Embracing Growth: The Game-Changing Mindset
How you approach failure can make a big difference.
I have been playing tennis competitively for years. I was never great, but wasn’t bad either. When I started college in the US, I decided to try out for the tennis team. The coach had a unique method for tryouts: I'd play against his players, starting from the lowest ranked, and my ranking would be determined by where I fell. With nothing to lose, I took on the challenge and, to my surprise, won against every opponent, despite them being a very strong team. This mentality continued with me during the tournaments that year and I ended up competing in the national tournament for my college.
Since then, I've approached every match and practice with the mindset of "having nothing to lose." It's all about learning and growing. This perspective, often referred to as the growth mindset, has been a game-changer for me and led me to many more victorious tournaments and matches.
As defined by HBS online “Someone with a growth mindset views intelligence, abilities, and talents as learnable and capable of improvement through effort. On the other hand, someone with a fixed mindset views those same traits as inherently stable and unchangeable over time.”
On the contrary, a fixed mindset is “someone with a fixed mindset views those same traits as inherently stable and unchangeable over time.”
Growth mindset in product management
Product management can be highly demanding. The weight of prioritizing the right initiative rests heavily on your shoulders. It's natural to feel the fear of failure, but it's crucial not to let that dictate your decisions. I observe many PMs who are solely focused on advancing their titles or increasing their salaries. A significant portion of them exhibit traits of a fixed mindset, prioritizing output over outcomes. In essence, they neglect the opportunity to learn and view failure as unacceptable. At times this is a culture at their workplace. As highlighted by Ronny Kohavi on Lenny’s podcast, merely 8% of his experiments at Airbnb outperformed the control and positively impacted key metrics. In simpler terms, failure is an integral part of the process.
Over the years, I've observed some common behaviors among product managers who embody this mindset:
- They set clear goals and metrics for success.
- They follow up on releases, sharing usage and performance data.
- They provide clear next steps based on conclusions drawn from experiments.
- They are data driven
Growth mindset in your day to day
While I strongly believe in the importance of a growth mindset for product managers, its value extends to all fields as well as beyond the workplace. As a father of two young boys, I've witnessed firsthand how this mindset shapes their approach to challenges. It is amazing what kids achieve with a “can do” attitude. Working with my kids to understand that the process is what is critical has been very rewarding. Even in marriage or with your friends, it's about understanding, learning and growing.
To sum it up, I will leave you with these 3 points:
- Treat everything as an opportunity to learn and grow.
- Understand that failure is not the end, but a step in the journey and a chance to improve.
- Focus on outcomes, not just outputs.
As Steve Jobs once said “Stay hungry, stay foolish”.