YouSaid · the spoken record

Paige Costello

lines on the record: 70
first: 2023-07-09
most recent: 2023-07-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter, page Costello, and on Twitter at pagenow. Listeners, well, I'd love to hear how you think AI is going to shape the future of software for knowledge workers. But in particular, if you and your team use Asana, I'd love to know where you'd like to see AI playing a bigger role to drive efficiency alignment for your team. So as you know, we offer a ton of goal management, work management pieces that help teams and orgs do their work together. And I'd love to hear from you about where you see the opportunity.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Use Asana to run all my meetings and assign prereads. So I use the multi-assign feature in subtasks all the time where I make a task with a due date that says read the same by this date and then I assign it to a team or a set of individuals like that really quickly. And then when I'm in the meeting, I take notes live in a task and then highlight parts of those notes and convert them into subtasks so that none of the action items gets lost.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The three reviews are three people who are assigned a task to look at something. Only one person is blocking whether it moves to the next stage.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so no more than three reviews on a given piece of work where people are blocking one approver. If a meeting has more than 10 people on it, we ask the person hosting the meeting to kick out the other people and write better decision notes.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Such that the knowledge is known, and we could have connected dots more effectively than we do or did. So that's kind of the logic there. And it's really changed the pace and quality of our work.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the biggest ones is just be once again, being real about how many reviews and approvals it takes for something to get done and who's actually responsible for reviewing and approving work. So we got really aggressive about functionally who was in charge and at what level for a given review and pushed to say like to actually have limits on the number of people per meeting on the number of subtask reviews for a given body of work. And what this did is it created a lot more agency and pace within a given working teams. And so what we did was we said we actually don't care. We don't want a daisy chain of approvals. We just want one person with whom the buck can stop with them and they can be responsible for how the work moves forward.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say though, but the advice bits and bobs I gave you earlier are absolutely things that I've been thinking about feeding. But I think the page bot would probably say it.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been playing a lot with po.com lately. Just an opportunity to learn more about LLM capabilities in a firsthand way. It's been fun to create little bots. I'm playing with making a page bot. I can't say that the page bot could have had this conversation yet, but maybe next year at this time you can have a conversation with the other me.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The good news is I can tell you this and still keep asking it because the answer has always come up differently. So I like to ask, tell me about a time something went wrong. What was it? What did you do about it? Yada yada. And effectively, the question gets set the product failed, when something about the team didn't work, just things that go wrong because that's what happens when you're doing this work and evaluating people's mindset and the way they talk about it and the way they relate to evaluating the situation. I think it's a great question. Really tells you a lot about how people think and how they perceive themselves when things are not working well.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ooh, I'm very much enjoying the diplomat right now. And then TV show or movie, let's see. I just watched The Fire of Love documentary, which is about a couple who study volcanoes. And that was a great change of pace.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My go to book recommendation for other PMs is inspired by Marty Kagan. I think it's a classic. The other books that I have enjoyed and recommended lately are The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood and The Alchemist by Paulo Cuello.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem is interesting to you, and if the problem is fun or interesting to you, it doesn't mean it has to be sexy. It doesn't mean the company needs to have a brand name. It just has to be something that you're curious about so that you do a better job at your job. So I would say learning curve environment and problem are things that I use to assess like, am I still on the right path or should I consider an alternative? But when I think about my own career, I really think about skills and experiences as opposed to roles. So I would say that that's more my frame of reference because otherwise I think I'm living in the future and not enough trying to make the most of the career I'm living right now.