I've been thinking about purpose a lot lately. Coming from a conversation I had with Michelle from We Cultivate a while back, on why we do what we do.

And I want to share my perspective that might be uncomfortable or unpopular.

What if our purpose isn't to find our calling, build our legacy, or change the world in some measurable way? What if they’re just potential outcomes of living our purpose instead?

Because what if our purpose is simple: to truly live and experience this life.

To feel good and safe in our bodies. To build and strengthen relationships. To do things for the sake of doing them. To get to know ourselves and what matters to us as we live our day-to-day and continuously evolve as human beings.

So that we can (just to name a few):

• Learn from our mistakes as much as we learn about topics we’re curious about.

• To find joy in ordinary Tuesday afternoons.

• To grieve the things that we’ve lost.

• To be able to sit with ourselves in quiet without feeling the need to distract ourselves with noise and doomscrolling.

• And to fight for the things we believe in (but also be flexible to change them).

I write this from a place of privilege, of course. My context might be different from yours. I have the luxury of questioning purpose because my basic needs are met, because I'm not fighting for survival, and because I can afford to sit with philosophical questions instead of scrambling for the next paycheck.

But just what if?

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I’m writing about this now because a huge chunk of the people coming to me for coaching are either burned out or burning out. Then you have the other chunk of people who are constantly questioning their worth because of what’s been happening in their careers while also asking themselves if “Is this it? is this all I’m supposed to do?

The Cost of Making our Careers the Purpose

One thing that’s common between all of my clients (and myself) is that we spend so much time chasing the next goal, the next milestone, that we forget to enjoy the experience of the chase itself, much less everything else. And in the process, we forget what we’ve gained along the way.

Last August, I spent my holiday scrambling to fill my pipeline with leads instead of actually taking a vacation. I got frustrated by how slow things were, completely forgetting that it was August and people were on vacation... including me. It was my first August as a full-time entrepreneur, and all I could focus on was how empty my calendar was. I spent a good chunk of my holidays doubling down on work, trying to fill up my empty calendar until somebody had to remind me that I was on holiday too.

I have a client who's had a stellar career these last few years. When we first started working together, we worked on getting her relocated to a country she’s always wanted to move to for a job. That was a year ago. But now she called me again because she's feeling unhappy where she is, despite the high-visibility and highly strategic projects she’s got her hands in — not because the work is terrible, but because she's already focusing on the next milestone that feels so far away. The stress is real, for sure. And so is the strain this is putting on her relationships.

And one of my clients who just finished coaching with me recently had a similar-ish story when we first started working together. At first it was for looking for a new job, then when she found her new job, it was about positioning herself well at work, then it was about finding a side hustle, then there was the marathon, the house to buy. It never seemed to end. And yet no matter what milestone she hit, there was still the feeling of not doing enough, even though she was exhausted all the time. But slowing down felt like giving up.

Is it wrong to keep wanting more? Bigger scope? Shinier titles?

Absolutely not. I don’t think being hungry with ambition is wrong (it is my job to help people achieve their career goals after all!). However, why are so many of us not allowing ourselves to digest? When do we get to enjoy and smack our lips in satisfaction from the fantastic meal we just had before we start wondering what to have for the next one?

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What We Miss When We're Always Moving

When we're constantly chasing the next milestone, we miss the actual experience of being in this moment… in this life we're living right now, including the joy and satisfaction from what we’ve achieved.

When my client got that incredible job relocation, she spent her first year in a new country focused on what comes next instead of letting herself feel the ground beneath her feet in the place she’s wanted to move to for years. She missed so many opportunities to lay down roots and build a life outside of the office walls.

When we're always running toward something, we miss:

• The relief of feeling the weight of our body settling into a chair after a long day.

• Enjoying taste of our coffee in the morning, before we even check our phones for Slack messages and emails.

• Feeling satisfaction of finishing something - not for what it leads to, but for the simple completion itself.

• Finding humor in the conversations that go nowhere productive, but leave us feeling connected to another human.

• Getting lost in the books we read not because they'll make us better at our jobs, but because they make us imagine something different.

So many of us have been living entirely in our heads, strategizing and planning, working long hours well into the night and even the weekend, at the cost of so many other things, until we find ourselves in front of a doctor getting treated for symptoms that feel like they came out of nowhere.

This isn't about finding meaning in mundane moments. This is about remembering that we’re human beings having a human experience. We’re not productivity machines that happen to need food and sleep.

The purpose isn't to make every moment meaningful. It's to be present for the moments that are already meaningful.

The Discomfort That Comes With Being Present

Here's what I've learned from watching my clients (and myself) try to step off the achievement treadmill: it feels weird at first. And there’s grief.

I had a client who, by the end of our collaboration, decided to prioritize her health, her relationships, and actually enjoying the rewards of the hard work she'd done so far instead of immediately chasing the next milestone. Hurrah, right?

But when she first brought this up, it felt like giving up to her. "What if people think I'm not ambitious anymore?" she asked. "What if I lose momentum?"

The idea of stepping back from constant career optimization, even though she was exhausted and her relationships were strained, felt like failure on its own. We've trained ourselves to find meaning in the pursuit, so when the pursuit pauses, we panic.

We feel anxious about whether or not we're doing enough, being enough, moving fast enough. The fear that if we're not constantly improving, we're falling behind.

This is why so many of us reach for our phones the moment we sit down. Why we fill silence with podcasts and background noise. Why we book ourselves into back-to-back commitments. The discomfort of being present with ourselves, without an agenda, without a goal to chase, can feel unbearable when we're not used to it.

But here's what happens to people (not just my clients) when they give themselves permission to prioritize something else aside from titles and achievements. When they finally allowed themselves to slow down and just be.

They started to reconnect with who they are underneath all the achieving and chasing. And from that more grounded place, they made better decisions about what was actually worth their energy. And from those decisions, along came flow.

When Being Present Becomes the Purpose

What if being present becomes the purpose vs forgetting to be present in order to chase meaning or find purpose?

I had a client who stopped chasing her “dream job” and chose financial safety first because that’s what she needed at the moment. So she can have the calm space to look for something more exciting. Three months later, the exact opportunity she’d been hunting for opened up, and she was in a stable enough position to pursue it without desperation. When you stop needing something so urgently, it often finds you.

Another client finally realized that choosing where to put her energy - her hobbies, her interests, her health - wasn’t giving up. The space she gave herself helped her detach from work outcomes. So she showed up more relaxed, braver, with stronger boundaries. The result? Better feedback and getting tapped for strategic opportunities. But by then, she wasn’t defining herself by these wins anymore.

This is what happens when people stop putting their worth on the outcome of the chase. They give themselves permission to feel safe, to do things they’ve wanted to do, to make choices based on what feels right for them and their context, rather than what looks impressive. The flow isn’t something they’re trying to achieve - it’s what emerges when they stop trying so hard to achieve everything else and just be present with themselves, their deepest wants, their realest needs.

Final Thoughts and Feelings

Maybe our purpose isn’t to chase being extraordinary nor to save the world.

Maybe it’s to notice the world. To experience it fully. And to find the extraordinary in the ordinary by being present for our own lives while we’re living it - not as preparation for something bigger, but as the thing itself. To find ease in being fully ourselves instead of constantly providing our worth.

Maybe it’s to let ourselves be human in a world that’s constantly asking us to be more. To find satisfaction and joy in every single moment. And to make decisions from a place of groundedness rather than anxiety. So we can see with more clarity the bajillion opportunities that are, often, already right in front of us.

This is what I think when “truly living becomes the purpose”, actually means. Not the outcomes we produce, but how present we are for the life we’re already living. It isn’t about what we build or achieve or change in the world. It’s about how fully we show up for the world, and for ourselves, exactly as we are, right now (and maybe just, maybe, we change the world in the process)

💙

Kax

p.s.

