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Ken Norton

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65
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2022-07-24
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2022-07-24
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podcast

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  1. “Maybe try to illustrate this with an example from my life right now. And I feel indulge me. I'm going to go a little bit afield here, but I promise it'll do it. So we are teaching our 16-year-old son how to drive. So he just got his driver's permit. Do you remember when you learned how to drive, Lenny? I do. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So it's scary. I don't know if you know how your parents might have felt, but nope on the other side of it. It's a whole new journey. And look, he's a smart kid. He's going to do great. But it helped me actually think back to when I learned how to drive and actually what I think is maybe a little bit more important here is before you learn to drive.”

    2022-07-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And I think my clients are also very interested and surrounded by great mentors and advisors and have all sorts of people in their life who can help them but are realizing that a lot of the work is going to be internal work that's going to get them to next level. And so this sort of transformation is going to be just as much what I need to do as who I am. And that's often when people come to me. Said that the way you coach is about the whole person. And I'm curious, I don't know if there's an answer to this, but when people come to get help and coaching, how much of their blocks, I guess, are rooted in their regular life versus skills, technical skills, and more like the PME product leadership side, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think, well.”

    2022-07-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “When do you find people come to you to get advice and coaching? What kind of clients do you find you end up working with? That's a great question. Generally speaking, I work with senior product leaders, however you want to define that. Typically, these are chief product officers, VPs of product at startups, largely director level and above at big, bigger tech companies. Some CEOs, other C-level execs in there, I think really anyone that sort of considers themselves in a product leadership role often they come to me because they're a career milestone or a crossroads. And it could be that they've now find themselves in the position of being a CPO for the first time. Maybe there's a new industry change or they've gone from a big company to a startup and sort of have this sense of what got me here isn't going to get me there. And that's oftentimes when they reach out for coaching.”

    2022-07-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Wanting to figure out where I could do what I like the most, and then also recognizing that where growth comes from is less around advice and sort of telling people what to do and more about helping them figure out their own path, their own way. And then that ultimately sort of brought me into, hey, I want to do this full time. And that's what I've been doing ever since.”

    2022-07-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “The shortcomings of giving advice because it seemed like, well, I could meet with these folks, I could tell them what I did. I could tell them what Google did, and that'll sort of answer all their questions. And you start to realize advice is not as powerful as you might think it is. It's a little bit like cotton candy doesn't have a lot of nutrition. You get a nice sugar high, you feel great, both sides feel happy, but then a couple weeks later, a couple months later, nothing's really changed. And that's because it doesn't often confront the real problem. It often isn't relevant like what worked for us at Google may not have worked anywhere else. It may not even have worked at Google for all I know. I feel like there were years at Google where all we were doing was making things worse by showing up and we should just all have gone, sat on a beach somewhere and life, the company would have grown even faster. So who knows? And so it was sort of these kind of twin pillars of.”

    2022-07-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Change for that individual, wherever it is they want to go. And the question around what brought me into it was actually kind of interesting. And as I honestly working with my own executive coach started to figure out what it is that mattered to me and what I liked, what my values were, what my purpose was, started to unpack that I love deeply connecting with people and I love helping people change and grow. the moments when I had the opportunity to do that As a manager, as a product leader were the most fulfilling parts of my career. And so I started to unpack that and figure out what would it look like if that was what I did. And the other part of the journey was for several years at Google I worked at GV, Google Ventures, Google's Venture Capital Arm, and I had the opportunity to work with founders and product leaders in the portfolio. And I started to simultaneously recognize”

    2022-07-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “What we might talk on, what we might work on together. It's not limited to products, not even limited to work or even leadership. It's wherever they want to go, whatever change transformation means to them. As coaches, we bring a bunch of tools to the conversation. The most important ones, honestly, are probably listening and curiosity, intuition, open-mindedness, really there to sort of help challenge them to see things in different ways, help them tap into their imagination, figure out when there might be underlying beliefs, help them connect dots that need to be connected, help them disconnect things that feel connected. There's a lot of exploration to it. It's very jazz-like. My love of jazz has been shared before, but there is a sort of improvisation to it. And what coaching is really powerful is you may not necessarily know where you're going when you start and you sort of follow wherever there is meaning and”