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blah blah blah blah. That stuff matters, and I think people don't talk about it or take it seriously enough that your environment should include people who are advocating for you and it should just be a place where you feel you've got the right ingredients to set you up to do the good work. And then the third piece is really around just the problem, the problem your product is solving. Is it fun? Is it interesting? I often like to think about passions are made not found because I think people kind of, we do this with nine-year-olds who say, what do you want to be when you grow up? They look cross-eyed and they say an astronaut, just getting a vet. I don't know. And there's this moment of like panic. And I would say that being comfortable saying like, go try different things and see if”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I try to be really intentional about. Staying as much as leaving a role. And when I think about my career as a whole, So, something that I think about is like effectively, I evaluate whether I'm in a healthy role and in a good setup by asking myself about my learning curve? Is the steepness of my learning curve doing me a favor here? Because sometimes you might love the organization, love the problem, and feel like you're just not learning or learning fast enough or being challenged. And that's something that I think is really important. So thinking about the learning curve, thinking about whether the environment is positively impacting your ability to grow your career and make an impact. And so environmentally, you might have not enough staffing or tooling or have someone in the management team who is toxic or have a peer who is”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I try to be more real with myself and others. I try to show up and say, hey, this is incomplete. Like, for example, even the thing I did this morning, the clarity brief, I said, this is 70% finish, the 30% that I don't believe is there yet are these three things. I don't feel confident in this piece of it. And hopefully we'll have more clarity by next week. So that's an example of just being as real with the small things as with the big things so that people can balance their perspective of you and your work and the organization and the environment you're creating.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was that I had an experience where I didn't realize that people didn't think I was being authentic because they thought something was bad and I wasn't talking about it. But it wasn't because I didn't think it was bad or didn't see it. It was just because my nature was to say, well, I'm not going to talk about bad things because we're doing the things we need to do. Like as long as the plan is good, I wasn't really highlighting all the problems I saw or like really pushing on those head on with my team. And so they felt like they didn't know what I was seeing or if we were seeing the same things. That was really an interesting experience. Yeah, there were just so many. Yeah.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go to my meetings with a stack of post-its and I would write what I wish I was saying on post-its and see if someone else would say it first. And then if by the end of the meeting I had decided that I still had a post it or two that was worthwhile, I would say them. But you've got to police yourself because no one else will do it because no matter how accessible you think you are, other people know that you're the boss. They're not going to necessarily speak over you or challenge you directly. Another challenge I had is I'm a very optimistic person and I like to look on the bright side. I'm very positive and I think depending on the culture you're working with or depending on your team, sometimes they need to hear what's really bad and they need you to be really real and they need you to tell them like it is. And something I realized.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that all of the advice I've given so far is directly related to things I've learned the hard way. So like especially as an IC moving into a management role, you aren't supposed to have all the answers. You need to ask better questions. You need to be thoughtful about direction and agency. And so I would say one of the missteps here is knowing how to give guidance or direction in a way that doesn't feel like micromanagement because what you're trying to do is to teach a repeatable pattern instead of giving a precise instruction that can be used once and then disposed of. So I think that's a pretty common manager path issue, but I think the faster you learn it and observe it and use techniques to manage it, the better. So, for example, I would”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That something that you must do, that I should do, or that I should consider? You can actually develop a conversation that will move your relationship forward. And so I would say that's something that I think holds PMs back. PMs tend to be so ambitious and career-centric. And there are so many good things about that. But I would say like don't let the sound of your wheels drive you crazy. If you're present in your job and you actually have fun with it and solve the problems, people will come out of the woodwork, say you're great, and tell your boss you should be promoted. You don't need to ask for a promotion. Your outcomes should speak for themselves. And yes, you should have sponsors and people who advocate for you, but a lot of that just comes from that raw connection to the work and to your team.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say, this is it, this is right, and I know what's right, and let's do this as quickly as possible, and everyone else says, wait, what? Like, I don't know. I have a question, they don't, and they still have a question, which is even worse. So I would say something that really holds PM's back is not being collaborative from a place of true curiosity, performative collaboration where they nod in a room or want to do a review, but ultimately they don't really want the questions or the feedback. And I think trying to make sure that you can be in a place of curiosity and openness, because that will make your experience more successful is really important. Other people aren't always going to be right, but if you're present for it, you can ask clarifying questions. You can ask the question behind the question. You can hear the feedback and then say,”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say this illusion that you have to be all knowing and super confident sets you up to be in a place of advocacy instead of inquiry. And so PMs who are newer in their careers or who are like in a different space than they're accustomed to working really want to be pro really fast. And what pro means is trying to cut that straight path. And that can reduce information and conversation that makes you smarter. And so some of the challenges that some BMs face are feeling like they need to be the expert. They need to be the smartest person in the room or God forbid they think they're the smartest person in the room. And then what happens is they're really doing that customer or product discovery or a spec in a little dark room. And then they show up and they...”