 Okay, so without further ado, I'd like to introduce our first speaker. He's a TEDx speaker and author of some of the most popular books on product agile and coaching including product mastery He's also the founder of agile mastery institutes with the mission of offering meaningful long-term support and development for professionals Instead of two days certifications. Delighted to welcome Jeff Watts. I've been told I need to hi I've been told I need to get better at this Instagram thing So I want to get a little video of you guys. This is in person and the cameras. So this way that's all Thank you. All right Yeah, first first thing I want to say thank you to to David and Alice and all the team and well done because I know How hard it is or how hard it was to organize a conference and Now it's even harder So I'm going to give them a round of applause for putting this on Cool. Yeah, so thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm Jeff I'm here to talk to you about mastering your inner demons as product people You know There's a lot of stuff for you to do. There's a lot of things you need to master Roadmaps visions personas customers users development teams All these different things you need to master But one thing that often gets forgotten is you So I'm here to try and shift your focus back on to you a little bit And to tell you that it's not selfish that it is actually a good business decision to focus on you a little bit That's my plan And I want to start off with a little bit of a story have just out of it Maybe we have I don't know. Have we got any Australians in the room today, and I'll never mind I was gonna I was gonna ask if you if you knew knew this person if you're not from Australia The chances are you don't know this person. His name is Cliff Cliff young and he If he's not a national hero, he should be He's kind of a hero to me even though I'm not Australian. He was a farmer in Australia Does anybody heard of Cliff young? Who people? Okay, cool. So And Cliff was a farmer spent a lot of time in his fields and back Back in the 80s. I think it was early 80s 1981. I think he decided that he would enter an ultra marathon Which went from Sydney all the way to Melbourne 544 miles, I don't like running 5k They're letting 544 miles and this was a farmer Okay, not a not an athlete and He was asked why he's entering this crazy crazy race. He's well I spend a lot of time in the fields chasing after sheep. I won't do the accent Chasing after sheep and putting that potatoes. I reckon I've got enough stamina to do this and He was famous for training and running in what he called his gum boots what I would call Wellington boots and this was This was quite a Quite a challenge now. Obviously. I'm telling you this story because there's a there's a happy ending here. All right, obviously He did win what was interesting about it was he defied conventional wisdom. So conventional wisdom at the time for these high High-performance athletes was that the 186 rules You'd run for 18 hours and then you'd sleep for six and then you run for 18 hours and you'd sleep for six Cliff was having none of that So I don't need to sleep I'll just keep on going So I won't do the accent He he ran well run ran not particularly the right word. He became known as the cliff shuffle Basically just shuffled Continuously, it's a classic tortoise and hare story while these professional athletes in there Adidas and Nike trainers were sleeping for six hours He just kept on shuffling and he won and they built this memorial of his gum boots to celebrate and he became a bit of a of a news story And you're sitting there thinking all right Jeff why are you? Why are you talking to us about this Australian farmer this this person who took on a seemingly impossible role that involved not a lot of sleep With amateurish training with poor equipment very little support team That's nothing to do with product people They're professionals We have all the support and the training and the tools and the equipment we need We have plenty of sleep. We don't keep going for days on end. We don't have to do the impossible So that's good news. I don't have to talk to you about this this this challenge this stress You are happy Stress-free delighting your customers Working harmoniously with your development teams and sales and marketing Everything's going at a sustainable pace nice and predictable So, yeah, absolutely no relevance to you At all I can tell from some of the smiles on the faces that maybe there's something in there so Is it an impossible job? I get I get told a lot. There's not enough hours in the day and If only our users would do what they were supposed to do it would be fine and This development team. They're so slow Can they speed up? Why are sales selling this can't do that yet? And it's it's a challenge. I you have my empathy. You have my sympathy I am a product owner and I have to bite my tongue now and again. I have to try and swallow my own medicine And it's it's tough now I wouldn't be interested to know just as a show of hands I'm not not amazing at this hybrid thing So I haven't figured out how to Have to get a show of hands online at the same time But just as a quick show of hands who who here would say your biggest stressor is your customers What about your users your SF use? You could users No, what about other product people would you say they were your biggest stressors? leadership You okay? All right sales Do you people dev team? legacy code Okay, a bit of a spread what if I were to tell you that actually The biggest people to blame for the problems you have are your parents This is my position for the day We'll explore this a