TBM 273: What To Do More (And Less) Of

I recently gave an internal talk to a product community of practice on the theme of behaviors. My focus was on connecting abstract ideas to specific, observable behaviors. What do we actually see when teams are more product-centric? I’d like to share a post version of the talk below.

None of these behaviors are all-or-nothing. There will always be situations where you do more of some and less of others. The point is to use them as prompts for reflection and conversation.

• How might your team create an environment where these behaviors emerge more often?

• What do you need to make space for?

• And just as importantly, what might you need to do less of to allow them to take root?

(Help needed. I’m looking to do research/discovery specifically with chiefs of staff and/or product operations leaders, director or above, in companies with >150 people in design, engineering, and product. I’m happy to split up the session into 50% research, and 50% sharing industry trends and themes, or digging into whatever puzzle you’re facing. Drop your email here, and I’ll reach out)

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Weave In Context

Weaving context into daily discussions changes the quality of the conversation. Instead of only talking about the feature or the update, people pause to frame it within the bigger picture. What was the original insight? What was the customer’s situation when they asked for this? What is the broader market or strategic context?

That does not mean the discussion cannot move forward without all the details. It just means there is an effort to bring in multiple frames including strategy, customer perspective, insights, even what is happening right now. This shows up not only in the lofty, high-level statements but in tactical details too. You might be discussing something very specific and still take the time to explain how it connects back to the larger challenge.

It is like the “forever why” button is always on.

Of course, it can be overdone. We have all seen twenty-five minutes of context that leaves only five minutes for the actual decision. The art is finding the right amount, just enough to get people on the same page. And another important point: you do not manufacture context if you do not have it. Saying “we do not know yet” is still valuable. Not knowing is part of the picture too.

The essence here is sharing context at the right time, in the right amount, so that decisions improve and collaboration gets stronger.

Delay Convergence

Premature convergence is what happens when people jump too quickly into solutions, plans, or overly precise estimates. The healthier behavior is to converge at the last responsible time, not earlier.

That means sitting longer with ambiguity, holding space for multiple valid options, and delaying decisions that do not need to be made yet. The delay is not avoidance. It is a strategic choice, often because more context and information will make the decision stronger.

It is easy to nod along with the idea of less premature convergence, but in practice it often gets mistaken for waffling or an inability to be bold. That is not what this is. The real skill is knowing when a decision truly needs to be made and when it should wait. This is where ideas like one-way door versus two-way door decisions come into play.

So the behavior might look like slowing down on a call that does not yet need an answer, encouraging divergence, or pushing back on estimates that are too specific too early. It might sound like a leader saying, “We can work out the details later. For now it helps to keep options open. We know the big goal, and we are committed to it. The exact path can come later.” That ability to hold off until the last responsible moment—that is the powerful part.

Crisp Problem and Opportunity Framing

Problem and opportunity framing matters. In many companies you see someone toss out a flimsy problem statement or a vague opportunity, and then skip straight into describing their project. When the better behavior shows up, the framing is handled at a different level. There is a crispness to it, a completeness. You can tell they have thought through the counterarguments. They are not pretending to have certainty where it does not exist, but they explain things in a way that opens up creativity and action rather than sending people off to build a bridge to nowhere.

It can be hard to describe, but you know it when you hear it. There is a shift in the room. People start to see things from a different angle, and you can almost feel a collective awareness build. A well-crafted problem or opportunity statement has this effect of both focusing and inspiring at the same time. It passes the basic reality test. It is grounded in insights, and the insights line up with the framing.

The impact is obvious in what follows. The conversation that comes after is sharper, with less spinning and more forward motion. Imagine a leader saying, “The problem is not that we are struggling to land customers. The problem is that the customers we do land fall into two broad cohorts, and one of those cohorts thinks it is buying a different product. The qualitative and quantitative data mirrors this.” That kind of framing has a focusing effect. It helps the team get crisp, sets up higher-leverage action, and raises the overall quality of the work that follows.