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the other person. It's about sharing the impact of different decisions that they're making. So especially if you have to give feedback about, God forbid what someone wears to the office or, you know, how detailed their work is or how they're communicating or their body language, having enough support where you can be really clear about what you're intending in the spirit behind that, but that it's formal.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their program for helping you think about okay, I'm going to convey this feedback as situation, behavior, impact. Like the situation is like on Tuesday in that meeting at three o'clock, behavior, you interrupted me while I was saying this thing. Impact made me feel like you weren't listening to me or made me feel like your voice was more important than mine or impact, blah, blah, blah. It doesn't matter what the impact is because the way you've set it up is it's a subjective observation. It's not what the camera recorded. It's what you experienced and therefore it is true and valuable feedback. And it gets the conversation started such that you can then talk about next steps. And that format and framing really helped me understand that delivering feedback isn't about being right or about getting the right information.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Specific about how they define durable advantage and think about overall the product process from a place of customer insight through to like the market landscape. So the PM program there was absolutely super thoughtful, especially for taking someone who has never PM'd into being a super skilled PM. They also have a wonderful manager training program and I think the biggest thing that I took away from their manager training was really on the feedback side. So delivering feedback is something that I think everyone benefits from but for managers it's so much more critical because if you don't do it and you don't say what you mean and you don't do it in a way that it can be internalized and acted upon, you really don't set up your teammates for growth or success in their careers. And so”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intuit had excellent training programs. The APM program and their manager training. So on the PM front, the biggest thing that they taught was around customer centricity. And it really started with the founding of the company. For anyone who works it into it or has worked it into it, they know that there's the story about Scott Cook watching his wife balancing her checkbook at the kitchen table and staring at it saying there's got to be a better way software. So it was very typical for the product training into it to be all about like how do you spend how do you actually watch customers using your product or just doing the things they do, collecting the artifacts, knowing the workarounds, and using that experience to build opportunities for surprise and insight that then you can capitalize and create products around. They also are very”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so skipping a lot of that to just really try it on for size has been key. And then what we're doing is giving the teams with the most expertise in the customer problems, for example, status and progress reporting, the keys to that car and saying like, here's the starter, here's the hypothesis, here's how far we got with it. It's dog fooding. What do you want to do? And so we're able to like nudge people without wasting time and build the skills locally within the teams that then move those experiences forward.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've had an ML team for quite some time making sure that we have test prioritization models and notification prioritization models and are making our product less work for people to use. But when it came to the massive leap forward in LLMs recently, we staffed a team to really prototype quickly and discover what was possible and just apply hypotheses outside of the typical norms of how we work. So they kind of went straight to prototyping instead of going through that double diamond I was explaining earlier. What that meant was that we were really quickly able to say wow there's just so much better than we imagined and would never have prioritized it because we thought it would take so much longer. And then in other cases that sounded good in theory.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm pumped. It's a really interesting time to be a product leader. Especially with all of the tactly the technological transformation on LLMs is astonishing. The pace of development, the ability of our teams to just ship quickly and ship really intelligent things. We're not in an operational figure it outland. We're not in a place where we're trying to decide how to do a better job and get it out to customers. We really have lots of interesting paths forward and are trying to make sure that we're on the cutting edge while really looking at like what does it mean to serve the companies and organizations that we want to serve with new ways of serving them. And so it was a really fun conversation and I also had to be honest with people and say this is a 70% cut. 30% of this is missing or incorrect and that's why I'm coming to you.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is just too much. I should try to move or cancel one of these. And then I asked myself, how might the opposite be true? And I was like, I can do both. Like, it was just enough to pop the balloon because sometimes your brain is so accustomed to having a scarcity. Oh, yeah, I can do both. It'll be fine. Well, have a great conversation. I, you know, ready to show up and be curious and really engage with you on the topics that you've found interesting. And we'll just do that. And so how might the opposite be true has been a really helpful piece of advice or line of questioning that I use with myself to make sure that I'm not taking myself away?”