Episode 237: Leading Creative Teams with Discipline with Keith Lucas
Keith Lucas, author and former product leader at Roblox, joins Melissa Perri to discuss his new book "Impact," which focuses on building high-performing, innovative teams. Keith shares insights from his experience leading teams at Roblox and explores how visionary leadership and mission-driven strategies can inspire and align teams for success. The conversation delves into creative constraints, the balance between vision and mission, and the continuous improvement necessary for effective leadership.
Ready to learn how to lead innovative teams and align them with your organization's mission? Tune in to gain valuable insights from Keith's experience and discover practical strategies for building impactful teams.
You’ll hear us talk about:
05:45 - Visionary Leadership and Team Alignment
Keith explains the importance of visionary leadership and involving teams in strategy formation to inspire and align them with the organization's goals. He discusses how this approach helps in building trust and fostering a shared sense of purpose among team members.
15:30 - Creative Constraints and Innovation
In this section, Keith emphasizes the need for creative constraints and maintaining flow states to foster innovation. He shares strategies on how leaders can set boundaries that encourage creativity without stifling the team's potential.
27:20 - Decency Over Niceness in Leadership
Keith talks about the distinction between being decent and being nice as a leader. He argues that transparency and honesty are more valuable than mere niceness, especially when it comes to making tough decisions and fostering a culture of trust.
Episode resources:
Impact book: https://keithvlucas.com/writing/impact/
Keith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kvlucas/
Other Resources:
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Keith Lucas: Leadership is often having an idea that is contrary to what people expect.
[00:00:06] Especially like visionary leadership is often about having an idea that people are not quite getting. But there's a difference between people not understanding your vision and just not believing you have anything worthwhile to say. And so the first step in having a strategy is to actually have really come upon something compelling.
[00:00:30] And one of the ways to do that is actually involve the team in coming up with the strategy.
[00:00:36] The space for creativity. I think, is created by two things. One is having what we talked about before, some set of things to align to. Some sort of creative constraint, a healthy, creative constraint.
[00:00:51] And the other one is flow, and some people talk about flow state as an athlete. You get into a flow state, you can be very creative, you can unlock a lot of ideas.
[00:01:01] All of that flow applies not only to the day it applies to the project. If you give someone an OKR and then halfway through it, you change your mind and there's no real reason to, there's no evidence that someone's learned something. Then it's hard to be creative because you're in the flow of that success and you don't achieve anything and it will disrupt. It'll be a lot of context switching. So context switching and anything that disrupts flow could impact that.
[00:01:29] PreRoll: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you find your way.
[00:01:57] Think like a great product leader. This is the product thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
[00:02:07] Melissa Perri: Hey, product people. You might notice something a little different today. There is no dear Melissa segment in this episode. That's because we're giving it its own spotlight. Starting this week, dear Melissa, will be released as a separate episode every Friday. Why the change in a world where attention spans are shorter and time is tight, we want to make it easier for you to get the insights you need, when you need them. So that means shorter, more focused episodes that deliver the same value in a more intentional format. So stay tuned. Dear Melissa Returns this Friday in its new format. Don't miss it.
Why Keith wrote Impact
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[00:02:40] Melissa Perri: ~Hello and~ welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today I'm joined by Keith Lucas, author, advisor, and former product and engineering leader at roblox. We're diving into Keith's new book, Impact How to inspire, align, and amplify innovative teams, which releases this month.
[00:02:55] It distills 30 years of startup experience into battle tested frameworks for building high performing teams that scale without losing speed or purpose. Having helped scale Roblox into a global platform, Keith brings proven insights on creating mission-driven athletes, high performing teams that balance collective focus with individual autonomy.
[00:03:13] And today we'll explore his frameworks for aligning creativity, building culture through daily behaviors and turning teams into engines of innovation. Welcome Keith.
[00:03:23] Keith Lucas: Thank you. Happy to be here.
[00:03:25] Melissa Perri: So can you tell us a little bit about why you decided to write this book?
[00:03:29] Keith Lucas: Yeah, so I wrote the book. Uh, I've been an advisor for about five to seven years, and in working with companies, the same questions kept coming up over and over again about people and culture and they really were very much a part in the experience that I had in at Roblox before, after, and it made sense for me to write it down.
[00:03:56] Melissa Perri: ~I think this is such an important book and like I told you, I was reading it all morning on page 230, and~ what I love about it is that there's so many books out there about building teams that are like generalized about how do you like hire people or what should you look for? But yours is specific enough I think for product and technology leaders or people who are actually managing a product company as well. ~Where I really found so much of the advice that you were putting in there resonated with things that I see happening in leadership over and over again. Whether it's like leaders not setting the right direction, or how do you balance like micromanagement versus being too passive. How do you get like people to actually be creative?~
[00:04:13] ~And then you had a great section at the end too, which we'll dive into more about, how do you hire people, how do you coach them? How do you actually level. And these topics I think keep coming up for new leaders, for existing leaders, for people who are trying to grow. ~So when you think about this book is different too, what do you think sets it apart compared to the standard leadership or team building advice that you see out there?