Honestly, I’ve had a lot of back and forth with myself if I should send out this newsletter because these are still thoughts and feelings I’m stewing in and processing. But there’s a strong pull to “think out loud” hence a shit ton of rambling for now.I’d love to read your thoughts, comments, or even violent reactions about this though!

Leave a comment

📌 Coaching Bulletin Board:

📣 I have 1:1 coaching slots open for:

• Senior functional experts in tech who want to stop waiting for recognition and start creating their own opportunities before year-end conversations begin.

• New Product, Dev, or UX leaders navigating the challenges and complexity (or even drama) of personal development conversations and promotion processes.

• Senior folks in tech who are feeling stuck in their careers but not sure what they want for “what’s next,” much less where to start.

Book a discovery call with me and let’s have a chat about how partnering on a coaching collaboration can be a fit for your goals.

If you're already feeling a knot in your stomach thinking about these conversations, then this post is for you.

After coaching dozens of PMs through promotion cycles, and having been through them myself, I've learned that promotion processes are a game and it’s a game you can’t win unless you start playing offense.

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The Defense Player's Reality

I know this cycle intimately because I lived it.

Once upon a time, when I was a young and innocent Product Manager, I worked my ass off, delivered measurable impact, only to find out my peers were leveled higher than I was. But I still waited until “proper” development conversations to bring up promotion, only to hear reasons why I wasn't ready yet that felt completely invalid. It didn't help that my managers kept changing so every conversation started from scratch.

Then I lost out on a leadership position simply because I wasn't communicating that I wanted it, while someone else was crystal clear about their goals.

This is what playing defense looks like: waiting for things to happen TO you, assuming your work will speak for itself, and hoping someone else will advocate for your advancement.

And this defense mindset is even more pronounced for women and women of color who have been taught since forever to keep our heads down, do our jobs well, and don't make trouble. And asking for promotions can feel EXACTLY like making trouble.

Doing the job well doesn't necessarily equate to being ready for the next level. It just means you know how to work at your current level well.

And when managers say "not ready yet," what they usually mean is “we haven't been having ongoing conversations about your development all year, I don't have a clear picture of your impact beyond task completion, you haven't shown me what you'd do differently at the next level, and I don't feel confident betting on your future potential because I only see your present execution”.

Playing defense is exhausting.

There's this persistent feeling of invisibility, like you're working twice as hard but somehow, you're missing out in the important conversations and decisions.

You end up burned out, not from the work itself, but from the constant low-level anxiety of wondering if anyone notices what you're doing.

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Why The System Rewards Offense Players (And What Defense Players Miss)

So why does the system reward players who play offense?

It comes down to three key things defense players miss:

• When you're head down deep in the work, you miss out on the opportunity to create the perception of being ready. You miss out on opportunities to build relationships with people whose opinions matter about whether or not you're strategic, and people who can advocate for you when your manager cannot.

• When you don't ask for promotions, you miss out on the opportunity to build a case AND an action plan to make this real with your manager. Getting your manager in on the game early helps you prioritize what you actually need to work on and make a plan to make this happen. Their support is necessary.

• Impact is always going to be the key. If you're stuck in meetings or staying up late answering every Slack message, you miss out on the opportunities to create real impact or try and share the learnings from what you've created (which is what the company truly needs).

The promotion system isn't actually about rewarding hard work because if it were, the hardest-working people would always get promoted, and we all know that's not how it works. *side-eye to … the world*

Promotions are bets on future potential (you can read it straight from the horse’s mouths here in a previous issue). And the people making decisions (your managers and promotion committees) don't bet on defense players because the risk is too high. Instead, they bet on people who demonstrate self-leadership.

How offense players practice self-leadership:

• They align expectations early and often on what "awesome" looks like

• They manage up about progress toward goals, not just project updates

• They give themselves permission to do more of what's important vs what's being asked from them even if it means pushing back

• They can navigate uncertainty calmly and can turn chaos into a fun little adventure

• They’re not afraid to be visible for both the good things and the bad things

The system rewards offense players because they demonstrate the exact behavior that senior roles require: taking ownership, driving alignment, and creating opportunities rather than waiting for them.

But what is self-leadership, really?

It's trusting yourself enough to make decisions based on your values and goals rather than just reacting to whatever gets thrown at you. It's knowing your strengths and leaning into them instead of constantly trying to fix your weaknesses. And it's being grounded enough in who you are that you can navigate conflict, pressure, and uncertainty without losing yourself in the process.

☎️ When you lead yourself first, opportunities start finding you instead of you chasing them. If you're ready to flip that switch and build unshakeable confidence in your career path, let's discuss how that can look for you specifically. 

Book a discovery call with me and let's talk about how coaching might be able to help you with your career.

How To Flip From Defense to Offense (Starting Today)

If you're reading this and thinking "fuuuuuuuuck, I've been playing defense all year!"… Don't panic because you have plenty of time to shift this if you start now.

⚡ Quick wins: In your 1:1s, start doing these

• Talk about progress toward goals, not just projects

• Share your next steps and challenges before they become problems

• Reinforce who you already are while addressing the gaps

• Have a plan for how you're filling in the gaps (don't just acknowledge them)

• Ask yourself whether you're giving yourself space to do more of what you is important or are you constantly just fighting fires day in and day out

⛑️ The promotion conversation you actually need to have:

Most people approach promotion conversations asking for it instead of making a case. This is how you get a million variations of “you’re not ready” as a response.

Don't walk into your next 1:1 and say "I want a promotion".

Walk in and say "Based on the impact I've been having, I believe I'm ready for the next level, and here are the 10 million reasons why."

🧰 The conversation should sound like this: 

"Over the past year, I've been operating at the next level in these ways... [specific examples]. The impact has been [concrete outcomes]. I've been thinking about my next step, and I'd love to discuss what a promotion to [specific role] would look like and how we can make that happen this cycle."

Notice what's different? You're not asking IF you can be promoted. You're discussing HOW it can happen based on evidence you've already established.

Even if this specific promotion doesn't happen this cycle, having this conversation builds the muscle of advocating for yourself and gets you clearer data about what advancement looks like at your company. Both of which serve you long-term.

💡 When You Don't Know Your Impact (And How To Figure It Out Fast)

But this is what trips most people up: they don't actually know how to talk about their impact in terms that matter for promotions. They may not know or have been focused on execution. Whatever the reason is, the more senior you become, the more impact becomes the language of the game.

Start with what the business actually cares about:

• Value: Did you solve real problems that users actually cared about? Did your work directly contribute to making money or saving money?

• Efficiency: Did you eliminate waste, reduce time-to-market, or streamline processes?

• Team performance: Did your work enable others to be more effective?

If you don't have hard numbers, look for these signs:

• Before/after scenarios: "Before we implemented X, the team spent 3 hours a week on manual processes. Now it's automated."

• Stakeholder feedback: "Our customer support team reports 40% fewer tickets related to this feature."

• Process improvements: "We reduced our deployment time from 2 weeks to 3 days."

When you genuinely don't have data, create a plan to get it:

Tell your manager. For example:

🧰 "I realize I don't have strong metrics on my impact yet, and I want to fix that. Can we align on what success metrics would look like for my current work so I can track them going forward?"

This actually demonstrates exactly the kind of self-leadership that gets people promoted: recognizing a gap and taking ownership of solving it rather than waiting for someone else to tell you what to measure.

🧰 Your September Action Plan

This coming week:

• Audit your work from the past 6 months using the impact framework above

• Draft your promotion case: "I've been operating at the next level by... with impact of..."

• Book a personal development conversation with your manager (separate from your regular 1:1)

This month:

• Have the promotion conversation using your impact case as the foundation

• Ask: "Based on this impact, what else would need to be true for promotion this cycle?"