little bit with a little bit of fun, but a little bit of seriousness as well You see I would suggest that most of those stressors that you have from those other parties are just external manifestations of things that you have written into your life script courtesy of your very loving Family well-intentioned family. I will position to you that every parent no matter how well-intentioned screws up their kids Okay, it's just a question of how they screw them up and how much they screw them up and in what direction Okay, myself included it's become a bit of a tradition now for me to put a picture of my family at some point in one of my talks in Ireland So this is this is my brood. These are the people that I've spent the last 20 years screwing up not deliberately Okay, I try my best, but I have my own issues and Somehow somehow I managed to screw these wonderful people up and I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about what we might be able to do To to help you avoid Burnout a lot of product owners. I coach a lot of product managers. I coach Really suffer from burnout. They suffer from stress Some of them get into a point where they think you know what? Why am I doing this? I could just go and work in a bar So much easier I want to help you with that. I'm gonna give you a tool or a model to help you with that It's actually a psychoanalytical tool Called transactional analysis. I won't be able to do it anywhere near the amount of justice that it is due I'm only gonna be scratching the surface of it, but don't worry. I have no couches up here Okay, I am not a practicing therapist I'm not gonna get you talking about your daddy issues or your Oedipus complex or anything like that I'm just gonna be talking about some of the stuff that's going on for us now that might Might if you're aware of it And how you might be able to deal with it and bring it back into balance might help you as a product owner Master yourself because ultimately the only person you can really control and influence is the person you see in the mirror every morning So transactional analysis the transactions are effectively Communication exchanges This this model talks about the communication exchanges between people and also between states of people So this talks about us having three different states as a part of us That is a parent and adult and a child and those different states communicate within each other inside our heads And we try and communicate with other people. Those are the transactions and they're not always They're not always Seamless shall we say They influence so if we can help us understand what states involved for us and for the people we can start Building more awareness of our interactions. We can become more self-aware We can manage ourselves better and as a result if we can manage ourselves better We can start working with other people in a better way build better products. We can become more self-regulating And this is all based on this this concept of a life script Okay, don't go too deep on this one but a life script as they define it is the culmination of dysfunctional behaviors From self-limiting decisions we make in childhood and we carry over into our Adulthood they're made with good intentions and it can be it can be something as simple as Either an explicit or subliminal message from from people of authority saying things like You've got to be lucky to be successful Or you've got to work hard to be successful these types of messages that sort of get ingrained in us and we don't even realize How we act on them So it likes it. I will re-emphasize. It's not a therapy session. All right, all models are wrong Even the model that I'm going to give you today is wrong. It doesn't mean it can't be useful though So take from it Whatever is useful and leave the rest behind Okay, don't go too far in it. Just look at well Maybe there's something I can learn about myself here and if that would be useful to me as a product owner brilliant. I will grab it All right, so there are five transactional analysis drivers these things that Have we have learned in our younger years as our definitions of success of goodness of how we are going to How we should act and what we should value and Most people will relate to a couple of them quite strongly. You might notice a little bit of all five of them in you That's fine. Don't get worried about labelling yourself or anything like that But just take it with that pinch of salt. So the first one hurry up quite an impatient person We'll talk more about these in detail as we go through but just as a as an introduction. We've got please me Remember I'm saying we'll do this. I'm happy. I'll be happy if you do this. I'll be disappointed if you don't do this There's the be perfect driver. There's the be strong driver push on through and then there's the try hard driver Some of you might even be even before I go into detail. I think oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's me. That's me And don't judge yourself on it. Just be interested in it. It's not good. It's not bad. It's just interesting So hurry up driver if you find yourself talking quite slowly All right talking quite quickly. I need to slow down. Otherwise, I'll make mistakes So it's talking very quickly. You want to get to the point really quickly You want other people to get to the point really really quickly if you notice that Could be you've got a hurry up driver going on if you're tapping your foot if you're tapping your fingers on the table If you're pacing around the room while you're talking Maybe you've got a bit of a hurry up driver going on if you've got nothing going on if you just sit in there Okay calm