[00:04:24] Keith Lucas: So I'll start by saying there's actually, it's a good time to be alive in terms of learning about product, technology and leadership. There is a lot of good stuff out there. I've read a lot of it. And there are two things, I think the book, at least for me being the audience, what I find different.
[00:04:43] One is it's an end-to-end approach. It's really looking at holistically the entire team and the entire individual's lifecycle on your team. And how do you lead and put a system together end to end from individual to team. But the other one is, I think, leading creative, innovative teams is sometimes counterintuitive and just by talking to people, seeing a lot of leaders, talking to leaders, and in my experience, it can be challenging. It's not always intuitive. We tend to go either, passive meaning I don't wanna crush the creativity. I don't wanna crush the ownership. I want them to be an owner, and so you've pull back a little too much.
[00:05:35] Or you go the other direction which is another style of leadership, but that tends to be too forceful. Either, either maybe too aggressive or potentially micromanaging. And what I try to do in the book is point to this other way that is not a blend of those, but it's really about disciplined leadership.
[00:05:56] It's systematic leadership. It's having a vision leading by vision and values, but it's. Also have people knowing that you are committed and you're committed to not only the mission, but to the team. And so it's really another way of thinking about leadership. And for me it's what I've learned to be an effective way to lead specifically creative and innovative teams.
[00:06:23] Melissa Perri: When you're in the beginning of the book, you talk a lot about how the leaders need to set directions for the team and that allows them to be autonomous. Can you tell us a little bit about what are the things that you look for as a leader, and what do you have to put in place to help bring out that ownership and that autonomy in the teams?
[00:06:41] Keith Lucas: Yeah, so there's a number of pieces in the book, but to start simply, and this is where I do like to start. Either if I don't know anything about a team, or even if we've put together a really complicated or complex plan, I still love these three questions. What are we doing? Why are we doing it, and how do we know we're making progress?
[00:07:08] And those questions are simple, but they encapsulate a lot. The what are we doing is really about mission. It's about the focus of the team, the why are we doing it? It's about purpose, it's about vision, it's about, inspiration strategy and how do we know we're making progress really is about not only an initial alignment, but a continuous alignment in course correcting.
[00:07:37] So that's like a foundational element of that. And if people start there by having a clear vision, having a clear mission, having clear values to operate by. And then working together on strategy and goals and metrics, then I think you can unlock autonomy.
[00:07:56] Melissa Perri: So I find that the concept of like vision, mission, vision, strategy, like confuse them. They don't know what
[00:08:06] Keith Lucas: Yeah.
[00:08:06] Melissa Perri: they're used for,
[00:08:07] Keith Lucas: Yeah.
[00:08:07] Melissa Perri: 'em all mixed up. Can you tell us a little bit about how you think about the difference between those things, why they're important and what do you use it for?
[00:08:16] Keith Lucas: Yeah. And so you're correct in that even if you do an internet search of mission and vision, and you look at how companies define them. Companies often flip flop on these. And so the definition that on, your team of what each of them are is less important than the fact that they're different.
[00:08:37] And so for me, a vision is what is the world I want to see? This is really the highest level cause around which everyone is involved. And at Roblox, for example, you could imagine that that a vision is really a infinite world of online engagement and play through physical environment virtually simulated environments.
[00:09:03] Mission is the next step in bringing them out that world. So mission is the rallying point and the focusing of the team to go next. So we had a mission at one point in Roblox, which was to get to 10 million monthly a admin users, and then the next mission, mission was a hundred million or something like that.
[00:09:27] So vision the world, you wanna see mission the next step in getting to that vision.
Creating focus and the year of growth
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[00:09:33] Melissa Perri: And then you talked a little bit too about Roblox how you made it like the year of growth one year, and the first year was a year of revenue, and then it was the year of growth. Can you
[00:09:42] Keith Lucas: Yeah.
[00:09:43] Melissa Perri: bit about like that focus, how do you, how do you get a team to rally on it?
[00:09:48] Because one of the biggest issues I see was so many product teams is we're all going in. 8,000 different directions.
[00:09:54] Keith Lucas: Yeah.
[00:09:54] Melissa Perri: We haven't chosen a focus. Like how do you roll out a focus like that? How do you think everybody will always ask as well, like, how do you think about stuff that comes up that's not quite aligned to it, but you just gotta get it done,
[00:10:05] Keith Lucas: Yeah
[00:10:06] Melissa Perri: what does that do and how do you set that as like a leader?
[00:10:09] Keith Lucas: I actually really think that it is awesome when you try to roll something out and no one is buying it. And the reason I think that's awesome is it means you have a good team and it means you haven't come up with a compelling idea. And so you should look at, leadership is often having an idea that is contrary to what people expect.