• Start tracking metrics for the current work so you have data going forward

This quarter:

• Build one new relationship with someone who can advocate for your promotion case

• Document new impact as it happens (don't wait until next review cycle)

• Share the impact and learnings widely and often

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What Happens When You Don't Get Promoted (And Why That's Not Actually The Point)

But sometimes it's not even about you. I have a client right now who's doing everything right. She’s performing at the next level, has her manager's support, had the promotion conversation early in the year; but getting blocked by systemic barriers that have nothing to do with her readiness.

She's been at the company less than a year, promotion calibrations happen mid-year so she has to wait months, and committee members think promoting someone so "new" feels too early and they’ve been pushing back on making her an exceptional case.

There's nothing objective about this, which is the nature of promotions themselves

A lot of what happens in promotion decisions is outside our control: the process itself, the fact that managers aren't the only ones making decisions, budget constraints, or roles that just don't exist (especially the more senior you become).

The ultimate value of playing offense isn't actually getting the promotion: it's that YOU start to know your own value.

You learn to speak about your contributions with confidence, and you stop tying your worth to what other people think.

💡 Not getting promoted doesn't make you less valuable, and when you're grounded in your own value through self-leadership, rejection becomes information rather than devastation.

Playing offense becomes about finding a fit for yourself:a role, scope, and recognition that match what you bring to the table.

Promotions are opportunities. And playing offense asks you to know what that promotion actually means: Is the additional scope what you want, or do you want it because it makes you feel important?

TL;DR

The promotion system feels rigged because it rewards self-leadership in a world that trains us to seek external validation. You can't think about your promotion in one day, or even one month, it's about being honest with yourself about how you're spending your time, having allies who can speak for you, and trusting yourself enough that the promotion becomes acknowledgment rather than validation.

Stop waiting for development conversations to happen TO you. Start leading yourself first, and let that self-leadership drive how you show up in every conversation.

📌 Coaching Bulletin Board:

Ready to stop playing defense and start building your offense playbook? If you're ready to flip the script and start leading yourself through your career development, I'd love to help you build that strategy.

📣 I have 1:1 coaching slots open for:

• Senior functional experts in tech who want to stop waiting for recognition and start creating their own opportunities before year-end conversations begin.

• New Product, Dev, or UX leaders navigating the challenges and complexity (or even drama) of personal development conversations and promotion processes.

• Senior folks in tech who are feeling stuck in their careers but not sure what they want for “what’s next” much less where to start.

Book a discovery call with me and let’s have a chat about how partnering on a coaching collaboration can be a fit for your goals.

If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me until the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that you’d like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.

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💙
Kax

• Most people, when they’re new to leadership optimize for the visible side of leadership. Because it’s what’s on our JD and what gets noticed AND eventually get rewarded by the system we’re operating in.

• But the invisible side of leadership, the shadow side, is 50% of the job. It’s what makes having an impact sustainable for leaders and their team.The “shadow side” is the part of leadership most people try to suppress or don’t even realize they have. But they leak out anyway in our everyday interactions and decisions whether we’re aware or not.

• The integration of the shadow side of leadership is learning to lead yourself. And being able to lead yourself well asks us to be aware of our beliefs and our values that influence the way we feel towards the situations and challenges we face in our leadership and how we respond to them.

Last we left off, we already started exploring how we can begin leading ourself: by getting curious about our beliefs, surfacing what we already bring to the table, and embracing failure and starting to see it as a natural part of growth.

So now we get to the fun part.

How do we connect the dots between leading ourselves and leading others? How do the two work together and make us effective leaders?

Your role as a leader

Before anything else, I want to put on the table again what your role is as a leader so we have something to align on. Especially for the new ones who don’t get their role framed helpfully aside from being given a list of responsibilities.

Our roles as leaders is to create the right environment and conditions for our teams to successfully deliver value.

This means:

1. Strategic alignment - make sure that there is a clear alignment between you and the team, the leadership, the stakeholders on what the goals are and what needs to be prioritized to get there

2. Set up the organization - hire the right people, provide training access to your team, make sure they have the right tools and processes to get their work done.

3. Coach and mentor - help people do their job and do it well, develop the next generation of leaders, and coach them to face their challenges with confidence and cheek.

But in between the lines of trying to set up the environment for teams to succeed, there will always be misalignment, politics, conflict, pressure (*side eye to the founders/executives who keep changing the company goals every 6 months*). And it’s in these in between, is where our self-leadership lives.

The Cost of the lack of Self-Leadership

Becoming a leader is cool and all, but it’d be super difficult to hold the responsibility of being a leader if we don’t know how to lead ourselves.

What do I mean? If we’re unable to lead ourselves:

1. Every conflict can feel like a personal attack.

2. Everybody’s needs will feel like an emergency that needs an immediate solution.

3. Seeking visibility or navigating politics will feel like selling our souls to the devil.

4. The uncertainty that comes with the job will put us in a constant fight-flight-freeze cycle.

5. And everybody else will feel like they’ve got their shit together… except us.

And what’s the impact of these things on our work as leaders? How do they impact the team and other people we work with?

A. When every conflict feels like a personal attack - we tend to avoid it in favor of trying to keep people happy.

• We’ll soften feedback; which can impact the team’s performance

• We’ll optimize for consensus vs clarity; which can delay decision making or dilute the impact of what we’re doing

• We’ll bury the feelings under the guise of not wanting to get into an argument; but this can fester into resentment over time, which can harm our overall collaboration by creating biases for us that impact our interactions (not to mention the impact of unreleased anger on our health)

B. Everybody’s needs will feel like an emergency that needs an immediate solution - so we tend to take it upon ourselves to figure out a solution for everybody.

• For the people in our team, we’re not coaching them to learn to be independent or navigate their own challenges

• Not pushing back on our peers and our leaders is also “training” them that prioritization is optional

C. Seeking visibility or navigating politics will feel like selling our souls to the devil - so we avoid it to not be a sell out.

• But avoiding visibility and politics dilutes potential for influence and removes opportunities for the organization to trust us.

• And for us leaders, especially in corporate tech, influence and trust are the currencies of our work. It’s how we gain agreement more easily or how we’re able to push back without the negative recoil.

• Opportunities we fail to open up through influence and trust are opportunities we fail to open for our teams, too, to have more impact and even growth.

D. The uncertainty that comes with the job will put us in a constant fight-flight-freeze cycle. - as leaders, our job is to try to provide certainty to our teams but that means being able to navigate uncertainty ourselves. And if we can’t?

• That energy will seep into our interactions, whether we do it consciously or not, and our teams will inherit the stress from us.

• Being in constant fight, flight, or freeze mode is us trying to be safe. Or our brains are trying to be safe. So it’ll get us playing defense or playing small instead of trying to push the boundaries of innovation lest we make a mistake.

E. Everybody else will feel like they’ve got their shit together… except us.

• And then we try to prove to ourselves that we’re fit for the role. But operating in constant proving doesn’t give space for our own wisdom and expertise to emerge. Because we’re constantly seeking approval from other people who have their own biases and motivations.

• Which also means we’re spending more time trying to fill in our gaps vs leaning into our strengthts that can have bigger returns in terms of impact and faster.

⛑️ Are you seeing potentia gaps in how you might be leading yourself can impact how you're leading others?

When we lead ourselves first

In part 1 of this story, I’ve shared some tips on how you can start leading yourself: by shedding light on your shadow.

And while there are more, the gist of it all is to cultivate self-awareness of:

1. The drivers and beliefs behind our patterns

2. The reactions we have towards certain situations

3. The values and strengths that we already carry

4. The kind of leader we want to show up as day to day

5. Who we are outside of our work

Awareness is step one. Step two is turning it into action: using what you know about yourself to guide how you will choose to respond to the situation of conflict or pressure versus reacting based on your defaults.