and calm stresses you Something should be happening You might have a hurry up driver going on. Okay, again, not good. Not bad. Just interesting You find quiet you find silence you find peace stressful Constantly checking you watch you don't like to be late I don't like when other people are late actually multitasking is a symptom of a hurry up driver Because if we've got something that's blocked rather than wait there We'll start something else so that we can make progress because we might be running out of time Not good. Not bad. Just interesting find yourself rushing from meeting to meeting the idea of being late is very stressful You'll leave a meeting early to avoid To avoid being late to the next one might leave the football early miss the last couple of goals Just so you get to the car park. You don't want to get stuck in traffic. He's couple of things My wife bless her on her iPhone has probably got about 60 different alarms set the different things during the day Constantly in fear of missing something of being late for something alarm alarm alarm The kids teaser on it now, but why is that relevant to you as a product owner? Well, if you've got a hurry up driver There are some advantages to it, right? Definitely some advantages to it. We actually talk about releasing early Don't we would talk about getting something out quickly. We want to rush We don't want to take our time because if we take too much time Our competition will beat us to it. The idea might become obsolete But we can find ourselves releasing too early. You've probably heard of procrastination Me personally I'm more of a pre-crastinator All right, I tend to make decisions too quickly rather than sit on them and think of them And that sometimes is a good thing, but sometimes means that I make a sub-optimbal decision Sometimes I make a decision that doesn't actually need to be made at all Just because I don't like having that thing hanging over my head. I hate having an inbox with ten things I'd rather have inbox zero if I just reply to it. The ball is now in their court So but I will often reply too quickly. I Can get burnout, but I've been like this for 40 odd years So I'm kind of used to it. I kind of got to a sustainable pace But actually the people who work with me, they might not have the same Coping structures. They might not have the same resilience they might not have the same ability to keep up with with my pace expectations of them and Depending on our relationship. I could easily Without even realizing it encourage other people to burn out Just myself So there's there's those things to bear in mind equally if I'm looking through data I don't tend to go very deep if I've got this hurry-up driver. I will see something. I think okay. Yeah I like that. Let's go with that rather than look at the whether it's actually there. There's actually causation there I'll go with the correlation I'll just see the surface level stuff and make some decisions on it because then we can make some progress So I need someone in my team who is a lot more data orientated Who's a lot slower who processes information properly who can make sure that I don't go off on a very quick knee-jerk tangent and Because I'm multitasking because I've got lots of things going on. I don't like quiet I've often got work in progress which as you know Leads to burn out it leads to the compromisation of quality and if I'm worried about that kind of things I might need to start off another project to actually rectify it and it can become a self-defeating cycle anyone Resonate with any of that. Yeah, there's a little bit of me in that of interest maybe 15% 20% okay. All right interesting again. It's not good. It's not bad. It's both It's interesting. All right. There's advantages to it. There are downsides to it. Okay, the next one please me You might also hear this is a people-pleaser driver, but transactional analysis calls it a please me driver So some symptoms here. You're asking a lot of questions. You're checking with every P. Everybody. Is that all right? Is that okay? Are you all right with this? You know, are we going in the right direction? What do you think? All right, even if you don't need to even if they are not in any way an Authority or a senior figure You really don't like the idea of people being upset with something you've decided or want to do So this please me driver will cause you to do that Any concept of conflict any prospect of people arguing not just with yourself, but with each other stresses you Is we want harmony we like things to be nice and calm again? That's a good thing in many situations, but sometimes sure you found we need a little bit of conflict We need a little bit of conflict, but please meet people will try and avoid that They will really sticklers for the rules because of fear of judgment fear of consequences of breaking the rules They'll stick within those boxes, especially the regulators can't upset the regulators management seniority These people if everyone's happy, I'm okay is the general script there and as a result Find it hard to say no to people And actually the other it goes even further than that will actually start rescuing people even though whether they've asked for help or not So we will you'll see someone who's struggling and that's not good There's an imbalance in our personal force. We must rectify it So we will go and help people Taking on more stuff and as a result pushing what we need and what we want much further down the list of priorities If anybody were to offer you any criticism Wow that hurts Because we're taking that as a personal judgment. They don't it's not a criticism of the idea criticism of us And