that's and with product management I just wanted to say I there's two tools up for me I think I could pretty much kind of be a product manager for anything with two any digital product with two tools and I just want to call them out one is snag it if you guys ever use snag it it's for screen shotting and for video recording so instead of telling someone hey on the top left there's a button on this website you just take a screenshot put a big arrow to it so there's also chrome plugins that do things like that and other products but snag it I really like and bugzilla for just listing requirements it's open source and for tracking bugs and such all right a shout out to my where I started in my career going backwards a little bit as a product manager again you're the CEO you're responsible for the ultimate success of the product so you better put your testing hat on I don't think you can just say oh there was a bug I blame QA don't do that like you need to understand the methodologies of QA because when it's time to test you should help out and if you spot the bug before QA great tell QA how you did it give them the reproducible steps have them added to their test cases but don't be in the oh you know it's it's their fault they didn't do enough testing that's why we had bugs that's not what you want to do because you're going to need QA to have your back so when you are doing QA mindset constructive destruction so you're gonna be so excited you want to show up this new feature of whatever there's a field of enter your name here make sure it max out the characters put in numbers put in a scripting code like try to break your product before people out in the real world break it you might still launch anyway but at least you'll know about it and last but not least never push on a Friday because you'll ruin your weekend all right with that that's my presentation so Q&A go for it I'm not a fan of like get everyone in the room together and like hash it out like I think I think that ends up becoming like a free-for-all and people start ripping into things I this and I've learned this over time I think it's better off have the one-on-ones with everyone like set a clear vision of why do you think it's off the rails how do you think it'd be brought back on the rails meet individually with one-on-one then either you or assign someone to make a proposal of how we get this back on track then get everyone in the room because I think if you just get everyone in the room say hey it's off rails like that can become you know I there is like there's a book Google Sprint which is a really great book I recommend it and when you're starting off on like a new project it's nice to just everyone just brainstorm and throw stuff on a wall but I think if you've down the road a little bit and you have a product and you have an established market and you're you're doing you know work that's got real kind of implications on the business side I don't advise just you know the free-for-all that was helpful you mentioned that you started as a QA engineer and first action was to give a list of all the bugs you found I find that relatable in the sense we're coming from a technical background you may tend to zoom in to the details and I guess in your career maybe at one point you learn to step back in some of the detail things and and maybe somehow manage to constantly keep the big picture in mind so you can share that with people so looking back to that learning process if you could give some advice or shortcuts you know to when to step back and when to actually I think Nokia did this awesome thing where they did consumer focus groups and they had the budget to do it which was nice too but I think you don't you can do it low budget too but it was you know sitting behind double-sided glass and then there was a moderator who didn't work for our company and then you know have people use the product and then having them watching them use it and hearing them use you know hearing the comments that they had that was just to me awe-inspiring moment in my career they're really reinforced it's you know you have to look at the forest through the trees type thing so I think my advice on that is make sure your user community you're you're being honest and asking them like how are we doing is this working for you so do the one-on-one usability tests do the small focus group tests but don't ask the leading questions you know like try to ask questions and find out from them are they getting value from what you're building and sometimes that gets for me it gets hard to do especially in the beginning it's easy because you haven't really built anything or you're not invested the more you actually work on it and you put your blood sweat and tears on it the harder you'll find it internally to ask the question something like hey what do you think of this product because it's like it's yours it's your baby you're gonna it's just naturally gonna feel bad if they say bad things about it so see how can you get maybe an independent person who's not as involved in it who can ask those honest questions and then try to digest that feedback that you're getting and I think if you doing that as well as you know depends on the product but look at the bottom line like are is it successful are you making money or are you you know philanthropically making world better like I mean I think that's you know really asking your your users and your customers if they're getting value I think tactically speaking if you have a a product at your own company or products in the genre like ask them you know or you can even ask them what if it's if you're a tech company like what tech products in your life do you really like and how could they be better I think that how could you make it better how could be better that will help you get insight into their thought process and then in terms of the strategic and personal ask those teamwork questions like when you're interviewing them is it all about them or is it about their team I think the team approach is pretty important and then and then to the question I was just asked are they big picture thinkers or are they just you know do they just drill in and I think understanding the business value is super important of why why are you spending R&D budget and why do you you know what's going to be the impact of you putting effort into this particular initiative and what's going to be good for the for our what's going to be good for our customers what's going