Balanced Discussions About Output and Outcomes

There is a noticeable shift from conversations about pure output, such as what was shipped, delivered, or launched, to conversations about outcomes. What actually happened? How did it perform? How did customers adopt it?

It is important to point out that output discussions do not disappear. They will always be there, and they should be. The difference is balance. Instead of meetings being ninety percent about delivery updates, it becomes closer to half output and half outcome. And the outcome side is not just about immediate reactions. It might include follow-ups on things delivered months ago that are only now showing results. The conversation sounds like: what happened, to whom, what did we learn?

These discussions are not performative. They are not limited to “wins” at the end of the month in some optics-driven session. They happen as part of the regular cadence, woven into daily and weekly discussions. And they cover both sides, what worked and what did not work as expected.

It is also not just about broad KPI readouts. Those can be useful, but often they reflect work set in motion a long time ago. Seeing new bookings is good, but if those were driven by efforts from eight quarters back, the signal is not fresh enough to guide current decisions. The better conversations connect to what is happening now. They carry a natural follow-on question: now what? Given what we are seeing, what are we going to do next?

Return To Stable Foundations

A powerful conversation habit is the ability to return to more stable ideas, models, or workstreams over time. Instead of being reactive to whatever fire is burning at the moment, the team builds and revisits the underlying models and narratives that anchor their work.

For example, a leader might remind the group of the three core pillars for the team, or point back to the big-picture strategy. This is related to weaving in context, but it is more about the stable kind of context that persists across quarters and projects. It also includes the ability to create these foundational narratives in the first place. Someone has to make the model. That might mean going back to a market segmentation, or to the value creation hypothesis that underpins the strategy.

These foundations act as reminders, but also as focusing mechanisms that cut across the latest customer request or the pressure of quarterly goals. Picture a leader saying, “We have a lot going on right now, but let’s revisit the capability map with our core assumptions. What has actually changed here? Are we still on track with what we expected? Once we answer that, we can return to today’s puzzle, which is this feature versus feature debate.”

It is the ability to step back to the key models and ideas when the team is caught up in the moment. In practice it might be as simple as a teammate saying, “Let’s pause. Let’s go back to the core journey and see where this fits.” That return to stable foundations keeps the work tethered to something larger and steadier.

Moving Beyond Tetris

This one is harder to pin down, but the best way I can describe it is with the image of teams playing Tetris. You see them trying to fit everything in, meet every constraint, optimize output, and juggle tradeoffs. The energy goes into making sure every piece fits.

The counter behavior looks different. It is when teams use constraints artfully, almost like enabling constraints, to step outside of the Tetris game altogether. Instead of hyper-optimizing, they find a sharper focus.

A simple analogy is how people approach vacations. One person tries to see everything, hitting all the spots, maximizing the schedule. Another person sets a constraint, maybe one thing in the morning and one in the afternoon. The constraint does not limit the trip. It actually makes it better.

In practice, this might look like a leader saying, “We have been framing this as a tradeoff between speed and quality, and the team has been working hard to thread that needle. But what if we reframed it? What if quality drives speed and speed drives quality?” The shift here is moving from PM as maximizer, always maximizing output or trying to satisfy every stakeholder, to PM as leverage seeker. The focus becomes finding the one thing that will crack open the bigger opportunity.

Sometimes this shows up as a team planning to spend months on something, but instead they set a constraint. “Let’s get something into product in a week so we can learn X.” That is still a constraint, but it is an enabling one. It creates movement and clarity instead of trapping the team in endless tradeoffs.

Ship

With all the talk about outcomes, impact, and context, it might be surprising to hear this, but a key behavior is still shipping. Shipping does not always mean the final product. Shipping might be a series of customer interviews. It might be releasing a slice of functionality. In this sense, shipping means meaningful action. Action that shows progress, not just the endless grind of pushing a boulder uphill.