[00:10:35] Especially like visionary leadership is often about having an idea that people are not quite getting. But there's a difference between people not understanding your vision and just not believing you have anything worthwhile to say. And so the first step in having a strategy is to actually have really come upon something compelling.
[00:11:02] And one of the ways to do that is actually involve the team in coming up with the strategy. So the example from Roblox and I'll use myself in this example, but I will say that Dave, founder and CEO of Roblox was a master at engaging people in the development of strategy.
[00:11:23] But I'll use my, this example, the year of growth. So I became chief product Officer in late 2014. And probably just because I got the role, a lot of people kept coming up to me and saying what they thought we should do. And one of the recurring themes was growth. And it became apparent when you looked at it that it wasn't just a groundswell of interest by the team. It was also something that made sense for the company. We were growing really respectably at 25% year on year, but we all felt we could do better and so that was an easier sell because it was something that was, and this is important. Why you wanna hire people who themselves are leaders, is that you can get some groundswell, which is different than consensus.
[00:12:21] And so that was an easier thing to, to pitch to people. We then had to pitch that and demonstrate competence. But the idea of it was an easier pitch. And there are other examples of when you come up with something that no one believes in and they fall flat, and that's good too. Like then, you know.
[00:12:42] Melissa Perri: So when you're out there like declaring this is the year of growth, what, how are you balancing like that direction with what the teams are coming up with? What does that kind of kickstart for everybody? How do you provide that focus and what else should leaders be looking at? Because you do say in the book too there's leaders who are like: oh, we're, we need to make money at all costs.
[00:13:01] Keith Lucas: Yeah.
[00:13:02] Melissa Perri: this all the time, right? Or, anything that will make us revenue,
[00:13:05] Keith Lucas: Yeah, Yeah.
[00:13:05] Melissa Perri: or make us grow.
[00:13:06] Keith Lucas: Yeah.
[00:13:07] Melissa Perri: how do you think about creating this system where people can come up with ideas that are aligned to that year of growth, but they're not so off base that they're, something you don't wanna do as Roblox.
[00:13:17] Keith Lucas: Yeah, and the example you're talking about is I worked in a company one time where the CEO just wanted random money. And we were a software engineering company, and I threw out there, went about selling t-shirts and he was like, great idea, great initiative, let's go. And, I, and that was a jerky thing to say, but it revealed that there was no, there was no guide, there was no North Star into the revenue. In, in terms of of that, of having a North Star and how we rolled out the year of growth I will say that it was, and I didn't talk about this in the book is one, it was very collaborative, but at the same time, collaboration is something that allows leaders to be part of, they are collaborators too. And what I think everyone should respect in working with each other is the value of their whatever, like purview they have. And so a leader might have a CEO might have a high level like systematic view of everything, but if someone on the front lines of customer support or moderation will really know the user experience.
[00:14:32] And so you have to collaborate and get a lot of ideas in, but you can slowly start putting in framing. For the strategy that slowly aligns and focuses people. And so for the year of growth, what was really Dave was adamant about, was nothing gimmicky. Had, to me, fundamental improvements that improved the product for the audience.
[00:15:03] And in case of growth, also influenced a set of well-known growth metrics, whether it's first time user engagement or long-term retention, short-term retention and all of that. So you had this, north star of value to the audience of like substance, and you had the metrics and you put those two together and it gave people a lot of ways to be creative.
OKRs, cadence, and Kanban approach
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[00:15:30] Melissa Perri: Okay, so you were setting there like these guardrails around it, like the direction, but then the guardrails of, this is what we want, this is what we don't want.
[00:15:37] Keith Lucas: Right.
[00:15:37] Melissa Perri: And then inside that they're free to explore.
[00:15:40] Keith Lucas: Yeah. And I wanna add one other thing because it's a really useful analogy is and it is very meta in a way. So Roblox was creating a really in, in one way of thinking about it, creating an entire virtual economy. And so what we. You have indirect influence over that economy and over that, over everyone.
[00:16:06] So if you wanted. If you, if the users, the players wanted more mobile games, you couldn't go to creators and say, you must make mobile games. You had to do other things that felt natural to incentivize them. And so one of the things we did is we just gave them a dashboard of bounce rate and monetization and engagement of their games on desktop versus mobile.
[00:16:32] And everyone saw that they didn't do so well on mobile. So then they were very incentivized on their own naturally to work on mobile.
[00:16:42] Melissa Perri: Cool.
[00:16:42] Keith Lucas: The same thing is true with culture or setting goals, is if you think about it as an economy, what are the signals you are creating? That create productive effort. And so things like having a north star of metrics and guide, guide a rail as you're talking about, aren't just about constraining.
[00:17:07] They're more about these incentives in a productive economy. So some, like a lot of it is like creating a small economy.
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[00:17:44] You talk about do, uh, OKRs when it comes to
[00:17:47] Keith Lucas: Yes.