Self-leadership and team leadership aren’t separate skills. They’re two sides of the same system. And here’s what that can look like in practice:

When conflict feels like a personal attack

• Before → You soften feedback, avoid the hard talk, or optimize for keeping everyone happy

• After → You still acknowledge the sting, but anchor yourself in the shared goal. You’ll be flexible where it matters, co-create solutions with the right people without fear of losing control, or strengthen your arguments to provide more clarity. Your interest will be on doing the right thing vs being right.

When every request feels urgent

• Before → You jump in, fix it yourself, and end the day buried under other people’s work.

• After → You don’t feel bad about slowing down to ask what’s really needed. You might even coach others to take the next step themselves. And saying “no, there’s no bandwidth for this” won’t leave a bitter taste in your mouth like it used to — leaving you to create space for what’s truly important.

When visibility or politics feels like selling out

• Before → You avoid it completely, keeping your work (and your team’s) in the shadows.

• After → You reframe it as giving your work and your team’s, a seat at the table, and you do it in a way that feels like you. And it becomes about sharing perspectives and knowledge so other people can learn from you too.

When uncertainty pushes you into fight-flight-freeze

• Before → You play it safe, make small moves, and unintentionally pass the stress down to your team.

• After → You’re ok with not knowing what you don’t know, give your team what certainty you can, and make the next best decision based on the information you have instead of waiting for perfection or readiness. You’re aware of the risks, minimize what you can, and mitigate for what you can’t. Failure is no longer a scary thing but an opportunity to do better next time.

When everyone else looks like they have it together

• Before → You overcompensate by proving yourself in every direction, burning through your energy while still feeling like not enough.

• After → You ground yourself in your strengths, lead from them, and choose whose feedback is worth integrating. Other people become an inspiration vs a goal post that keeps moving.

Working with your shadow won’t make the discomfort vanish. But when you work with it instead of against it, you stop letting your old patterns run the show. And your leadership presence stops being reactive and starts being intentional.

And this is when the outside, the more visible parts of your leadership start to change.

⛑️ If you're a new leader or a middle manager finding the day-to-day of your leadership life challenging, it might be time to face your shadows and challenge old patterns and beliefs that might be holding you back from creating the right environment for you and your team to succeed.

Click here to join my 90 minute guided session on August 27:
"Leading through the Messy Middle" 

In this workshop, we'll take the time to surface your shadow, design a new way of leading, so that you can lead more effectively but without the burnout.

Inside-Out leadership is simple, though not easy.

The Inside-Out leadership starts with who you are, not just what you do. It asks you to know your values, energy, and patterns and how they shape your presence as a leader. The more grounded you are on the inside, the more effective and sustainable your impact on the outside becomes.

You’ve probably heard that “to become an effective leader requires an identity shift”. But a lot of people make the mistake is thinking that means becoming someone you’re not. So they resist and keep pushing through with trying to do better work. Sometimes there’s impact. But it’s rarely sustainable. And when a new challenge comes in, they start from zero all over again.

What I do with my clients is different: we define the kind of leader they want to be. As in the one who makes things happen, acts in line with their values, and protects space in their calendar to think and breathe.

We don’t create a brand new persona. Instead, we create habits that reinforces their ideal leader self and let go of old beliefs that no longer serve them. So that they can always embody who they’ve always been at their best: minus the fear, empowered by their ambition, and aligned with their values.

Because as leaders, especially the ones in the middle, misalignment, conflict, and uncertainty are pretty much what we face every single day.

For example, we won’t agree with every company decision, nor will we be able to influence all of them. But when we’re aligned with the highest version of ourselves, we trust ourselves to navigate it. We can choose how we will deliver a tough decision, how we can motivate people to commit (even though they might disagree too), and how we can still deliver excellent results with our team regardless of how we might feel about it. And these things will matter more than the decision itself.

That’s the Inside-Out approach in action: your inner work doesn’t just make you feel better; it also directly expands your capacity to lead so you can create the right conditions and environment for your team to succeed.

Leadership will change you, but not because you become someone else. At the end of the day, it’s not about fixing yourself (there’s nothing to fix). It’s about trusting yourself enough to lead as you are… at your best.

The Inside-Out approach asks you to remember who you’ve always been, and letting that version take the lead.

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📌 Coaching Bulletin Board:

📌 I’m doing a 90-minute leadership reset for new leaders who are feeling bogged down while navigating the murky and messy life of being a middle manager. It’s a few weeks from now. Join me!

📌 1:1 Coaching for the new Product, UX, and Tech Leaders going through career dilemmas. If this is you, I’d love to help you define your strategies to set yourself and your team up for success. Book a free call and let’s discuss how we can work together.

If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me until the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that you’d like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.

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Kax

I wish someone had handed them a manual on what being a leader actually means, before they said, “Yeah! Let’s do this!” 😂

More often than not, people who get promoted to leadership aren’t ready… but through no fault of their own. The jump from IC to first-time manager is abrupt. Some get lucky and have great managers who guide them through it. But most don’t.

Their title changes on Workday, their boss announces it in an all-hands, and off they go… trying to lead while also trying to look like they already know how (because nobody can know they feel like a headless chicken).

The role can be incredibly fun and fulfilling. But it can also be an express lane to burnout-ville if you’re not careful.

There’s plenty of talk about what good leaders should or shouldn’t do.

But not many people talk about how:

1. You can be a great manager, hire only A players/rockstars/whatever the term of this era of the industry is, and never miss 1:1s, and still end the day feeling drained as hell?

2. You can learn all the frameworks, run the sessions/workshops, and create decks that get passed around the company, but people are still giving you feedback left and righ,t saying you’re not being strategic.

3. You can follow all the best practices, do the “good” stuff, and stop doing the “bad” stuff and still feel like you’re doing it all wrong.

And that feeling: of not knowing what you’re doing wrong, of second-guessing your every word, of ending the day joyless and tense — that’s actually where all the problems start

Ok ok, now that we have that clear... What does that mean?

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Optimizing for the visible side of leadership

The stuff people can see is what gets measured. So of course, we focus on it first.

It’s what gets recognized and eventually rewarded (because it’s what’s included in the Job Description). So it’s also what stakeholders and senior leadership watch out for to evaluate.

I’ve once talked about the 3 overlapping hats that leaders need to wear at any given time. There’s just so much to do. And for new leaders, all of it is new.

So naturally, we optimize what we can see. A bit hard to work on something you’re not even sure was there in the first place, right?

But not working on the shadow side makes for a weak leadership foundation. And eventually, cracks will start to show. Not always in one fell swoop, but slowly like having a hang nail that’s not so bad, but you can’t help but pick on it until the mild annoyance becomes a bleeding mess.

The impact of an underdeveloped shadow side is not always seen immediately. But they compound. Because most of the challenging moments are not just about the tasks alone — they’re also about how we respond under pressure, how we protect our energy, and how we manage our stories about ourselves:

• There’s always a Slack message asking for 5 minutes

• When we keep softening feedback because we don’t want to offend anybody but that only enables bad behaviors to continue

• The 10th company-wide email about how you’re all a family and everybody’s contribution is important. That’s followed by a 30-minute secret call that’s asking all managers to evaluate who gets to stay or go because AI is taking over the world, obviously.

And unfortunately, no amount of re-reading Radical Candor, Leaders Eat Last, or Empowered can help ease the inner conflict.

So now what?

Is the new leader just not good enough or not working hard enough?

You already know the answer — of course not. It’s just that the tools that they’ve been handed are the ones that are not enough.

We try to match what’s in the JD because that’s what people notice and promote. But that version of leadership has a shelf life.

The visible parts of leadership do not replenish. It only demands. It demands that your back is straight and your answers are polished. So you always look like you’re on top of things.

And that’s when new leaders start realizing that the job isn’t just about creating strategies to execute, hiring A-players and rockstars, or negotiating with nearly everybody in the organization about the priorities. That’s just one half of it.