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And challenging effectively, there's this notion of how might the opposite be true. And that's a piece of advice that I give myself like this morning. I think it was yesterday, actually. I was like, how am I going to do tomorrow? Like, tomorrow I have to deliver the clarity pillar brief to the area leads and make sure they understand our stack ranked metrics and they need to know exactly what our strategic priorities are and why and they need nudges and they need to be able to translate our voice of business and usability lists into those plans and I need to establish a perspective and make sure this is all written down and they really understand it and I have a great conversation with them where I get open questions and they feel like they can really challenge my thinking. I also am having a podcast with Lenny in the afternoon right and at first it was like”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is this concept. I'm like, where are you? Are you above the line? Are you below the line? If you're above the line, you're committed to learning. You're open and curious. Things are funny here, more playful. If you're below the line, you're committed to winning. You're committed to being right. Things are more black and white. And all of us have days where we're having a conversation and we're really like in that below line base where it's like, no, it just is this way. There's no two ways around it. And that concept of understanding your personal headspace and then being mindful of how you're operating when you're in that place really was great advice for me and also recognizing where other people were when it related to decisions we were making or context. It also helped me think about rejecting false trade-offs.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And miss the bigger picture. And so think big, ship small is another piece of product advice I give. And the last piece of advice that I would say that I like is more of a way of thinking. So this is a little abstract. But when employees join a sauna, they get a book called The Fifteen Commitments of a Conscious Leader. It's led by the conscious leadership group. They also get two-day training on some language and tools for how to effectively work with other people. And it's a really, like for me at least, it was transformational because I learned some vocabulary and methods that I could share with my peers. And one of the things that you learn is to be above or below the line and something.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a few ways to think about advice, and my advice often meets a mark when it's for a particular person at a particular time in their career. And so I would say advice I love giving to people who are early in their career is don't self-select because I think it's really easy to say, I don't have the experience or I'm not XYZ enough and not apply. And so I really push people not to self-select and I try to remind myself where that's appropriate to do the same thing. Other advice I often give is just think big, ship small. Think big, ship small. Like what's the smallest thing you can do to do that thing? But let's not, because we're trying to ship all the time and in small chunks start thinking in small ways because it's really easy to get a little too incremental, a little too wrapped around the axle around optimizing a metric.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe didn't see or consider. And so I think the mix of experience, exposure, and education really helps you make sure that you're consciously moving forward on each of those fronts or finding people who can help you there.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone else had left, and the leader of the business unit as she was leaving the room said, always ask or always answer the question that they should have asked. And always answer the question they should have asked. And I was pretty surprised by that advice because it was very profound in the moment because I think when you're a student and you are accustomed, if you're an achiever, you like to get A's, you're probably going to hear a question and answer it. You're like, one-to-one, one-to-one, one-to-one. But what I learned from that was that there's actually another altitude, another point of strategy when you're in a meeting or in a conversation to make sure that you're covering the more important point, the bigger picture, the alternative that the person asking the question.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The experience is you doing the thing and getting that experience firsthand. Other times you need an education, you need a mentor, you need a coach who will tell you what they're saying or give you advice. I was in a really high stakes product review at Intuit. And at the end of it,”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'll give two examples. One is the way I run my meetings are the kind of meetings I want to be a part of. So I try to make sure that I start with a clear agenda and I move quickly but give time for conversation and it's not fully just sharing information, but debating where appropriate. I think knowing how to manage the conversation and courteously pausing people who are going on too long or like taking the group in a different direction than was intended and just think about the experience of everyone there and create the experience that you hope that they're creating in the rooms that you're not a part of. An example that I have in terms of experience is like sometimes”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, what is the impact? And this goes back to being really present and analytical and being a learner, because if you can be a learner not just in an education or experience context, but in an exposure context, you can really grow so much more quickly and in so many more directions than you will get from just, you know, what does your day entail from a what work is directly required of you.