our relationship and our perception and as our goodness as a human being we internalize it that way Anybody ignores us or we think people are ignoring us. It's really really stressful We take it as a sign that they don't like us. If someone doesn't like us. That is a bad thing again Not good not bad. It's interesting So talked about sacrificing our priorities The interesting one here is even most people make decisions based on emotion and then they find the rationale to back up their emotional decisions This is even more the case for people pleases. They put an emotional outcome Over the logical outcome If I know this is a good thing, but people will be upset by it This isn't as good thing, but people will be less upset. I'm going to go for this one. All right that kind of thinking So how does that affect you as product owners potentially? Well, you are going to be receiving a heck of a lot of feedback on you, right? And if you can't separate the feedback on the idea or the product the feature from yourself That's that's going to really eat away at your resilience. That's going to be really chipping away at your self-confidence And just your general enjoyment and resilience But equally you need to give feedback to other people Whether that be the dev team whether that be the stakeholders and if you're worried about them getting upset If you're worried about them not liking you you're going to water down that feedback and the product will suffer Your job as a product person isn't to make friends to make great products The prioritization becomes very difficult. You got a person a who wants something person B who wants something They're both nice people. I want them to both be happy Can't we do both? But then the dev team are saying they're not happy because they're oh my word. What am I going to do? All right, so prioritization gets really really tough because we take that as well. I'm upsetting somebody Now I probably need to change this analogy, but I've written about it And I was told once that a camel was a horse designed by a committee Now I think that's quite harsh on camels because actually they're pretty well designed for their environments But the theory was nobody wanted a camel They just had lots of different requirements and someone put them all together and ended up with a camel So the analogy I don't think really works anymore But that idea if you try to please everybody you will end up with a product that pleases nobody is a big risk For a product person and that please me driver can be a big underminer for that. And so what's going on for us? Again, if this gets out of control too much work in progress we say yes to too many people yes Too many projects yes to too many things We can become overburdened and our priorities our needs can suffer. We get burned out. Oh So anyone But the hand up for that one You know now I'm not gonna pick on you. I'm not gonna talk to you. Don't worry Yeah, okay, so it's not as many as the as As the first one that's fine. That's interesting interesting. Oh, where how this works? Be perfect Quite a big one for a product even product people So you find yourself setting some high standards of yourself and other people and again, that's a good thing Don't want to settle for mediocre. No one really wants to buy a mediocre product a meh product do they? But sometimes these high standards and get out of control As opposed to the please me driver perfection people perfectionists tend to be overly logical They don't really that emotion come in at all many ways very very logical thinkers if you find yourself using precise language Now that doesn't just need to be exactly they say things like exactly or precisely or correctly using the word literally One of my pet peeves But also if you're not sure then you will be really certain to caveat it So you would use the word probably or possibly So if you're really precise about your language using really descriptive language as an indicator that you'd be perfect drivers is alive and kicking As you can tell from me tidy appearance nice ironed shirt Clean shaven maybe not so the be perfect driver might not be something that's that's a there's a big driver for me But people who have that that really nice tidy again It's a good thing to be nice clean tide right, but it can get out of control my father-in-law blessing Classic he used to actually have a perfect list and if someone made a mistake they were off the perfect list And he used to say if it's not a right angle, it's a wrong angle Yeah, gotta be laid out exactly so You might have other words for that But in the context of this we'll call it a be perfect driver all right, and it served him well But it can be quite demanding for other people it can be quite Intimidating for other people generally speaking if you don't if you find yourself unwilling or Feeling a little bit anxious about the idea of giving up control to somebody else again This be perfect driver might be coming because nobody can do it as well as you You can't be certain that they will actually have the conscientiousness that you have Why would I let somebody else do this if they're not gonna do it? I might as well just do it myself And that actually is a big thing you find yourself I'll just take on everything myself find it very difficult to hand off to delegate because I might as well just do it because nobody else has good standards these days You find yourself saying something like that. What's wrong with people? So get very irritated. How does this work as a product owner product person? Well, it actually affects your ability to innovate Because it's very difficult to innovate perfectly Innovation actually