[00:17:47] Melissa Perri: this and you're not the biggest fan. What have you seen with OKRs that turns you off?
[00:17:52] Keith Lucas: I'm a fan of the idea of OKRs and like in a, in a. What I, what I feel gives me a lot of credibility as as someone in product, is that like I'll set personal OKRs for myself at home for work around the house. So like I, I do use them and I think they can be valuable. What I critique in the book is, they tend to drive artificial cadence. And they also tend to drive almost like if you're developing a parallel writing parallel code, they'll create lockups between teams because one team is on what they're okr and it's not time for quarterly planning yet. So what, so I have seen this repeatedly that.
[00:18:44] OKR is an amazing way to focus. They're really great at goal setting the audacious objective and the concrete key results. But they, if you implement them, on a cadence, they will, that cadence will be the speed at which you can move, which is why I'm, I've leaned as I continuing to work is more into a kanban style of OKRs. Where's unending OKRs, uh, that that can operate in teams at different cadencies.
[00:19:21] Melissa Perri: And when you say like common style are you meaning like the poll based methodology there to pull in the OKRs?
[00:19:27] Keith Lucas: Yes. So if you like, think about like you have two teams, let's just think about the simplest case. You have two teams and they and in Roblox is a great example, but same true at instrumental. You'd have an app layer team and then you'd have a core tech team. And often the Cortet team moves at a slower cadence, it just paints la net e. Make some changing in the graphics engine or launder and make some changing in the ai code that it now can change your app layer or user experience. So they have different cadences if they each have a strategy. So they each have a strategy that compliment each other.
[00:20:07] So they like roll up to a higher level strategy. Then it's a little artificial to say let's have quarterly goals and measure each team quarterly, because I don't know if a long-term AI team objective will, maybe it'll paint the whole corner, but that might be an eon for app level. So I like the Kanban where you stack your OKRs and then each OKR gets the amount of time it, it requires.
[00:20:37] Melissa Perri: Yeah, so there's no it's the end of the quarter. We're done now. Move on to the next thing.
[00:20:41] Keith Lucas: Yeah. Let's all do bug fixing. Maybe like we should do bug fixing all the time anyway.
[00:20:46] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:20:46] Keith Lucas: But yeah it tend, it can tend to feel like make work or the other thing that can happen is people then plan for too long, oh, we're done early, so planning's coming up in three weeks, so we'll paint three weeks to plan. And so it's like a, yeah. It's very much like a, you know, having too many lockups in parallel code.
[00:21:09] Melissa Perri: So when we're talking about you know, having the mission, the strategy that we have here, a lot of it is in place, and you introduce it here because it's about alignment teams and then also allowing them to be autonomous. So
[00:21:23] Keith Lucas: yes.
[00:21:23] Melissa Perri: let's talk a little bit about the people. When you look at these high performing teams that you built. What is essential in the team, right? Like the people there that really set them apart. What are you trying to coach for and what are you trying to build in that team that says they can be creative, they're gonna solve these hard problems, they're gonna go after it.
[00:21:42] Keith Lucas: So I'm gonna like describe it at the high level and then we can get into some details. So I call 'em in my book this idea called Mission Athletes. And I really like this idea of a mission athlete because someone who's focused on mission but in many other ways behaves like an athlete.
[00:22:01] They're growth oriented, which means that they embrace feedback. None of us really like feedback on a human level, but the athletes do embrace it to get better. They're okay getting they're okay with getting measured. They're constantly in pursuit of higher levels of mastery.
[00:22:20] And so having as a baseline, this idea, me, a mission athlete, a mission-driven person. Who is growth oriented in both in personal and collective capacity and mastery, but also aligns with the team's operating system. And we can talk about what that means. That varies from team to team, but if they don't have impact.
[00:22:45] In a way that aligns with how your team likes impact to have impact, it could be that may, that impact comes at too high a cost. So they also have to align to the team's operating system.
Mastery and ownership in high-performing teams
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[00:22:58] Melissa Perri: And with these mission driven athletes one of the parts that you went in on really deep was mastery, which I liked.
[00:23:05] Keith Lucas: Yes.
[00:23:05] Melissa Perri: To me about, like you, you go over a couple different types of mastery. To,
[00:23:09] Keith Lucas: Yeah.
[00:23:10] Melissa Perri: that somebody just has to
[00:23:11] Keith Lucas: I.
[00:23:11] Melissa Perri: a master at one type of thing. When you are a leader, how are you evaluating mastery?
[00:23:15] What should you look for? What makes you go, okay, that's mastery, right? This person is striving for mastery. They're actually going after it.
[00:23:22] Keith Lucas: Yeah. I, I'll I'll give a quick story in a second, but just to to answer your question, I. I think there's a one is if you're evaluating a skill-based mastery and I didn't talk about this in the book, you do need someone around them who has or can evaluate that skill. So if it, otherwise you can't know if they're getting better over time.