to be good for our company and doing so go ahead do you have any advice on like I work with some teams and sometimes like product managers or like like what's your advice on like how to handle like transitions like but I think that's usually a big challenge for us I think you you have to handle the transition before it occurs like I just had it I mean on a personal side right I just had I've been trying to look into our finance team is doing invoicing in a pretty antiquated manner right so when I first joined this new company I've been very customer focused I haven't really looked at our back-end operational stuff but we've got some of the customer stuff going so start looking at the back-end operational stuff and we have a finance person she's a part-timer but she's doing all the invoicing for our company and there are incredible amounts of these crazy circumstances of one customer wants to pay pay a big amount up front and then do little projects and you know do partial invoices and percentages and she does all these crazy steps and she hasn't documented anything she hasn't documented a single thing so if she takes two weeks of a kid I don't think we can invoice customers and that's like not good so I think the step on the transition piece is a product like people should be as a manager of product managers make sure they're documenting how you know the high level like you know the bugs the feature ideas the roadmap plans like all that stuff should be accessible and reviewable and not just sit on their hard drive somewhere and the other thing I think you can do is from a manager's standpoint my wife is a she's an organizational psych psychologist she does she worked for Pitney Bowes and in HR so she's always talking about succession planning so in your mind like you should always think okay if this person leaves who's gonna backfill and get that person that experience so if you have assistant product managers or a developer who wants to see what it's like to be a product manager or a customer support person have your product managers give them some features to go out and design or give them some requirements to write things like that and that brings a question on requirements that's another one see how they ask them to write a couple sample requirements see what the requirements are they clear are they or are they ambiguous are they digestible or are they verbose and you can't follow them are they testable so things that's another test it is incredibly difficult to manage up I've failed at it so many times so my goodness because when you tell it's so hard to especially it's startups like when you're telling the boss that they could do a better job at something like that's really hard feedback to give to someone who's you know on the organizational hierarchy up above I think if you can find peers and you guys can kind of make proposals that can be helpful for sometimes upper-level management when they feel oh it's not just one person telling me I should do a better job at something or I should make different decisions but it's it's really oh my wider team the other thing I would say is and I've made this again horrible mistakes but I'll see something that's wrong and I'll say this is wrong we should fix it this is terrible if you just flip that and say here's an opportunity for improvement without bashing it that's so much better and you'll just see like if you talk into like for me my CEO like I sometimes I get carried away I get passionate I'm like hey this invoicing thing it's a mess we got to make it better like I learned from that I didn't go to him and say our invoicing is a total disaster I said hey I by the way I checked out our invoicing and I think there are areas it can really be improved and if we don't improve it I foresee this really bad situation that could happen to us so you're not like chicken little sky is falling screaming at them telling them you I'm smarter than you you could do a better job you're kind of giving them just that opportunity that you don't have to hold them over the coals you're you're actually bailing them out as opposed to telling them everything they're doing is wrong is that helpful based on your experience but kind of recommendations you have in terms of how to get to you have a product launch right and it you go so great what kind of methodology in terms of holding like retroactive to get feedback for the next time so you don't repeat the same things and then how do you motivate people after a failure to you know get them to still stick around after I was just got humbled and first of all I don't think you can BS them so definitely do not do not just you know call out this you know everything's gonna be better like I think that will because they're just gonna ask why so I think step away and and look for the real silver linings and look for the the things that so yeah some things went wrong but what went well right so don't only focus on things that went wrong and then kind of back to some of the same answer I gave before like have your one-on-ones with the stakeholders of why they think it failed like give them give everyone an opportunity to voice it to you in a safe way where if you have that group meeting someone's not gonna say hey like you know this was what really really went wrong because they might they might not feel comfortable doing that so give them a safe environment to be honest with you and then protect them so even if you found out oh it was Sally's fault Sally like really dropped the ball don't kill her like give her a chance as long as it wasn't like a third time fourth time doing it like give her a chance to redeem herself and look for the things that went well that you could further enhance and then after you have those one-on-ones together as a team it's not one person solving it how can you then solve it as a team and I think I think then you'll have the loyalty that'll build the loyalty in the trust of your team that the next time you know and there's no guarantees the next time look you might be on the wrong product and maybe or maybe the market changed and you might that no matter how good of an emotional leader you are no matter how good of a team leader you are no matter how good of a programmer and a designer you are it might still not work and then think about how are you gonna handle that and again like you know it's that's when they talk about pivoting in startups and and then it's time I think to pivot and how do you do that as a team