    2022-07-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Does mean a lot of different things on who you talk to. It is a little bit of kind of who you are, your style, your approach. Some people are calling themselves coaches doing more mentoring, more advice. Other people are maybe more like meet, more peer coaching. To me, I see executive coaching as a partnership or like creative partnership. And it's all about helping my client reach their goals, their potential, whatever that means to them, right? So important thing about coaching is the definition of success does belong to the client. I don't have an agenda. I don't have a set of things I'm trying to share, teach, learn. It really is fundamentally up to them, which means every client is completely different. They have different sense of where they want to go, different barriers that might be standing in their way. My coaching practice, I coach the whole person, so there is no restriction on.”

    2022-07-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Writing. And then more recently, you've become a full time executive coach focusing on product people. I have so many questions I'd love to ask about your career and learnings along the way and the writing, but I'd actually love to spend most of our time talking about the coaching and things that you've learned through that experience. And so I have a couple questions just off the bat. What does an executive coach actually do? Like what kinds of things are you helping people with? What does a session look like? And then two, just how did you decide you wanted to be a coach full-time after leaving Google? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think coaching.”

    2022-07-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Patience for happy hours over Zoom and stuff like that. Maybe that patience has worn out. The idea that I love the most was actual donuts. It was a PM who got DoorDash codes and found the best local donut place for each of the people on the team and basically sent them a code and said, click here and order the donuts to come to your house whenever you want them. So maybe at least partially the digital equivalent of donuts might be actual donuts. Decentralized donuts. Decentralized donuts on the blockchain. Oh boy. Let's not go there. I don't know what that is. So I was perusing your career path ahead of this chat. He had this pretty wild career. You were an engineer initially and then you were CTO at a part of NBC. Then you were a founder. And then you spent 14 years at Google working on products that folks may have heard of like Google Docs and Google Calendar and Google Maps. And you've also done a bunch.”

    2022-07-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I'll never get tired of it back when we met with people in person, people would bring me donuts and never got tired of it, nor did any of the people that I worked with who got to eat those donuts get tired of it. So no, no, I'll never get tired of donuts. Someone on Twitter asked, what's like a digital equivalent of bringing the donuts now that we're kind of in a remote world? Do you have any advice on that? It's a great question. I'm not even sure if the physical equivalent of donuts is donuts. I mean, when I came up with it, I think it was really to be a metaphor around being sort of a servant leader, bringing whatever needs to be done, filling the white space, filling the gaps, whatever sort of needed to happen. So it doesn't always have to be donuts. I did put that question out to some of the readers in my newsletter a while ago, maybe early in the pandemic and got a lot of really interesting ideas. And maybe that was at a place where people had a little bit more.”

    2022-07-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Have you heard of Lenny's jawboard? Well, if you're hiring or open to a new gig, if I got the site for you, Lenny's jobs.com. If you're a hiring manager, sign up and get access to hundreds of hand-curated people who are open to new opportunities. Thousands of people apply, and I personally review and accept just 10% of them to be part of this collective. You won't find a better place to hire product managers and growth people. And if you're someone who's looking around for something new, join the collective. It's free and you can be anonymous and hide yourself from any company. You can also leave anytime. And you'll only hear from companies that you want to hear from. Check out Lenny's jobs.com to learn more.”

    2022-07-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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    2022-07-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Over his 14 year career at Google, Ken Norton led product teams that build Google docs, Google Calendar, Google Maps, and even did a stint at Google Ventures. The products that he's helped craft are now used by over 3 billion people. Today Ken is a full-time executive coach specializing at working with product leaders. And in our conversation, we cover the creative versus reactive mindset, why the art of product management is much more important than the science of product management, how to get over imposter syndrome, the most common PM blind spots, how to find a coach, and how to know if a coach is right for you, and so much more. I hope that you enjoy this episode with Ken Norton.”

    2022-07-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Part of what I think is pretty exciting about product management is you are a leader from day one in product management, right? And there's leadership all over the place, but that's hard to your job. You're a leader. You don't have any formal authority, but you're a leader. You're expected to lead.”

    2022-07-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to unlock your product leadership skills | Ken Norton, Ex-Google · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source