[00:23:51] There are signals that someone is getting better over time, meaning. They move faster. They are able to take on more without sacrificing quality. So there are definitely external signs we all know of, of the expert versus the non-expert. But it helps to have someone who knows the craft, you can think about it as a crafts person type of thing.
[00:24:15] But the mastery on a team is actually also being able to master their teamwork, which means you have to get better at communicating and inspiring others, helping others align helping others, helping amplify others, meaning bring more out of them.
[00:24:34] So at the high level, there is a crafts person, like, um, aspect to it, and then a macro aspect, but I'm happy to tell a story of one of the. Examples I put in the book, if that's, if that makes sense. So a lot, I give about five or six examples in the book from early Roblox because that early culture, coming from Dave, coming from he Eric Castle, who an amazing person and inspiration really set the tone for mastery and so mastery at Roblox.
[00:25:08] Was like, we had a term that congen it was like you got all over something and it, and I often call it that you work without a net. As teammates, we should have each other's back, but as when you're seeking mastery, you should try to work without a net. And so I often. When tell people like, don't let, don't wait for me or the CEO to catch something.
[00:25:33] You put yourself in the CEO's shoes for the quality of this work. But the story is about Christina Shaky who had to remove. A fe a feature we had two currencies at Roblox. Tickets and Robux. Robux are still around. They're tied to the US dollar, and tickets were given out freely for daily attendance and other things.
[00:25:57] And so tickets highly inflated and you could exchange them in an, in a. Currency exchange we built and, but they were causing a lot of problems and the inflation was bumming players out because, if you had a lot of tickets, things just kept getting more and more expensive. And also there it was leading to some sort out, out of application hacking. So people would try to like on some, like some other app trade robots for tickets and someone would always get screwed in a way. So like we had to put a stop to it. Tickets were loved. And I will tell you, I was talking about this story recently and a 17-year-old, two months ago was still talking about why did tickets have to go away. So people really love this. So Christina, there was no better person to do this because we knew. What a comprehensive thinker and what a hard worker she was. And so she went and talked to everyone. She talked to me, she talked to Dave, she talked to people across the team internally.
[00:27:07] She talked to people across the community. She invited creators to come in. She talked to people on the forums and got a comprehensive like assessment of how are we gonna do this? And she talked to engineers because it was a hard thing to remove. And what she ended up coming up with and putting together was a celebration of tickets whereby we started selling virtual goods only in tickets.
[00:27:37] And so rather than the currency crash, the minute we phased an out, it actually became more and more valuable in the final month because it was the only way to get these very limited edition items. And it was a flawless execution. There were no real issues that happened afterwards. People were often, some users were like, oh, I missed tickets, but everyone realized.
[00:28:04] Boy, Christina really cared, and therefore Roblox really cared about how to remove this. They took a lot of care in doing it. It was not just ripping off and everyone would be sad. It was really very sensitive to the community. So it was, that really is a example of mastery execution where she got all over it and I'll add one other thing.
[00:28:30] I think this's, the biggest learning curve for new people at Roblox is this level of getting all over it that we expected of people. It was intimidating, because if you came into a meeting. You and asked every detailed question on every aspect of what you were doing, and that was a way to learn. Oh, I have to I have to get all over it. And so Christina was a great example of that kind of mastery.
[00:29:01] Melissa Perri: You talk in the book too, which I think is really important and a complaint I hear from leaders a lot about ownership, right?
[00:29:07] Keith Lucas: Yes.
[00:29:07] Melissa Perri: how the teams and people right, have to feel this extreme
[00:29:11] Keith Lucas: Yes.
[00:29:12] Melissa Perri: over what they're doing. How do you, obviously Christina's a great example of that. Like she owned tickets and like removing that with such care and creativity. do you look for ownership in the people that you're hiring, right? So if you're going out and interviewing somebody, how can you tell if they're gonna really own it? And how do you recognize that in your teams as well?
[00:29:33] Keith Lucas: Yeah, I think this is a great question. I think there's. A third question as well, which he's related is he is you don't always get it right. So then what? And we'll come to that. But in terms of what you look for, I think there's a way sometimes ownership, focus and urgency, which are all super important, sometimes may present.
[00:29:58] Together. And there are certain a examples of where you can look at one or the other, but often they present intertwined. And I'll give you an example of someone recently that I came across who demonstrated this. And so I recently interviewed a head of product for a company. I. And the head of product.
[00:30:17] What, in that role for that particular company, the head of product was asked to like, do a little bit of a culture shift turnaround of the team to help the team move faster and have higher impact. And, what you do often in these situations with a high level higher like that is ask them to put a plan together.
[00:30:41] And I think a average plan is just something where someone gives a lot of information, but it's either generic or it's not very Customized nor is not very insightful. What this person did is he put together a plan, but really almost in his presentation, disregarded it to get to the meat of why the company was having these problems to begin with, and wanna have those kinds of conversations with me.
