Ken Norton

Part of what I think is pretty exciting about product management is you are a leader from day one in product management. You don't have any formal authority, but you're a leader. You're expected to lead.

The hardest part about being a leader is when you don't get to just rely on the formal authority. So you're getting to practice all the hard parts about leadership from day one, because you're nobody's boss.

For me, the key to that was letting go of needing to be liked and redefining it as an admiration that takes place over time. So rather than I want to leave this room with everyone liking me, I started to realize I want to be the type of leader where, a decade later, people say, 'I would work with that guy again in a heartbeat.'

If you really want to have huge breakthrough innovation, you need to be able to try, you need to be able to fail. You need to be able to shoot for the moon is where this 10X comes from.

If you go off to a training to learn a technique for doing, I don't know, some sort of technical dashboard analysis, why don't you go to training to learn how to have difficult conversations?

They passed all the technical questions. They do all this, they do all that. But then you neglect to find out can this person show up and work with these engineers, these designers? Can they inspire them? Is this somebody that they want to follow?