When you talk to high-performing teams and ask what happened in the last week or two, they have an answer. They point to milestones that mattered. They share what they learned. You can feel the momentum. There is inertia when things are moving, and it shows up in everyone’s behavior. When this is not happening, there are plenty of reasons it might not be, but when it is happening you can sense it. It is palpable.

The conversations sound different. You can feel the integration happening—learning integrated with code, expectations integrated with reality. Progress feels like a series of small closure moments. Instead of just hearing that things are “on track,” you hear about pivot points that mattered and loops that were closed.

When it is not happening, the conversations drift into talking about the work around the work, or the plans, or the hopes for what might come next. When it is happening, people are talking about what was actually done, what changed, and why it matters. That difference makes all the difference.

Strategy Flows Bidirectionally

In many companies, information flows in one direction and strategy flows in one direction. What you want to see instead is a more bidirectional process, a gradual convergence on strategy. Teams surface insights about what is working and not working because they are closest to customers. Business partners add context. Leadership might float some high-level ideas, but strategy takes shape through reviews, teams bubbling up their bets, and leaders layering in new information like long-range plans or financial data. This can stretch across months of back and forth.

In some organizations the cycle is even more continuous. Strategy is shaped as much from what happens on the front lines as it is from the boardroom. Leaders may offer a few broad pillars, but they avoid getting overly prescriptive. Teams then take those signals and shape their own strategies. When teams walk through their approach, it feeds back into the higher-level conversations.

It is an ongoing rhythm. Leaders share ideas, teams adapt their roadmaps, those roadmaps spark feedback, and executives sharpen the strategy with new data. High-level roadmaps start to emerge, but they are the product of many cycles of interaction rather than a single announcement.

The important part is that it is not just an end-of-year exercise. Information and discussion are always bubbling up, and direction and framing are always flowing down. It is a continuous pattern of divergence and convergence across multiple levels.

Always Seek Leverage

A key habit is aggressively challenging scope and always seeking the 20/80, where 20 percent of the effort creates 80 percent of the value. More importantly, it is about reducing the complexity, friction, and added weight that can creep in. The behavior shows up in the constant questioning of whether the extra scope is worth it. What is the bare essential thing that will unlock value for customers?

At its best, this behavior is about leverage and outcomes. But it has a dark side if misunderstood. Done poorly, it becomes a version of Tetris, where teams are forever juggling tradeoffs, maximizing for the sake of maximizing, and ending up with features that technically check a box but do not really solve the customer’s problem. It becomes three mediocre things shipped instead of one powerful thing that makes a difference. That is not the point here.

The point is to stay obsessed with leverage. To ask how the team can add the least amount of complexity while creating the most value. It is about a kind of thriftiness. By default, you assume you will stop, and only continue if there is strong evidence that it is worth it. It is an almost forced minimalism, a discipline of searching for the simplest way to solve the problem in a way that creates outsized impact.

Sometimes the simplest path is not the easiest. In fact, the simpler solution can be the hardest one to pull off. But if it delivers far more leverage, that is the move worth making.

Question Priors and Commitments

What you often see in teams is work being carried out simply because it was agreed to months or even years ago, regardless of how much conditions have changed. Old commitments are treated as fixed, and no one is questioning the priors. The healthier behavior is to actively reassess past decisions in light of current data and understanding. It is about taking a portfolio view of the work, not a blind continuation of what was promised long ago.

This is really about fighting commitment bias. Just because something was agreed to before does not mean it should carry forward unchanged. And for this to work, others in the company need to be open to the questions and the challenge. A partner might have been waiting months for something, and it may still be critical, but there should at least be room for reassessment in light of new realities, new strategies, or new evidence.

It is also about recognizing and battling sunk cost bias. Teams that do this well say things like, “Some variables have shifted. We are not seeing the same demand anymore. The basic hypothesis for this work was built on those assumptions, so let’s consider our options with fresh eyes.” The conversations are structured in a way that feels productive rather than defensive. Priorities are framed as options to be considered, not as fixed paths to be marched down.