[00:31:17] The people hiring him to just address those and to cut to the chase and to have a common understanding about what would mean to be done and how to do it. And so I think it demonstrates all three of those things and he. He didn't look at the role as, okay, I'm head of product, but I'm not a CEO, so I'll make sure, I'll find out what my CEO wants me to accomplish.
[00:31:44] Directionally, yes, turnaround culture and change. Not but not all the details, but it also showed focus on what the real problems were, the core of the issue and urgency in that, during the interview, probably because he couldn't help himself, and I'm the same way. Plenty in the interview, a little at risk by asking some hard questions to make sure that the questions were asked.
[00:32:12] Before the job started. And so I think there you can, you've heard the expression leaning in. That's another way of showing ownership is how curious are people during an interview about what, what's going on, about the problems they're solving? How much can they dive in about how things are done?
[00:32:33] How engaged are they? A lot of those show ownership, urgency and focus. I think the same. It comes across on the team really in, in their everyday behaviors. By them doing the same things, how quickly do they focus on what really matters? How are they easy to stay on track and how do they try to intelligently and competently accelerate progress? And so I think a lot of the same things that, that you look for in hiring show up in, in retention and promoting.
Course correction and tough calls
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[00:33:11] Melissa Perri: In the book too, you also talk about that third question,
[00:33:14] Keith Lucas: Yeah.
[00:33:15] Melissa Perri: What happens if you don't get it right? And you have this framework for coaching people through it or coaching them out.
[00:33:22] Keith Lucas: Yeah.
[00:33:22] Melissa Perri: do you think about course correction? Especially on the ownership piece. If you hire somebody you come in and they're realizing the urgency's not there, the ownership's not
[00:33:31] Keith Lucas: Yeah.
[00:33:32] Melissa Perri: it needs to be lacking. What do you do? How do you intervene?
[00:33:35] Keith Lucas: Yeah. So a couple of things. The first big picture item is you will face this like I do not believe you can create a high performing team, Only by recruiting and developing. I just do not, and it's not that there's anything wrong with people, it's that. You're not able to hit a hundred percent on hiring and developing. You're just not.
[00:34:00] So it always comes down to turning around and exiting. And the more competent you get at that, and the faster you move at that, the better for you and the team. That's the only way. To ultimately get to a high performing team. So how do you go about it? The first thing is to, I it's a, it made me a more sort of sophisticated answer in that is not like the simplest thing, but I do think of it as a continuum, which helps me, meaning it is a continuum from someone performing in a way that is amazing to someone, meaning they're having like oh, they had a bat at bat, and you wanna just give them some pointers to, oh, they're having a lot of bat at bats lately.
[00:34:47] Now, you now need to give them a little more like like turnaround coaching. Oh, now it's starting to get a little more serious or a lot serious now it's like extreme turnaround and then it's exit. And so it is really a continuum. And the reason it helps to think about that is that you are constantly assessing and following the person where they lead.
[00:35:13] They have to take ownership for their performance, and you are there as a coach and as a, a guide on behalf of the team. But it is a progression, they walk and you walk with them where it leaves. And I could go into more detail about specifics in that if you want.
[00:35:33] Melissa Perri: Yeah you talked about the one thing I thought that was nice in the book as well is about what happens if you leave that person in there and what does that do to a team?
Decency over niceness and creating space for creativity
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[00:35:40] Keith Lucas: Yeah. So it's probably the one when it came two by two business diagram in the book is that I think there's two dimensions and one of it is culture and one of it I call work routing. So the reality is when you have someone, and the way I think about it is just someone who is unwilling or unable to have the impact you need right now on this particular team.
[00:36:08] That's it. It's an assessment not an indictment. That, that disruption. Has two consequences. It will either erode culture or it people will work around them and they will work around the person because they care. So the extreme cases are the person who is not showing a lot of competence, so people are working around them to make sure that job gets done and simultaneously being culturally disruptive with anti values.
[00:36:45] So this person needs to be removed very quickly. Because of any stressing out the team and ODing your culture on the other. And if you don't do that, ~you have a ~you are just really indecisive and not protecting the team or the environment. And you will lose people's trust. On the other extreme is the person who is mediocre and competent and they're like, they're getting it done.
[00:37:12] There may be a really great person to hang with. They're not really eroding the culture. So there's some mild work around. What it is you are now creating a culture of mediocrity. So this is like what often people call 'em, these, like the B players or something like that. I don't like that framing, but this person like perpetuating mediocrity is really not good either.
[00:37:36] And so you might be able to take a little longer exiting that person. Give them a few more opportunities to turn things around. But you still need to take action.
[00:37:45]
[00:38:09] Melissa Perri: You, you mentioned in the book too that this is not about, being nice and that a lot of people confuse this with, with letting those people stay as being nice. If you're a first time manager or this is something that bothers you, right? Like how do you get over that mindset of having these tough conversations or this confusion with being nice.