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the main thing is repetition. We're all students of repetition. If you see something done a few times, you're more likely to remember it and internalize it. And so it's also something that a way that I learn. And so I think that's probably part of it. I remember hearing about a framework called the threes, experience, exposure, and education. And I think Was helpful for me to hear that as a way of growing your career or being more purposeful about your growth because I think when people are earlier in their careers, they tend to think education education education. And then they start to think experience, experience, like, how do I get the experience of being a manager? I need to like read about it and then be a manager is very linear. And exposure.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If someone has a question, pause at the beginning and welcome people and chit chat while people land and then close asking questions like, did I get all of that? Is there anything you would have expected to cover that we missed? It's really about being open and that conveys confidence more than being assertive and advocating 100% of the time.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great question. I think being brave and courageous in little moments is just... Just kind of where you have to do. You have to show up and say it before you're ready to say it and ask for forgiveness and be vulnerable. And I think when you're vulnerable, people actually trust you more than if you come with all of this armor and say, I know this and this is how we're going to do it. And so real confidence is often conveyed by being willing to ask the question or to say, I don't know what you mean by that. Can you say that again? It's also just how you communicate looking people in the eye, your body position, your body language, so much of this, I think people forget about because it's really easy to be in a meeting and looking at your computer and going through Slack messages. And so one of the best things you can do is if you're in a meeting, be in that meeting. Continually scan the faces of everyone in the room, see.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Customer and it also becomes very navel gazy. So I think the more you get out and break up how people are having conversations about what we should do and why and what we shouldn't do and why. And it's not about your opinion. It's about asking questions and then bringing insight can really change the nature of the conversation and build trust.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you take a new role, become best friends with a researcher and spend time with watching customers use the product firsthand because they maybe report on or are trying to do a study about might be very different from what you observe. But you really just need that front row seat with customers. And so asking for how do I actually set up time with customers? How do I compensate them? How do I read the tickets? Whatever it's amazing how little you have to do to quickly catch up to understanding who the organization is solving for well and poorly and how people really use your product versus how your teams use your product, especially in organizations where there are heavy dog fooding cultures. It's really risky to become less sensitive to the needs and behaviors of customers because people think they are their”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think when you're met by someone who doesn't know you, doesn't know your work, your job is to create credibility. And that's where I said like bringing the insight is where you can really tip the scales here. Reliability, this is all about your say-do ratio, authenticity is just, you know, being vulnerable, being yourself, and then making sure that people know that you're not in it for some other outcome or cause that perception of self-interest really can change whether people like how much they trust you.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Yeah. Our former board member, Anne Rimondi, and now our head of business wrote an article on first round that was really great about kind of the trust equation. And it really resonated with me. And I don't know if you've heard about it. She said that trust is equal to credibility plus reliability plus authenticity divided by or over perception of self-interest.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“True. I think that's a really tricky and unique thing is not to pretend like you have more experience than you do, but to be willing to ask great questions and then be curious enough that you're bringing insight to every meeting that people may or may not have, but you're always willing to share.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The thing I would say is bring the insight. Know thy customer, know thy market, know thy competitors, know thy numbers, know thy product. If you can be the person in the room who has watched customers use the product and has a point of view about why one tool is significantly better or worse in a given dimension, and you can do that with confidence and clarity and you don't need to know the other person's functional domain and you don't need expertise in what they're experts at, you can bring insight that makes people curious and trust you and just immediately believe that there's an opportunity that you're not advocating for, that just is”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I'm a morning person, and so I try to make sure that I don't have any meetings before 10, sometimes before 11. And that's when I do my hardest task for the day.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Was it Airbnb? I would encourage you to know you're chronotype and to walk that time where you have the most headspace to do that work. So for me, it's warnings.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like it's almost reverting back to that. And people are better at it than they used to be. I would say our remote days are more impactful, and then the days we're together, we're getting into the swing of things.”
2023-07-09 · Lenny's Podcast · How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source