involves letting go of what you know and opening yourself up to imperfection and Actually the result of innovation usually is in an unintended result So you're gonna open yourself up to that if you take control take too much control Filter out other people's views and contributions and actually reduce the ability to make mistakes You just stay where you are Again might not be a bad thing, but in some circumstances It could be really with gold plating and overdoing things your time to market reduces because you try and do things Perfectly before you release it to the opposite of the hurry-up driver We're gonna take too long to get to market rather than get there too quickly actually find yourself You might find yourself as a product owner actually not really enjoying the journey as they say and The life cycle of a product even though it's a lot shorter than it used to be still takes up a lot of your time So if you're thinking well, I'm I will be happy when Our product is perfect And yet this might not be an explicit conscious thing You're condemning yourself to a long time of not being happy All right, and that's quite it's quite a challenge for resilience and burnout like I said And all of this stuff is going on underneath the surface other people don't see your high standards as high standards. They see them as being very very picky and Annoying Annoyingly detailed does it really matter does it really matter if that font is 12.5 instead of 12? Burnout you can be seen as a slave driver And quite often you'll find yourself. Well, yeah, yeah, I can see that's a good thing, but it could be better And it's all with good intentions The intentions there are to give a better experience for your customers and users to have a better reputation as a product to be more successful but You can have downsides Anybody associate with any of those more we're increasing It's not intentional Okay, be strong Be strong a be strong driver if you find yourself Faced with ambiguity based with uncertainty faced with quiet you will generally say, okay, I'll do it If there's a difficult situation rather than let somebody else struggle on you will put that on your back and carry on Plow forward do your cliff shuffle. All right It's good thing in a crisis because generally you don't get ruffled Because the success driver for you is I can be strong I can work through this and other people will see you as really really calm Which actually leads them to think well if I stay quite a long enough Jeff will step up and take this on Which increases my ability to do that. All right, so other people are enabling me and Asking for help generally seen as a I've failed. I Should be able to do this on my own that should should should and we're assuming that other people see it as A weakness as well and that transfers to them So other people don't like asking for help because they know that we see asking for help as a weakness Emotion is seen as a weakness for people with a be strong driver She boil this down to being logical Emotions are not logic They get in the way So because of that very difficult to build relationships with people we can't understand why their emotions are coming into play We don't show our emotions. So they find it very difficult to connect to us And we don't really give people the chance to learn and grow when we see anybody struggling We will come in and say come on. Let's do this our help I'll get you through this which again has good intentions But reduces that person's growth and agency and autonomy as well And when things get tough because we don't really have the ability to to use our emotions because that's a sign of weakness Generally, we just go quiet So if you think find yourself faced with a Disappointment or a conflict that you don't know how to resolve. There's no logical solution to it Empathy isn't necessarily your way out of it logic. Isn't your way out of it? So, okay, I'm just gonna leave this one and see what happens. See if you can sort out yourselves Because I don't like this Who is that useful to you as a product owner to be aware of well Feedback all right if if we're if we are unable to build rapport if If we see something coming up, we take it very this is a problem for me to solve Generally, I'll encourage people to assess the credibility of the witness when receiving feedback because not all feedback is truth Yeah, feedback is just a perception. It's an opinion But people with a with a be strong driver take feedback as a okay This is something I need to do It's a problem for me to solve this is a mountain for me to climb and they will just get on with it So again, we can have on too much work in progress this this lack of psychological safety Which is which is a big term quite rarely so at the moment If if we aren't showing emotion if we aren't willing to ask for help then other people are less likely to willing to ask for help So there's there's just this sense of we just need to tough it out We need to work on through this I should be able to do this Says poor rapport with your development team with your stakeholders with your users We need to understand people. We need to understand where they're coming from and actually Might not be too much of an issue for you, but it'd be interesting if it does When we see something that shouldn't be the case All right, something that say poor working conditions here It could be you know working late an expert an expectation of just overtime or You know low breaks or Whatever it may be we would tough it out Because that's our driver But we also then expect other people to do so we don't call it and if we're in a position of leadership Leadership is often cited as the