[00:38:29] Keith Lucas: Yes. So the reality is based on our human experience in every other way, there is nothing about. Having serious conversations about someone's performance or or exiting them that will ever feel nice. It's like it's actually a good thing if it makes them feel nice. And so worrying about the nice part or worrying about things like that.
[00:38:59] Will cause you not to take action, and it's the wrong thing to think about because you can't achieve it. What you can achieve is being decent. And decency to me is about transparency. It's about honesty. It's about being concrete. It's about giving people feedback. It's about respecting their ownership to take action.
[00:39:24] It's about being really clear on what's at stake. And so the focus should be on decency, not about being nice. And one way of also thinking about that is it. Always remember it's a, an assessment, not an indictment. And in fact, it's a really narrow assessment. You are only saying that on this team at this moment in time for this mission, this person is not contributing to the level that we need.
[00:39:56] It is possible, and this happened with people I had to let go of at Roblox all the time. They went on and became like serial entrepreneurs or like a key engineer at a really well-known company or something like that. It is not a lifetime indictment, it's just an assessment of the moment.
[00:40:17] Melissa Perri: I think that's so important for people to hear when they're getting caught up in, in those conversations and they're hard conversations I think to have as well. But with your teams as well, you talk a lot about building them up so that they can be creative.
[00:40:30] With that creativity. a little bit about injecting intuition and
[00:40:36] Keith Lucas: yes.
[00:40:37] Melissa Perri: ideation in there too. How, when you have these teams that are working well together, how do you balance those two different things? Like how do you create a space for them to get creative like that too?
[00:40:47] Keith Lucas: So I think there, I think these are, there, there's two related questions there that I'll answer both of them. So the space for creativity. I think, is created by two things. One is having what we talked about before, some set of things to align to some sort of creative constraint, a healthy, creative constraint.
[00:41:08] And the other one is flow, and some people talk about flow state as an athlete. You talk about it in your work from programmers. I felt it when there were times I could program from 12, 14 hours a day not realizing, you get into a flow state, you can be very creative, you can unlock a lot of ideas.
[00:41:29] All of that flow applies not only to the day it applies to the project. If you give, this is where OKR do help. If you give someone an OKR and then halfway through it, you change your mind and there's no real reason to, there's no evidence that someone's learned something. Then it's hard to be creative because you're in the flow of that success and you don't achieve anything and it will disrupt.
[00:41:56] It'll be a lot of context switching. So context switching and anything that disrupts flow could impact that. ~In terms of the other question, which is. We'll take a break. What was, sorry? What was the other?~
[00:42:04] Melissa Perri: ~piece.~
[00:42:04] Keith Lucas: ~Oh yeah. All right. ~In terms of the other question about intuition, I I think intuition is so valuable and it took me a long time to really understand how and why it we valuable and how to leverage it in a way that I felt comfortable. And what I mean by that is I'm I'm an analytical person, i'm a disciplined person. I feel like you should have a reason for things. And so I'm always gonna be strong on the analytical reason to do something. And when as I've gotten older and done more like there is the intuition and that has to play a role.
[00:42:41] So here's how I think about these things. Analysis is linear processing. This is my mental model. I don't know if this is like legit or not, but it's my mental model analysis is linear processing. I take a bunch of data and I can predict an outcome in some way, and therefore we should do strategy A over strategy B.
[00:43:03] I don't think intuition is devoid of data. I think it's non-linear processing and it is, how do I take all the things that I don't quite know how to quantify? It could be like, I had two conversations with people in the community and I was like, you know what? They're right. ~I knew this was the right ~I knew this was a problem and they just told me it was a problem.
[00:43:29] And it's a small sample, but it's two attitude. So I think there is non-linear processing. And so you, there's, I don't think one is more bias than the other because you can certainly make analytical presentations extremely biased. So I think you just wanna be careful about bias in all cases, in, in the planning process, what I do, and ~I what? ~What was actually a lot of fun for people, and people seemed to like it. Is you start with an analytical thing and you just say, Hey, and it doesn't matter what order you go, but you can do the analytics. But then what you do is you get people in the room and you're like, okay, here's the analytics.
[00:44:08] Forget everything about it. Even forget the strategy we had. Write down the top five things we need to do in the next month, or where you look like idiots. When are the next things we need to do in the next six months? Or we're gonna fail. Like things like that or what is the, what do we need to do in the next six months Can be like having a game changing positive outcome.
[00:44:30] And so what happens is it, that is an intuition based exercise. And then you have the analytical based exercise, which is everything that people talk about, and then you put them together and you say. It's curious. Maybe they align and then you're like, wow. But if they don't align, you just wanna know why.
[00:44:48] And so it, it is good to be explicit with an intuitive exercise 'cause I think it can provide a lot of value.