The other half is about having the strength in your knees to keep standing when the storm is at its peak (or maybe even walk away if that’s what’s needed). And that’s hard work too.

✍️ What's the biggest challenge you're facing right now as a leader? 

Feel free to share in the comments. The more people share, the more we realize we're not alone. ❤️

The “shadow” side of leadership

Underneath the tangible side of leadership is the actual job. And the actual job is layered and deeply human.

Leadership is a constant negotiation between what the business needs, what the team needs, and what you need — and when those 3 are misaligned, the work becomes harder than it already is.

It’s not that people are hiding this part of the job. Most of us just never had it modeled.
We’re taught how to lead others, but rarely how to lead ourselves. And yet, those two sides are always in motion together.

Leading others is the visible side of the work: the skill-based work that you can learn from books, trainings, and copying what others are doing. Like managing a budget, writing a performance review, aligning on team goals, or figuring out who to hire next. It’s the part that fills your calendar and your to-do list. The part that gets evaluated and tracked. This part we know so well.

Leading yourself is the internal side: the shadow work of understanding your values, regulating your energy, recognizing your defaults. It’s asking why certain feedback hits a nerve. Why you avoid hard conversations. Why you keep second-guessing your own decisions. It's the part that enables the execution of the external side of leadership.

It’s the part most people skip because it wasn’t explicit in the JD. Fair! Because how do you write in the JD that your ideal leader should know their values to let them shape their decisions???

Leading yourself means noticing your defaults and being honest about whether they still serve you so you can decide when to hold your ground and when to adjust. It doesn't mean being 100% unshakeable (that requires shaolin training more than coaching). It’s about knowing what’s shaking you, and responding with intention instead of instinct.

And how does it look like when we don’t lead ourselves? This is when the internal patterns start leaking into the external execution:

• When we keep saying yes to every "do you have 5 minutes?” that we leave no time for the work we actually do, rendering all those tools and frameworks useless

• When we keep softening feedback because we don’t want to offend anybody, but that only enables bad behaviors to continue

• When we keep getting into spats with our stakeholders and senior leaders, simplify the situation as them being difficult because we also don’t want to back down.

These examples just go to show that the two sides aren’t separate. They flow with each other. Your internal patterns will always shape your external performance, whether you’re aware of them or not. And your external performance can influence your external patterns (whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on you).

⛑️ If you're a new leader finding the day-to-day of your new leadership life challenging, I'd love to support you. I have a few slots open from September. 

🔗 Click here to book a discovery call with me and let’s chat about how I might be able to help you.

Leading Yourself: Shedding light on the Shadow side of Leadership

There’s no such thing as perfect leadership. But when we know how to lead ourselves, putting in place the tools we have to lead others will come with less struggle or even less cost (especially to ourselves so we can keep going).

What does leading ourselves mean?

It starts with this: Noticing your internal patterns before they become the driver for your reactions.

How does one start with leading one’s self?

• Starting with curiosity. Examining the feelings and thoughts that come up, noticing when we’re reacting on autopilot, and asking ourselves where that reaction is coming from — and whether it still serves the kind of leader we’re trying to become.

  Examples: 
  
  1. Why are we feeling the pressure to have all the answers out right and why are we afraid to admit that maybe we don't know? 
  
  2. Why do we feel icky when we need to talk about the work we've done to more people? 
  
  3. Why is it that when we find something easy, it doesn't feel real? 

• Having awareness of what we already bring to the table. Most people are quick to identify what they’re lacking. And that’s great, personal development should be a life-long experience. But from my experience, people usually have a very hard time identifying their strengths and talents. And we’re quick to believe that progress and success should come with struggle. But what if it could come with ease, too? Leaning into our strengths can have a higher ROI than constantly trying to fill in our gaps.

• Embracing failure. Failure is inevitable. And that’s a good thing! It’s the gateway to learning, if we let it. If we set our egos aside and don’t see failure as a challenge to our identity. We might even enjoy the process.

And when things feel political or messy, it helps to pause before writing the whole situation off as toxic. Sometimes that’s true, but sometimes it’s just a mismatch of incentives, context, or trust that hasn’t been built yet.

There are moree and this is a much simplified version, but there are a lot of things to start with here already.

Integrating the Inside and the Outside

So how does this all work together?

What do you actually do with this awareness of internal patterns, defaults, and shadow work — especially when you're still expected to show up, make decisions, and hit goals every week?

We’ll get into that next.

Part 2 is where we start connecting the dots between the internal work and the day-to-day stuff: meetings, decisions, tension, feedback, and all the messy human bits in between.

But for now, I’ll pause here before this turns into an ebook😂

If you’re not subscribed yet, this is your sign! So you don’t miss the next chapter of Integrating the Shadow 🌚

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TL;DR

Most new leaders get handed a role, not a roadmap. So they pour their energy into what’s visible because that’s what gets rewarded. But over time, that version of leadership starts to fray. Because no one told them the internal side matters just as much.

And when that internal foundation, your values, your patterns, your energy, is ignored, it starts leaking into how you lead. That’s when things get murky. You say yes too much. You soften when you should hold the line. You react instead of responding.

Leading others is half the job. The other half is learning how to lead yourself. And no, it doesn’t make it easier. But it does make it more sustainable.

📌 Coaching Bulletin Board:

📌 I’m doing a 90-minute leadership reset for new leaders who are feeling bogged down while navigating the murky and messy life of being a middle manager. It’s a few weeks from now. Join me!

📌 1:1 Coaching for the new Product, UX, and Tech Leaders going through career dilemmas. If this is you, I’d love to help you define your strategies to set yourself and your team up for success. Book a free call and let’s discuss how we can work together.

If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me until the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that you’d like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.

Share

💙
Kax

Inside “From Stuck to Expansive”, we had an open discussion that brought this question to the surface in a very real way.

Everybody was sharing updates on the experiments they’d been running from Phase 2, like:

• the workshops they're setting up

• posting on social media to attract beta testers for their MVP

• or building visibility to attract potential first clients for their side hustle.

Super cool things were shared! I was excited for all these new opportunities that the participants were creating for themselves and impressed by how much insights they’ve gathered in just 3 weeks.

But most of all, I was amazed at how much the participants have grown since we first started.

But woven into some of those updates was also a different version of the same story that came up at the beginning of the program.

Some were already feeling behind so soon just after they started experimenting.

When asked why, it was because the results they were looking for hasn't happened yet. And somehow, there’s a dotted line between the lack of results and that they’re just not good enough.

And when we unpacked that frustration and many other feelings that went with it, what we surfaced together was this:

The urgency wasn’t just about results.

It was about meaning and wanting to feel like they were on the right track and that all the effort was worth it.

I could tell you about how beautiful it was to hear them come to a different conclusion from what they were initially feeling and also, coach each other through their concerns... but I'll save that story for next time.

But here’s the reminder we landed on (one every Product builder already knows but still needs to be reminded of):

You’re not going to figure it all out in a single sprint. That’s why we run experiments to learn, to iterate, and to shift whenever necessary. You know, agile.

And that's why, alongside these experiments, is a deeper purpose to the Stuck to Expansive program — to create a space where we can safely surface what’s really holding us back, so we can dismantle it and build something more empowering in its place.

The lack of results isn’t proof of failure. And it’s definitely not proof that they’re the problem. It just means the learning is still happening.

And quite frankly, this will never stop.

And isn't that marvelous?

Chasing the answer vs living the question

It brought me back to my own version of this story, though my frustration didn’t come from feeling slow. It came from feeling… unsatisfied.

It started with this: It started with wanting petty revenge for not getting the promotion and salary increase I wanted.

Quick backstory: The year before I found out that I was the lowest leveled and lowest paid PM in our group even if I was working on the arguably highest impact product at that time. (I wrote about this backstory in this post and why I couldn’t just leave).