poor behavior that you're willing to tolerate That is an accepted way of working because you're tolerating it just seems normal to you Because you can cope with it It's a too much work in progress you bottle things up and obviously at some point will explode And actually an interesting one here because we're very good in a crisis Unconsciously we can actually find ourselves Manufacturing crises because that plays to our strength We don't do it deliberately we don't go out to sabotage things But actually at some level we like being able to to take control of a crisis So we create it with there's this phrase if you if you if you if you reward the firefighters you breed arsonists That kind of thing and that's an internal thing as well as an organizational thing And our final try who who resonates with the be strong driver. It's smaller proportion For those of you that are online not surprising It's it's probably the the fourth or the fifth one try hard as our fifth one So this has some overlap with in my opinion has some overlap with The previous one, but this is really this is really symptomatic of I've got lots to do my calendar is very very full I'm always busy. You're actually telling people how busy you are you're telling people how things are really really hard Because actually you want people to realize how hard you are working how hard you are trying right? That's how you get your gratification. That's how you know internally you're doing a good job Because if your calendar wasn't very busy if things weren't very full then what's the point? What sure was the point of view? When something happens the first reaction is it's something else's fault Could be someone else's fault. It could be an external fact. It could be luck. It could be fate. We generally push off blame and accountability Outside of ourselves if you find that happen it we can rationalize it for your instinctive thought is it's not my It's not my fault and for us As long as we're doing our best That's okay Now this is where I kind of have an interesting challenge here because that's kind of some of the messages that that I've been brought up with To a degree is you know as long as you're doing your best. What else could you ask for? But it can become at some level an excuse for missing your outcomes and Are we really doing our best? This is the question and we're looking at output over outcome So on the flip side of that Actually a lot of what we say now is it doesn't matter how hard you work if you get the outcomes Well, that could be taken as it doesn't matter if you work 60 hours a week as long as you get the outcome So there's this really difficult balance to be struck here I think this is something that a lot of people in organizations don't really Have that conversation about there's a lot of unspoken stuff here and because we take Our effort levels really seriously if we see other people that look like they're slacking off That stresses us because that's not fair Okay, some level. That's not fair This phrase flog a dead horse mean anything. Yeah But it might not all of not all of the idioms and analogies that I use translate very well But I thought this one might this idea that just keep whipping the dead horse just because well, that's what we do Hopefully it'll come back to like it won't But this idea for like I keep doing what I'm supposed to be doing I'm okay. All right. I've almost got myself covered. It doesn't matter whether the horse is gonna walk in I'm doing what I'm the horse's horse's fault Not mine So how does that relate to you as a product to hurt the person potentially this can be seen as really really intimidating This you've got to keep trying you've got to give a hundred percent hundred and ten percent whatever that is 100% all the time keep trying keep trying keep trying keep trying keep trying which on the one hand can be Effort Some things are outside your control. I understand that as long as you're trying your best We'll have a retrospective about it but this It can be It can encourage the wrong kind of behaviors It can also lead to you getting overly attached to your ideas So I've got this idea. I've tried something hasn't quite worked, but if I try harder it might Rather than reading the signs that actually no matter how much more I whip this horse It ain't gonna walk I will hang on to that because I'm overly attached to it And I know if I work harder, it'll be okay You probably notice some failed sprints now by failed. I mean The operation was a success, but the patient died Yeah, so we've got some stuff, but actually we haven't got bad you Because we're focused on effort rather than outcome You could actually achieve the goal through less work or we could work harder and meet not meet the goal a Tri-hard person would choose the latter because of that it can lead to a significant loss of faith if we've got a lot a lot of Failed sprints and doesn't need me to be that many for it to be a lot Then other people are going to start to lose faith that we know what we're doing Often we might The budgeting and the financial support might be tied to outcomes. Actually we're focused on output again, not consciously Unconsciously and burn out. So what can you do? Well meditate? No, it's seriously though. Just Become more aware of what's going on in your head As busy people Who have 544 miles to run without any sleep? It's very difficult to take time and actually think what's going on in my head here. What's driving my decisions? What's driving my behaviors? I'm feeling stressed about this. Why am I feeling stressed about this? What's driving that stress? What's driving my response? What options do I have? Could I be more