Commitments are still made, but they are commitments to outcomes and progress, not to outdated plans. When a plan no longer makes sense, these teams are willing to scrap it and redirect. That ability to question priors, and to do so openly with partners, keeps the work grounded in reality instead of inertia.

Real Customer-Centricity

Do you just build what customers ask for? Most product managers would quickly say no. But the real question is what behaviors actually show up, because the nuance here matters.

The behavior to look for is leaning deeply into learning about the customer’s context—their job, their goals, their desired outcomes. Those are the things the customer is expert at. If you happen to be dealing with a customer who is also an expert in the technology you sell, the story might be different. But in most cases, it is your responsibility to bring expertise in design, data, and engineering. You are the one who should understand how to use those tools to help customers achieve what they need. You are also in the unique position of seeing across customers, knowing how different people solve the same problem. And ideally you are also grounded in the fact that you want a sustainable business, not a product full of one-off solutions for each individual request.

So the behavior is a mix. It is about empathy for the customer’s perspective, since they may see a particular solution as their best option, combined with a commitment to use the full toolset of your team to get them to the outcome they really need. In practice, this shows up as asking probing questions, digging into their work and context, and exploring multiple ways to solve their problem. It means thinking about the challenge from angles the customer may not be considering, and doing research on how other customers approach the same situation.

This is not about trolling through feedback lists and simply building the most common request. It is about using those signals as a starting point for deeper exploration. It is also about questioning whether you want to provide customers with a small incremental improvement, constrained by their current reality, or whether you can reframe the problem in a way that unlocks a step change.

Direct Contact with Customers

Direct contact with customers matters, and you want to see it happening across multiple members of the team whenever possible. It can be hard in a B2C setting or in highly regulated industries, but on some level the team has to get out of its shell and engage directly with the people they are building for. Feedback tools are useful, but ideally the contact is not only through proxies—it is real conversations with customers.

You can tell the difference between a team that ships something and immediately moves on, and a team that stays curious about how the work is being received. The stronger teams look closely at what happens after delivery. They want to know how it landed, how it is being used, and how customers are experiencing it. They are genuinely curious, not just ticking the box of “customer engagement.”

This does not mean every team member has to be on every call or in every meeting. It is not about extremes. What you want to see are regular nudges toward more direct engagement, more curiosity, more real contact with customers. That posture—of wanting to understand how things feel from the customer’s perspective—is the signal of a healthier product team.

Gentle and Friendly Pushback

Gentle and friendly pushback is a sign of a healthy team. This is very different from dragging your heels with passive resistance, which adds friction without value. What you want is a culture where people feel comfortable asking for more evidence, pressing for additional context, or surfacing a different angle.

Think about designers or engineers about to pour their energy and creativity into something. It is worthwhile for them to ask a few more questions before committing. That habit of pushback should flow through all discussions across the company. You rarely benefit from tunnel vision or a single perspective. Having people who feel empowered to challenge assumptions, share domain expertise, or remind the group about customer impact makes the work stronger.

Time is precious. Focus is even more precious, especially when teams are working on novel or creative problems. Gentle pushback helps protect that focus. It should come from respect, from curiosity, and from a commitment to customers. You might hear phrases like, “Let me pressure test this for a second,” or “Let’s red team this idea for a moment.”

The timing matters. You may not want to encourage it at the very last minute before a big kickoff, although sometimes even then it is worth listening if someone has critical new information. And it is especially important that this behavior extends across organizational boundaries. If sales or support only hears about something later in the process, their questions or objections should be welcomed, not treated as an interruption. That kind of respectful back-and-forth is what keeps teams grounded and customers well served.

Adapt Research Approaches

The strongest teams use research methods that fit the nature of the question and the implications of the answer. Instead of running the same process every time, they adapt. Are they in exploration mode? Are they trying to generate ideas? Are they benchmarking? Are they evaluating? Each of those modes calls for a different type of discovery, and the approach shifts with the context.