And what followed closely was dissatisfaction. The need for something else, because what I needed was not being met in my current situation

I didn't know exactly what that something else was. But I knew that I needed to do something. Anything was better than feeling undervalued… or worse not enough.

So in 2019, I gave myself permission to try. It was my year of yes.

• I started teaching Product Management at AllWomen.

• Ran Product management-related workshops for companies.

• I co-created Career Hacking for Women, a community for women who were feeling unsatisfied with their career trajectory (like I was) with my friends

• I went online to write about my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions about Product Management

• And soon after that, I started going up on stage to talk about them too.

By 2020, I was running career-related bootcamps through Career Hacking for Women ,being INVITED to speak in podcasts AND conferences, and I onboarded my first ever paid coaching client.

I stopped doing Product-related workshops, though, after I realized that I wasn’t such a big fan of doing it. 😅

Those moments weren’t about building a brand (at least not yet). They were just me, trying things on. Seeing what fit and what didn’t.

And in that trying, I learned more about what I was great at and wanted to keep doing. I think what was the biggest insight was that I got a glimpse of what else my career can look like.

And the excitement for the possibilities made up for whatever confidence I may have been missing at that time.

None of these decisions were part of a great big and important career strategy (I wish they were, and maybe this would be a sexier story), I just decided on them because they felt like the next thing was worth exploring. But these experiments and the insights gleaned were what made up the strategy later on.

And this is the point, we don’t always have to chase the answer.
Sometimes, living the question is the work.
The answers will come eventually.

 🧠 If there was no pressure to see results by... yesterday - what would you want to try doing today?

Growth as a natural part of evolution

The more I explored and experimented on what else I could do, the more I saw what actually created lasting growth.

It wasn’t more frameworks or more skills, though learning more certainly of those definitely helped.

It wasn't just the existential angst crisis or the righteous rage against job ladders. Although I won't lie, these were great motivators too and they gave me the push to want something different and to do things differently.

But it was reconnecting with myself that the search for growth became a natural part of my evolution. And surfacing my values, interests, and definition of success to create an inner compass that I could use to evaluate opportunities (as much as they evaluated me) became my default tools to start filtering out what was a fit and what was not.

Now here we are, 5 years later, making a living out of the things that I was curious about, thought could be exciting, and could be a wonderful enabler to the life I wanted to live.

I wanted to see if I could. So I did.

Of course in between, I made a ton of mistakes and made shitty choices. While I was aligned, I was not infallible. 😂 I also changed my mind a lot. Maybe because they weren’t as fun as I thought they would be in the beginning or because I kept changing as a human being and found out more things about myself and so my compass also kept iterating.

A lot of us have spent most of our career years operating in high-stakes, fast-paced environments. And every day, we're exposed to all the talk in the industry about acceleration — not just about our products but also for our own personal growth. So we've become REALLY good at keeping up.

Look, acceleration on its own is not a bad thing. But when left unchecked, it CAN make us lose touch with ourselves.

And this is when we start chasing outcomes and titles, thinking that's what career growth truly is.

But what if the growth doesn't need to come from doing more or from 5 year plans?

Where else can it come from then? And that my friends, is the question I recommend to always keep asking.

When we give space to curiosity and lean into the joy of wanting to find out what happens if we push the red button, the quieter the noise of doubt becomes.

How? Because we finally start living in the experience of today vs living in the fear of uncertainty from tomorrow that at best is merely a possibility. And when curiosity drives us, we open ourselves up more to infinite possibilities.

🧠 Question for readers: Where in your career are you following rules—and where are you letting yourself play?

Fear of Missing Out vs Joy of Finding Out

We’re so afraid of missing out that we miss the joy of finding out.

There's a thrill that can be found when we're testing and excited about the insight that we can get from it.

Every time we test an idea, we shrink the size of our fear and build real confidence, not imagined, not borrowed, but earned through movement.

We get to look uncertainty in the eye and say, "I'm figuring you out." And we give our doubts a chance to be wrong.

And eventually, there's also the peace that comes with choosing alignment over urgency. To choose opportunities that fit us and make sense for the life we want to have vs what we think we should have, because apparently there's some unspoken rule when it comes to career that we should be following.

So if you’re asking yourself if your career is going too slow or going nowhere, this is your reminder:

Your career is not just about getting somewhere fast.
It’s a space to experience more of yourself. To learn. To lead. And to evolve.

It’s okay to want more. In fact, I hope we all keep wanting more.
But my hope (and my work) is that we also enjoy the journey and adventure of getting it.

❤️

Kax

p.s.
Nobody gets it right on the first try. That's not the point.
The point is to try, to learn, and to see what takes shape from there.

p.p.s. wrote a beautiful piece on the importance of finding joy.

⛑️ If you’re feeling small in your career, feeling like you’re not getting the results of the work that you’re doing, or feeling like you're stuck in a space that's no longer a fit for you —- lean into your curiosity. 

And if you want to see what could be on the other side of your feelings, I'd love to support you.  

🔗 Click here to book a discovery call with me and let's see how coaching can look like for you.

📌 Coaching Bulletin Board:

Why I coach: I believe that if there are more and more people prioritize their wellbeing, choose career moves that are in alignment with their values and ambition, and help others do the same — then we can change how this industry operates and make it more kind, human, and in service of the people (and not just the investors).

📌 If you’re going through some big hairy challenges that you can’t seem to figure out right now, I’m hosting a 90-minute free workshop on July 15, 2025! Join me!

📌 I’m building something for first-time Product, UX, and Tech leaders. If you’re struggling to empower your team, deliver the impact that matters to the business, influence people within your organization, and try to stay sane through it all, I’d love to support you. I’m looking for 10-15 people to pilot the Leadership Lab with me. You can read all about it and sign up for the waitlist here.

📌 But if you feel that a dedicated space is what you need, then 1:1 Coaching might be the space for you. For the new and emerging leaders in Product, UX, and Tech going through career dilemmas, I’d love to help you define your strategies to set yourself and your team up for success. Book a free call and let’s discuss how we can work together.

If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me until the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that you’d like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.

Ok, that’s an exaggeration, but it’s how I was “trained” for the majority of my life. Think about the worst-case scenarios and be the high-performer who gets out of it unscathed.

My relationship with uncertainty is funny. I’m not technically afraid of it. But that’s probably because I’ve already laid out 20 different scenarios of how things could play out and 100 possibilities to prevent the bad things from happening. That by the time the uncertainty has passed, I’m just exhausted.

I remember that an ex-manager had to keep reminding me that we’re Product Managers, not heart surgeons. So the worst catastrophe that I’m imagining, in real life, would probably be… not that bad actually.

But that didn’t stop me from worrying the hell out of whatever it is that I was worrying about anyway.

These days, I have a different perspective, though.

I still have the thoughts, but I no longer let them run the show and drive me to the drawing board, making Plan Bs to Zs.

Instead, I do this:

• I ground myself on my why (my vision, my goals, what I want to achieve)

• Remind myself that the version of myself who can make this real is already in me.

• And I design the next move or decision that’s aligned with what I want, not with what I’m afraid of.

It’s not always pretty. But it’s working.

A common pattern with fears

It’s the same pattern I see with my coaching clients who work with me because they want to become better leaders, or just want to wake up on Monday with the dread. Same pattern, maybe different scripts.

They spend most of their time and energy managing their fears:

• of being judged

• of making the wrong move and failing

• of not being deserving of the many things they want for themselves

So they manage their fears by saying yes to all the work, delaying a decision until everybody’s happy with it (even if they’re not sure they are anymore), measuring their growth against other people’s definition of success.

It can look like the responsible and productive thing to do. There’s a catch, though.

When we’re so busy managing our fears and optimizing for being seen positively by the rest of the world, we’re not really being seen — for ourselves, our strengths, our impact, and everything that we stand for.

And when we become really good at managing our fears, we neglect to build the muscles that help us overcome them.