mindful about my decisions not just for me, but for other people? So you start becoming more aware of where your drivers are Don't judge yourself on them. Okay, because bad Jeff be perfect again. That doesn't help All that does is subconsciously tries to stop me from becoming aware of it because I know I'm just gonna get metaphorically Hit over the head again All right, so you got to allow yourself to see this stuff not judge yourself for it. This is interesting This is really interesting. I'm really impatient right now What's going on about it? Is that is that a good thing? Is that necessary because of you know We've got time to market challenges or is this just me remembering that I've got to get my shoes on and do my teeth and brush My head before we four five to eight so that we get to school on time Is that is that what this is, you know And if I can accept that then maybe I can make a different decision I can change my action if I want to And it's not about Finding out that I'm doing something wrong necessarily sometimes just becoming aware of it This is good actually and we don't do that enough either We don't give ourselves enough credit for the good things that we do as product people because there's so much going on Actually, I did put a lot of effort into that that is that that was appropriate That was a good thing other people stepped up the role model and so on and being a role model is a big part of being a Product person in my opinion you have a position of leadership Even if you don't have as much Authority and power and status as you would like you do have a lot of respect You do have a position of leadership And and one tool that I'll I'll encourage you to just experiment with it's just questioning your assumptions so if I Reduced my standards by ten percent Because my be perfect driver might be a little bit out of control What do I think will happen? What am I assuming will happen? List them out list out those assumptions and then evaluate them Is that you at how likely those assumptions are to become real when you see them written down on paper? Are they statistically probability wise likely to happen or are they? Might happen But more likely they won't is there something that you could do to reduce the risk of it It might happen. Maybe there's a 50% chance of it happening Is there anything that you could do to take that down to 40% or 30% that's something in place to mitigate that risk? Is there something that you could put in place if it does happen that would allow you to recover from it a backup plan a rollback plan Might make it a little bit easier to just temper that be perfect driver or that hurry-up driver How often have you heard something is a drop dead deadline? But after the deadline nothing dropped dead question the assumptions behind it and Then maybe if you get really good at this you can start thinking about well If this risk that I've got in my head actually does happen How could that be a good thing? Not just for me, but for everybody else If we actually if we actually deliver something imperfect How could that be a good thing if we actually didn't try quite so hard and People took advantage of that and maybe had a Friday afternoon off or something like that. How could that be a good thing? What are we worried about and actually could we flip that could we reframe it? and this is a Tweak from a TED talk by a guy called Tim Ferriss if you want to watch the TED talk it's called fear setting There are trigger warnings associated with it should be careful, but generally looking at the fears that we have How could you list them out? I tweaked it slides risks reductions recoveries and Reframing neither began with our Right just a reminder The only person you can really affect is yourself We put a lot of effort into changing other people changing our stakeholders opinions changing our users opinions changing our leaders opinions getting more support changing our development teams, but really the only person we can have any kind of impact on is ourselves So channel your energy into that You're gonna have more time with yourself than any of those people as well And just think you know, what do other people think of me? How do they see me? Maybe it's take some time out and there's there's a there might be a gap between how you see yourself and how other people see you Is that worth acting on? Would you be happier more resilient less likely to burn out more successful be able to make more mindful decisions on behalf of the product if You were more in control of what's going on in here and then just keep track Literally just have a little tally chart Okay, I was quite impatient today And somebody said we might have to put the put back the date that really got me going in here I'm gonna stick another one in the chart here. It just notice it. Don't judge it Don't beat yourself up with the head of it But just just notice it and just by noticing it you might actually see a little bit more mindfulness crop in If you are interested in in reading it more on transactional analysis or People pleasing or anything like that. There are a few good books out there And there's there's a link to Tim Ferriss's initial fear-setting talk in there as well For me, I think this is a big part of being a product person is knowing yourself There's the there's the mechanical side to being a product person. There's your roadmaps There's your backlogs There's your priorities but really a lot of those reactions and a lot of the decisions you make are driven by what's going on in here and Some of it can be really really helpful Some of it went out of control can be less than helpful My my role is to try and help