You might hear someone say, “The nature of this question is evaluative, so we are going to compare the before and after state more carefully.” That kind of framing shows the method is being chosen deliberately.

Just as important, the team talks about this openly. They may not all be research experts, but they can share the goals, surface their understanding of the context, and shape the approach together. Decisions about research are not treated as hidden or secondary. They are communicated, structured, and visible.

What you do not see is a team disappearing for a week to run a performative exercise with nothing real to show. The research has substance, and it produces findings that actually matter to the work.

Place Diverse Bets

Healthy teams make different types of bets. An anti-pattern is when everything is scoped down, cut down, and turned into only small, prescriptive bets. The stronger behavior is when teams feel free to propose open-ended bets, outcome-oriented bets, and bets with clear guardrails or pivot points.

If a team believes they should run a series of experiments to move a metric, they should be able to do that. If they believe a larger, big-bang project is the right move, and they have a plan to manage the risk, they should be able to pursue that too. The point is not to lock teams into only the safest, most incremental work, nor to trap them in endless iterations that go nowhere.

What you want to hear are teams proposing different shapes and sizes of effort. Higher-risk bets will naturally attract more scrutiny, but the culture should support people in proposing guardrails and risk controls rather than shutting the idea down. Over time, teams that demonstrate the ability to manage risk and make thoughtful, calculated bets should earn the leeway to try.

The environment makes room for this diversity of approaches. Teams and leaders work together to keep risk in check, but they also keep space open for bigger moves when those are the right bets to make.

Treat Ways of Working as Part of the Product

Strong teams treat the way they work as part of the product. They tinker and adjust without getting trapped in endless debates about every little agreement. When things get stuck or their current approaches are not cutting it, they make a deliberate effort to reassess and try something new.

This is not about managers alone deciding how work gets done. Team members themselves raise questions about whether rituals are worth the time. They propose alternative approaches, sometimes framed as experiments the team can try for a set period. There is space for unique approaches to emerge, and you often see individuals step forward with proposals to try something different.

The conversations about process feel real, not perfunctory. Instead of circling around the same issues again and again, the team actually acts on what they discuss. They run experiments, they reflect, and they keep what works. Some ideas catch on and spread across the organization, while others remain unique to a single team. Many do not spread at all, and that is fine too.

What matters is the willingness to treat ways of working as something to evolve. Teams that do this well end up with rituals and practices that feel authentic to them, built from lived experience rather than imposed templates.

Conviction and Strong Opinions Loosely Held

There needs to be room for conviction. You can take “evidence driven” too far. Sometimes teams get stuck waiting for perfect evidence, when the best way forward is for someone to place a bet and move. Not every decision can be made by running the numbers.

The behavior you want to see is people feeling comfortable expressing conviction, listening to conviction, and testing conviction. If you have conviction, you should expect others to pressure test it. And you should expect others to bring conviction of their own. It cannot be just one voice. The environment has to make space for people to share a perspective, even if the evidence is still forming.

“Bring data” is important, but it can get distorted. People may start manufacturing data, whether intentionally or not, to prove their case. Conviction matters because it allows the group to make progress without waiting for data that may never be complete or perfectly conclusive.

Often conviction comes from different domains. Designers, engineers, marketers, and product managers each carry their own form of domain conviction. The product manager’s job is not to tamp this down, but to create the space where those convictions can interact, collide, and harden into stronger ideas.

The reason conviction is critical is that without it, progress can stall. But conviction has to be balanced. It can turn into a curse if it becomes rigid. This is where the principle of strong opinions loosely held matters. You bring your conviction with confidence, but you also stay ready to let go of it when new information shows it no longer makes sense.

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(Help needed. I’m looking to do research/discovery specifically with chiefs of staff and/or product operations leaders, director or above, in companies with >150 people in design, engineering, and product. I’m happy to split up the session into 50% research, and 50% sharing industry trends and themes, or digging into whatever puzzle you’re facing. Drop your email here, and I’ll reach out)