Here’s what's scarier than other people thinking we’re weird or being bad at something that we fail:

1. Not spending our time and energy on things that bring us joy

2. Not living our lives and expressing ourselves fully

3. Burning out because of misalignment

And then we wonder why we feel stuck. Why we’re not in the spaces that fit our needs, our values, and our dreams.

⛑️ If you’re feeling small in your career, feeling like you’re not being recognized for your work, or not getting the results of the work that you’re doing —- it might be because you're managing your fear vs truly expressing your expertise through your work. 

If you want to change you feel about your day to day and bring results, working with a coach can help you with that. 

🔗 Click here to book a discovery call with me and let's see how coaching can look like for you.

A confession

I’m extremely afraid of not having both feet on stable, flat ground. This makes me afraid of going down the stairs sometimes. Even more in yoga and pilates, wherein half of the time, I’m being asked to be either be upside down or standing on things that move on their own. In my head, I’m always going to end up falling, head first, and then break my neck. Morbid, I know.

At first, I had all the excuses. Anything I can come up with that can help me skip out on the movement that triggered my fear.

Then, eventually, I realized I was missing out on an opportunity to get stronger, have better balance, and the bragging rights of being able to say “I did an inverted pull-up in a Pilates chair!” 😅 (I realized after one of the trainers called me out finally lol)

So I slowly included it in my practice. A few seconds longer each time. But more than that, I’ve been helping myself feel safe while I do this new hard and scary thing. Taking it slow, pulling my feet up a little higher every single time, asking my teacher to make sure I’ve got my technique correct (or sometimes just asking them to stand next to me in case I fall lol).

A reminder that I can do hard things… even when my body, brain, and every past version of me say nope.

Which brings me to careers. Because how we relate to fear in one space often mirrors how we relate to it everywhere else.

The same way I used to avoid those movements, a lot of us avoid decisions or conversations or next steps that feel risky, even if they’re the very thing we need. And the more we avoid them, the weaker those muscles get.

So when we say we want confidence, what we often mean is: we want to feel safe doing the scary thing. But safety doesn’t come from perfecting our plans. It comes from building our capacity to act even when we don’t feel fully ready.

This is usually the turning point. When we stop focusing on how to make fear disappear, and instead start asking: what would courage look like right now?

That’s what I see over and over again with my clients: Confidence doesn’t come first. Courage does.

When courage is in the picture:

• We talk to our managers about building a promotion case

• We speak up in meetings to ask our question (that we might think is stupid)

• We say no to the opportunity that’s not really aligned with our ambition

Ok, but just to be clear. This isn’t a shift that’s forced by sheer will power alone. It comes from building a practice that’s rooted in aspiration.

This is how my clients and I are giving space for courage to take over our fears:

1. We get clear on our goals. The ideal scenario that we want to work towards. For some, it’s the kind of leader they want to be. For others, the role they aspire to have. For everybody, the kind of life they want to enable and the careers that can support it. We imagine the best-case scenarios. We allow ourselves to say out loud what we want for ourselves.

   Try this: It's 12 months from now, everything has worked out for you, what does life look like? What are you doing? How are you spending your time and your energy? 

2. Then we define the version of ourselves who can make this goal a reality. The version of themselves who already lives inside of them, maybe comes out in some situations, but not always. The one who is confident, for sure. But also the one who doesn’t feel the need to respond to every fire, gives feedback with care, doesn’t take feedback personally, and speaks kindly to themselves and others.

   Try this: It's 12 months from now, and everything has worked out for you. Who do you need to be to make this vision a reality? What beliefs are you carrying with you? Which ones have you let go of? What kind of decisions have you made to get there?  

3. Then we create the system that allows for that version of themselves to emerge all day, everyday, every damn day. (can’t believe there’s no TQ giphy 😮‍💨) We create awareness of their triggers and tendencies so they can shift from reacting to responding. We create habits and routines that raise their frequencies so they’re always attracting or creating opportunities. We experiment a lot so we can validate/invalidate the assumptions that are often linked with our fears.

   Try this: If you were 5% more like the version of yourselves who is capable of making your goal a reality, how would you show up today? tomorrow? 

Most of the people who start coaching with me want to get promoted to a leadership role, or turn their team’s situation around, or maybe even start a side hustle. Fair!

But to get there is a series of results that stack up. And these results come from everyday choices that we’re often afraid to take, and when we stop waiting to feel ready to take them.

• A piece of feedback given to a senior leader can lead to them tapping you to share your insights in more leadership meetings, which might bring a promotion later on.

• A 60-minute delay in replying to somebody’s Slack message asking if you have 5 minutes can give you more breathing room, which brings more space to think and work with your team to define a strategy

• A single introduction at a conference can lead to meaningful conversations, and then an invitation to speak at a conference.

We can’t attract or create opportunities if nobody can see us because we’re too afraid to show up the way we truly want to.

With my 1:1 clients and with the participants of my 8-week Stuck to Expansive Program, we always talk about how growth is not easy.

Growth can be frickin’ hard!

But you know what else is hard? Staying in the same place, unhappy, unfulfilled.

So here’s what I always end up saying:

Choose your hard. And if you can do hard things, you can do anything.

Question for you: What hard are you choosing to this week? The one that you’ve been afraid to try but could have an impact in your goals?

I'd love to know in the comments or you can reply to this email directly.

📌 Coaching Bulletin Board:

Why I coach: I believe that if there are more and more people prioritize their wellbeing, choose career moves that are in alignment with their values and ambition, and help others do the same — then we can change how this industry operates and make it more kind, human, and in service of the people (and not just the investors).

📌 If you’re going through some big hairy challenges that you can’t seem to figure out right now, I’m hosting a 90-minute free workshop on July 15, 2025! Join me!

📌 I’m building something for first-time Product, UX, and Tech leaders. If you’re struggling to empower your team, deliver the impact that matters to the business, influence people within your organization, and try to stay sane through it all, I’d love to support you. I’m looking for 10-15 people to pilot the Leadership Lab with me. You can read all about it and sign up for the waitlist here.

📌 But if you feel that a dedicated space is what you need, then 1:1 Coaching might be the space for you. For the new and emerging leaders in Product, UX, and Tech going through career dilemmas, I’d love to help you define your strategies to set yourself and your team up for success. Book a free call and let’s discuss how we can work together.

If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me until the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that you’d like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.

❤️

Kax

What does that mean?

It means I created this group program for senior PMs/UXers/Engineers/functional experts who are now at a crossroads in their careers. They’ve done a lot and seen plenty, so now they’re asking themselves:

1. “I’ve been doing this for so long, and now I want to change, but I’m not sure what I want next.” They’ve built strong careers, but now they’re asking themselves if they should keep going down the same path even if it doesn’t feel so inspiring anymore, or should they change and try something new? What used to feel clear doesn’t anymore.

2. “I want more control over my career, but I’m afraid to make the wrong move.” They want more freedom and autonomy, but it all feels too risky, and they’re at the point in their lives where they feel like there’s only so much risk they can take.

3. “I have ideas, but I don’t know which one to follow. And even if I do, I’m not sure what the first step I should take is. Also, what if I’m wrong?” They’re tired, uninspired, or juggling too many paths. They’re looking for focus and a way to choose without regretting it later.

The origin story of “Stuck to Expansive”

Before I share what’s been happening in the 8-week program, because we just wrapped Phase 1 last week, let me share a little story first. About how this program is also, in a way, how I went from stuck to expansive myself.

I’ve been thinking about how to expand my coaching practice.

Not the “expand my number of clients” kind, but the “expand my coaching offering” kind.

I had some ideas, but they didn’t feel aligned with either how I wanted to be of service or with the kind of rhythm I wanted to have in my life.