Intuition, mastery, and first steps for leaders
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[00:44:56] Melissa Perri: You write too about the, how the intuition comes from mastery and from exposure and experience there, and I think that was an important part too, because. Everybody has opinions, right? And I've heard some people be like, you, we should just do this or we should just do that. And sometimes it's out of their field, let's say, or
[00:45:14] Keith Lucas: Yeah.
[00:45:14] Melissa Perri: solution on.
[00:45:15] So when you're looking at those like intuitive comments, how are you layering on top of it as well, that concept of mastery, like what are you looking for in a leader to make sure, hey, this is valid versus this is just noise.
[00:45:27] Keith Lucas: Yeah. This a great question. I think that. There's a few disciplines that are really hard for a specific reason, and I think product management is one of them because you look at it and you're like I can do that. They just have ideas.
[00:45:47] Melissa Perri: Yeah.
[00:45:47] Keith Lucas: Like I have ideas. I, and I think it looks like a, a low mastery job, and I think for a lot of new product managers, it might be a low mastery job, but you have to try to seek mastery. And I think again, it comes down to getting all over the field that you are responsible for. And for example, if you think about Roblox. If you were not regularly in let's frame it positively to be a masterful product manager at Roblox, you had to use the area, you had to use the product period.
[00:46:26] You had to use the area of the product that you were managing. You had to engage directly with the audience. Like you just had to talk to people, the players, and the creators about what was important to them. You had to understand the field and mastery or intuition can really strike really when you have all of that data gathering that you can't put in a formula, when you have that background. Now, often people who are new to something have exactly the right intuition because they're bringing another field to bear. They're bringing expertise from somewhere else and letting you know, that's an analogy no one thought to make, and it's the right answer.
[00:47:13] And so there is that experience. But I do think that really getting all over the craft, the product, the audience, the market the data, can help you have better intuition. And in fact, Dave writes about that. He wrote the forward to my book and he talks about how intuition is really important and how having the values, having the vision, having all of that really an accelerator for intuition.
[00:47:45] Melissa Perri: Keith, when we're thinking about leaders out there who are listening to this saying, Hey, I wanna, I want this entrepreneurial team, we're like, I wanna build it. And they're looking at their team and they're just saying it's not it. What's your first step for them? What would you tell them to do to start to dive into where do they start?
[00:48:03] How do they approach this way of working? How do they get a handle on what they need to get?
[00:48:07] Keith Lucas: Yeah, no, this great question. I love this question. I'll answer it as what I would do.
[00:48:14] The first thing I would do is ask those three questions of many, if not everyone on the team, depending on how large it was. What are we doing, why are we doing it, and how do we know we're making progress?
[00:48:28] And I would start there because one is Hey, there could be a lucky accident that everyone knows and everyone's thinking the same thing, likely not the case. And so it immediately gives you a dashboard of why isn't the team have an impact? And moving quickly. And then it's also a good metric over and over again to ask.
[00:48:52] To see if you're making progress as you're doing that. The second thing is and I did make it Roblox as I was, as we were went from one small team to start splitting up teams, is I asked every team to write down the vision of their area and the mission of their area. Not the values we had those common at Roblox, but the vision and the mission and just a baseline.
[00:49:20] And that was really rallying to people because now everyone understood, oh, I know where we're going and I know where we're going next. But you don't need to do that right away. You can start with the three questions. So then you do the mission and the vision, and then I would start with or after those two, I would try to figure out and I think this is a really good tactic, ~try to figure out what is the,~ let's say you have five teams working on your team, trying to figure out what is the critical thing that each team must deliver and when. And you can ask this by asking people not on that team. In fact, that actually just as valuable and just trying to figure out, hey, forget all the other things we said, what is like something that has to get done in the next month.
[00:50:12] And then you use that to drive culture. And I would say along with mission and vision, backing up is obviously think about your values, but you can do that quickly and you can iterate, and then you pick a project, everyone has an objective, you start working on it. And with each turn of the crank, each iteration, you try to make your culture better and better iteratively. But you start with those three questions.
[00:50:40] Melissa Perri: Those are great questions for people out there, and I'm sure all of our leaders who are listening really appreciate it. Keith, thanks so much for being on the podcast. If people wanna read your book, where can they find it?
[00:50:50] Keith Lucas: Yeah, so you can find it at wherever you like to buy books. You can also go to my website, Keith v as in vincent lucas.com. I'm also on LinkedIn, Keith V. Lucas. And on my website you'll find all about my book and I list them different book stories come the book app. And I will add that all of my proceeds on the book are going to charities to help young entrepreneurs.
[00:51:16] Melissa Perri: Amazing. We will put all of those links at our show notes at productthinkingpodcast.com so you can find Keith's book. It's called Impact. We'll be back next week with another amazing guest. So go to dearmelissa.com and let me know if you have any questions for me to answer in the upcoming episodes, and we'll see you next week.