Inspiration & perspiration
The target audience of this post are product leaders seeking to balance optimism & pragmatism in how they influence their teams and organizations.
I recently came across this tweet on the topic of job-hopping that - unsurprisingly - went quite viral in the Twitterverse and beyond:
If you scroll through the replies and quotes, you’ll find that the majority of respondents are in disagreement with the original argument (or at least some part of it).
Much of the dissent is rooted in personal, visceral and contrary experiences. For example: people who escaped a toxic work environment, were impacted by the massive trend of layoffs in tech, or found opportunities with upside far beyond what their previous roles could offer. For people with such experiences - it’s natural to see the tweet as reeking of cognitive dissonance or tone deafness.
My post today is not about job-hopping (though I share a footnote on that topic later). This post is about the power of leading with inspiration, when you need to influence others as a product leader.
As individuals: inspiration vs. perspiration
As a team builder and product manager, I spend a considerable amount of time & energy seeking to understand what motivates my teams. The ability to do this is a critical unlock to be an effective manager, and an influential product leader. Ultimately these roles require you to lead others, primarily through influence, at scale. It’s worth noting that trying to understand others’ motivations from the outside looking in is incredibly hard. In fact, without genuine & positive intent, I’d posit that it’s a fool’s errand.
While motivation itself is personal and individualized, it is still possible to pick up on some general patterns when you work with enough folks in different environments. One interesting pattern I’ve observed is that people tend to either be influenced more by either inspiration or perspiration:
Inspiration: motivated primarily by outsized potential, big prospects and creative possibilities.
Perspiration: motivated primarily by hard problems, complex challenges and gnarly constraints.
Both of these motivational ‘archetypes’ are fine and valuable, and we all have some mix of the two in our individual makeup. I encourage you to reflect on this for yourself to understand what your natural leaning or inclination may be. And equally, if you are looking to motivate someone on your team, reflect on what their natural leaning may be as well. This thought exercise can be quite clarifying.
As groups: gravitational pulls
When we congregate as teams or organizations, our individual leanings tend to either converge or collide. This is especially true when we group together under specific conditions that can either amplify or diminish our natural leanings ex: the company’s business performance, the nature of the product or domain we’re working on or the cultural traits & norms we operate with that have formed over time.
I liken this to Brownian motion: patterns seemingly emerge from random collisions and chaotic, continuous motion amongst a group of particles (us):
Related to inspiration and perspiration, the general organizational patterns I’ve observed are:
When companies are performing well, our collective impulse skews towards inspiration. When companies are not performing well, our collective impulse skews towards perspiration.
These patterns are understandable, but at their extremes, can be detrimental if left unchecked (ex: over-optimism that leads to orgs taking costly, distracting bets that have little probability of success).
Different layers & functions of the organization often diverge in terms of their natural gravitational pull towards inspiration or perspiration. This is because there is variance in perspectives depending on whether you are closer to seeing potential/prospects/possibilities or problems/challenges/constraints (ex: Support teams tend to skew towards perspiration - as would anyone who spends time with unhappy customers).
These divergences can be bridged by establishing strong feedback loops across layers & functions.
As they mature, organizations typically recruit talented & skilled ‘problem-solver’ types to help them scale effectively. Problem-solvers tend to look for problems to solve - and if you look for problems (i.e. perspiration), you will always find it.
The implication of this is that there is an inherent gravitational pull to perspiration and risk mitigation as companies scale. Counter-balancing that can be useful.
For product-led companies, product leaders are typically exposed to both the inspiration and the perspiration in heavy doses - given where they sit and the central role that product plays. Thus they are uniquely positioned to have the most ‘objective’ point of view on the requisite company strategy and execution to balance the two.
But, this is not a given. Individual product leaders have their own natural leanings, which can dictate how much they choose to lean into inspiration vs. perspiration for their product areas and their leadership style.
As product leaders: the power of positive anchoring
In a previous post, I abstracted the core responsibilities of the PM function to 3 facets:
Impact (to drive customer & business outcomes)
Leadership (of your direct team & sphere of influence beyond that)
Time Horizon (extending vision & strategy beyond the here-and-now)
Fulfilling these responsibilities well requires you to find the optimal balance of inspiration & perspiration when you are navigating execution, strategy & influence. This is actually really hard, and can be a moving target depending on the state of play of the organization, product and who you are trying to influence.
Given this complexity, my advice to PMs and product leaders is simple. When in doubt: lead with inspiration, and follow with perspiration.
In the random Brownian motion of a product-led organization, the vantage point of the product leader is unique. Your voice is more influential than most in defining the gravitational pull of the entire organization. How bullish or bearish you are at any given time shapes the organization’s wider momentum. People look to you for both conviction in the opportunity ahead, and confidence that you understand what challenges and problems need to be addressed to realize that. Thus, inspiration acts as the rocket fuel (thrust) needed for successful products to emerge from organizations, and to counteract the perspiration (drag) that can set in otherwise.
Here’s a rather more inspirational tweet from
on a similar topic. Ironically, this one went much less viral!A footnote on job-hopping vs. long tenures
Lastly, I want to go back to the original tweet I referenced above. Assuming the author had genuine intent to provide useful guidance to tech job-seekers, it is obvious that a more positive anchoring (“sink your teeth in! play the long game!”) would’ve been much more powerful than the negative anchoring (“don’t be jumpy! job hopping is bad!”). The influence of positive anchoring…based in inspiration more than perspiration…is unparalleled.
The topic of the value of extended tenures - or the perils of job hopping, should you prefer - is a nuanced one. There is no one-size-fits-all answer. But what I can say - as someone who’s benefited from longer-than-average tenures in my career - is that this discussion is better reframed in terms of impact & learning. Breaking it down a bit more:
As a product leader, you must learn from the impact of your judgement and influence on a company & product to help shape your career.
It often (though not always) takes meaningful time to realize your unique, singular impact to the product, business and team.
How long this actually takes is a function of your organization’s and product’s velocity. What may take 1 year to learn in one context may take 3 years in another.
As you advance in your career, your impact will, more often than not, take longer to realize and more cycles than in earlier stages of your career.
Based on the above, my general advice to senior product leaders is to place long-term bets when they make career moves. These are bets that they are convinced may have asymmetric benefits in terms of impact, learning & upside. And to then rigorously evaluate their conviction on a periodic basis (perhaps every 12-18 months) based on their actual experiences in the role.