without making everyone feel horrible about it but like get them excited and engaged how to judge the teams empathy like how they are like yeah why I'm having this question is now like sometimes the teams are not working at one place they work in different locations so like a judging people are like how to come up and like what's their empathy that like how they are judging is a tough question I would look at it introspectively as the product person which is are you telling the stories that allow them to empathize so as the product lead it's up to you to explain to them okay here's what the customer experience is right now um so I think I think there it's not necessarily judging them but judging yourself are you are you painting a good enough story that they can comprehend it and the other thing I think is eating your own dog food so help someone and I don't do enough of this either but like let's say I have a project manager who's not I feel like not empathizing for a particular situation and and they've never gone through it themselves so I'll get on a phone with them and do a screen share like a zoom meeting or something and I'll say listen I want you to pretend you are this person pretend you're this customer you have this issue let's together go through the screen share experience and I show them I could do the same thing with developers I do that all the time like some develop I have you know developers will say ah that's just you know who cares that the tech shows up over there like what's that a big deal for but then if you show them to it won't like look how frustrating this is to them oh they got to go to this page in this page back to that page then all of a sudden they get it so can I if I judged him on or how empathetic they were they would have failed but it was really me who failed because I didn't give them an opportunity to really feel it so that would be my advice there I worked for a guy at Nokia who did not believe in consensus at all he was like the dictator and he was the one who also felt that essentially no carriers would ever take the iPhone and or Android devices so that didn't really work out so well from his order you know autocratic or or dictator dictator type approach right but then I've also been part of meetings even at my current company where we try to design by committee and it's all these ideas and amazing ideas and they're great ideas but then after the meeting everyone walks out and no one has action items and no one has and nothing comes from it like everything in life I think it's about finding middle of the road again I mean this keeps coming back so again I'll give the same advice it's have the one on ones before you have the meeting and as product person like it's okay to say hey you just gave me great feedback and I did take that into consideration but hey I had to make a call and I had to make a call and I think if you give people the chance to give their feedback and you kind of explain to them I'm also not one there's a cliche I should have had it up cliche there's no such thing as a bad idea I completely agree with that there's a lot of bad ideas out there a lot of bad ideas but even if someone gives you a bad idea maybe you know if they didn't do it maliciously obviously give them feedback that explains you know why from a business standpoint it doesn't make sense right now maybe they'll actually be able to talk you out of it and talk you into something but have that trust that anyone on your team could have the next great idea but how it's hard to have those in these like group consensus meetings so have the one-on-ones which slows you down as a product person it's going to slow you down but you're going to build that trust and loyalty because the worst thing to have is that someone feels like their opinion doesn't count or their voice doesn't count then they have this great idea but they're afraid to like they're afraid to voice it because they're afraid they're going to get shot down or something and then you miss out on that but I think if you if you do that then when you explain to them hey listen we might be able to get to your idea at a later sprint then they'll they'll get on the they'll get on the same on the same team you know on the same sort of on the same path yes sir I'm a big fan of prioritization so I do really like that about agile so there's 10 things you need to get done don't just like drop the 10 things you know you can if you can serially list them that's helpful to folks I think if you've done all the other things we talked about you've gotten the team sort of all in the same direction because you've explained the business side you've explained the stories to them then I think they all understand the priorities and if you've if you've established the one-on-one relationships and you've established a trust then hopefully it won't ever get to a point where you're having to like kind of bark out orders irrespective of fire drills that sometimes that is required in a fire drill like hey I don't have time to debate this is what we need to do let's go do it and in that case listen you've built up the trust they know you're the product person like they know it's on you if it's successful they're going to get credit but if it fails they don't have to worry about being held accountable because you're going to take that for them and I think if you're that shield for them they're gonna you're gonna have team members who are going to go that extra mile for you and I don't think it'll ever have to come to having to like you know stomp your feet or anything you know walk a mile in their shoes try to think about where they're coming from try to have a safe conversation with them and and understand you know where your differences are maybe engage with a with HR or with a third party to see if they can help out with that I think it's all about so if I think you always take your personal life and your career life so so in marriage or I've been with my you know why 15 years or so and I when we were first together and if we had a art you know an argument or a problem I'd always say well what do I need to do to fix it what do I need to do to fix it and what she always would say to me and I still haven't always learned it but what she always say to me I just want you to listen I just want you to listen don't try to solve it right away just listen let me vent let me explain where I'm coming from then let's go solve it but don't just immediately try to solve my problem