people understand themselves better manage themselves better And then the product stuff will take care of itself I'm here Rest of the day some of my colleagues will be downstairs happy to talk through any of this stuff and You know how you can support yourself as a product person or support your colleagues happy to talk But we've got time for a couple of questions If you could just add your question into the platform I know we have a question through Allison Allison is gonna read out the questions I would have a time for one or two in person as well So maybe let's start with the online question if that's okay. I think Allison you've got the you've got the mic there Perfect. So Jeff How do we balance when we have folks on our team who work long hours because they enjoy it But it puts others on the team behind trying to keep up with them So there's We don't want people and I get this I was talking to somebody yesterday about There They didn't use the term hero, but they they're basically one of their their better developers is leaving Because Development is basically what they finish work and they go home and they do more development That's their hobby as well as their life that their work And I think that's that's that personally. I think that's fine because for them that's sustainable It's one of those things if you're doing something you love, it's not really a job type thing But being aware of the impact that it has on other people is key So I'm a I'm gonna assume through my own experience of something similar that that conversation hasn't really been Had within that team. There's this almost implicit assumption of okay Well, am I going to be judged differently because I'm not doing what they're doing Well, am I adding value in a different way to having conversations about that I think is really really important and having a conversation with that person in terms of the implications They might be having on the rest of the team Because they are a team member They have a responsibility to their teammates as well as themselves So I would I would as with all of the stuff that I talked about today, there are positives to all of it There's positives to the be perfect driver and try hard and all this kind of stuff But if we do it too much Then actually we lose the benefits and we tip into this function So trying the goal really is not to get rid of your be perfect driver It's to harness the positives of it without letting the negatives come in not just for you But for the people So I like the fact that the question was about team members because I know it might not seem like it at times But they're human beings as well All right It's not just product people that have these drivers all human beings do and having those conversations about well What motivates us what what situations stress us? How can we take advantage of that as individuals and as a team without letting The shadow of it creep in for the rest of the team to have a conversation is the short answer Ellison Any more questions From the audience Can you raise a hand please if you have a question? Did we bring a tumbleweed? Everybody um Jeff. Thanks so much for a great talk. That was really enlightening I Thought it was really interesting because it actually talked through a number of traits that I think are really prevalent in product People I had my hand up for the whole thing But I mean, I'm not sure if other people are aware but a lot of those traits are super common in people with ADHD and autism as well Hand up So I wasn't sure if you were aware that it was like, you know something that product people should be aware of in terms of You know something we talk about in terms of neurodiversity in the product sphere I was thinking on the way in what would be one of the hardest questions people could ask me and it would be around that because and Because I'm not as Clued up on that as I would like to be and I was brought to my attention Last week actually so I was working with somebody who who's dyslexic and he was talking to me about how And we had this after After workshop event social event. He said I can't come on that It's not because they want to be social It's because I actually need to go through what we went through today and repackage it up because otherwise I won't be able to access that information later on I Saw I wasn't aware of that. He said that do you design your workshops for people? With you know neurodiversity in mind I said well, I did go through a phase of trying and then I've just got a bit lazy on that and that's on me So I don't understand it as much as I as I would like but yeah You can look at some of this stuff and I make the joke that you know my father-in-law if it's not a right angle It's a wrong angle and yeah, he lines his shoes up perfectly by the door That that could be a sign of Somewhere along the autism spectrum ADHD maybe and I the reason I did it was worried about being asked the question is because I don't have The academic rigor to the answer, but in my head It's somewhere along that and it's probably more of a of a challenge and more important to have the conversation The people who have that as more of a part of their life But thank you Okay, thanks Jenna and so just in the interest of time We'll move on and if anyone has any questions for deaf you can catch them during the break as well Yep, and if people want to contact you online How can they how can they find you online? Just Google Jeff Watts and ignore the book about irritable bowel syndrome because that's not mine Excellent different Jeff Watts different Jeff Watts. He's a he's our keynote next year. Yeah other Jeff Watts And thanks very much Jeff accent