Until earlier this year, when I needed to pivot the work that I was doing with some of the Senior PMs I was coaching, because of big moments that were happening in their lives: moving countries, getting laid off, and burning out.

But it wasn’t until they asked me “how did you do it?” (“it” being deciding to not go back to corporate tech after getting laid off and make a living out of my coaching business + become a startup co-founder instead) that a spark of an idea started to form in my head.

And from there, I started validating how important and how big the problem was. And how did I want to deliver the value in a way that was aligned with the kind of business I wanted to have and the kind of life I wanted that business to enable?

It wasn’t about how I can have more clients. It was about asking myself the right questions first to create more opportunities that I can experiment with and take it from there.

And since then:

1. I ran a 90-minute free workshop to validate parts of the framework + the problem<>user resonance

2. I ran a 7-day email journey to validate parts of the framework + how to deliver the value

Instead of spiraling through a million questions and pros and cons lists, trying to find the one answer that will help me feel “ready” to expand my coaching business, I decided to make intentional moves to gather insights instead that can help me find my answers.

These were the same steps I took to create and solidify my coaching business that made it easy for me to walk away from corporate tech and take more ownership of my career.

And in a way, my own expansion journey became the framework I’m now using for the Stuck to Expansive program.

On being stuck

If I have a € for every single time somebody tells me they feel stuck in their careers, I probably wouldn’t have to work a single day for the rest of my life. 😂

And more often than not, it’s the people who’ve done plenty and seen even more.

They’ve climbed through the ranks, worked across companies of all shapes and sizes, built impressive careers with real impact.

And now they’re asking themselves: “Now what? What else is there?”

They’re not feeling stuck because they don’t have the chops. They’re feeling stuck because the options they’re seeing don’t seem to make sense for them.

Most experienced people look for their potential next step backward. As in: they look for open roles out there in the common job boards and try to make their stories fit into whatever titles are being offered.

When we do it this way (yes, we, because I used to do it like this too):

1. The opportunities we see are limited. Limited by the platform, the algorithm, or the companies themselves who publish ghost listings.

2. The opportunities can feel uninspiring. Something's not a fit (the company, the scope, the product?). And the lack of energy impacts our applications.

So what does make sense?

That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? And this level of uncertainty can feel intimidating.

Because if it’s not this job that they’ve been doing for so long, what else could they be doing? And could they even do it?

And even if the options were right in front of their noses, how to get it feels like an “all or nothing” move. And who can ever feel ready to do an “all or nothing” move these days, especially in this job market?!

If these are questions that you're also sitting with, this cohort for Stuck to Expansive is closed but you can book a call with me and we can discuss your predicament. 

🔗 Click here to book a call

The first steps to becoming expansive

In the first phase of the Stuck to Expansive program, instead of going through more job listings, we started from the inside out.

We created the conditions for clarity, so we could answer that million-dollar question:

What actually makes sense for you?

And not just sense from a rational point of view, but sense as in

So Phase 1 of Stuck to Expansive was about creating the space to surface this alignment.

So we looked at the following:

1. The kind of life they want to enable. Not just the roles they want to land or the side hustles they want to start.

2. The tools that they already have. Because at this point in their careers, they’re no longer starting from scratch. They already have the strengths they can lean on and the evidence of impact they can capitalize.

3. And the story they’ve lived — and the story they want to keep on living.

And then we went a layer deeper.

If we’re choosing new opportunities, we’re also choosing the version of ourselves that can lead and live those opportunities.

So we explored identity too.

• The parts that they wanted to bring forward.

• The patterns and beliefs that they need to leave behind.

• The kind of person they need to be to create this version of their career and this version of their life

Becoming expansive also means knowing that the role they needed to take was to be the writer of their own story.

That’s when powerful insights started to take shape.

The job has a job.

Every opportunity, whether it’s a steady role or a self-created path, has to serve a purpose.

Sometimes the job is the dream.
Sometimes the job funds the dream.
Sometimes it’s a stepping stone to figure out what the dream actually is.

What matters is knowing which one it is for them — right now.

From there, we asked: What are the opportunities that actually fit this story?

So by Session 3, we were prioritizing opportunities intentionally.

And by intentionally, I don’t mean prioritizing according to scope, title, company, or industry. We were prioritizing according to what was aligned with what was truly important for them.

1. The kind of work that gives them energy.

2. The kind of work that brings them to a career that can support their ideal scenario.

By the end of Session 3, here’s what people had to say:

“This makes so much sense now”
”This was so satisfying to do”
”I didn’t think of looking at it this way before”

The collective sigh was loud.

And I sighed too! Because I knew they got it! 😂

Session 3 marks the end of Phase 1. And at the end of it, the participants have aligned opportunities. Prioritized for their needs, their interests, and their version of success.

Some of those opportunities already exist, while some are waiting to be created.

And this is why prioritization is important: Prioritization creates focus. And focus creates movement. And that movement is where clarity gets created — not just found.

And that’s what Phase 2 is for. Movement.

🧠 Clarity Corner. If you're also seeking that kind of clarity to figure out the next step that makes sense for you, here's how you can start:

Imagine a future where everything worked out well for you. Where everything you ever wanted became real, and everything you ever needed was within reach. What does that future look like? Where are you? Who are you with? What are you spending your time on? How are you feeling?

And the version of you who made this all real? Who are they? What habits do they have? What do they believe? And what have they let go of?

Want to keep going? Click here to find out more about working with me.

What’s next

Phase 2 (Session 4-6) is where we move from alignment to movement. This is where we take their prioritized opportunities and start validating them.

Our goal?

1. To gather evidence to make sure that the opportunities are indeed aligned and are a fit for their purpose

2. To address their fears and concerns through intentional actions

3. To design the steps that will start to bring their ideas to life in a more sustainable way.

So that they stop waiting to be ready and instead, make themselves be ready.

This is also where we shift from “hoping somebody will notice” to strategic positioning.

So we’ll work on how the participants show up. We’ll define what they want to be known and we’ll make sure their strengths and aspirations are visible, to themselves and others, so the right doors are more likely to open.

Phase 2 is about momentum. Slow if needed, but sustainable and always forward. It's about building confidence through evidence. And always be learning so they can adjust whenever needed.

If the opportunities are real and aligned? We’ll create them. Or we’ll attract them. Either way, we don’t wait. We act.

But first we take a break this week and conrtinue with the rest of the work next week.

As one of the participants said:

We’re normalizing taking breaks, here!

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📌 Coaching Bulletin Board:

📌 I’m something for first-time Product, UX, and Tech leaders. If you’re struggling to empower your team, deliver the impact that matters to the business, influence people within your organization, and try to stay sane through it all, I’d love to support you. I’m looking for 10-15 people to pilot the Leadership Lab with me. You can read all about it and sign up for the waitlist here.

📌 But if you feel that a dedicated space is what you need, then 1:1 Coaching might be the space for you. For the new and emerging leaders in Product, UX, and Tech going through career dilemmas, I’d love to help you define your strategies to set yourself and your team up for success. Book a free call and let’s discuss how we can work together.

📌 Magical Audios is partnering up with creative companies who want a more engaged and productive team. We’d love to design a program with you to help your team tap into their most creative and expansive selves so that they never run out of ideas that win. If this exactly what you’re looking for, I’d love to talk with you! Let’s chat about how the Magical Audios team can work with you :)

As I’ve mentioned earlier, the Stuck to Expansive program is also a reflection of my own expansion. So doing this program and writing about it means so much to me.

So if you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me until the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that you’d like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.

❤️

Kax

Before burning out and getting kicked out of my corporate employment, I was the Head of Product for a 100+ people organization working on the domain of Trust.

And if there’s anything I learned in the years I was working on the topic it’s this:

Trust is a decision.

We can’t make people trust us. We can only give them evidence that they can.
But ultimately, the choice is theirs.

So even if you are the most credible, reliable, empathetic person in the world, and they’ve known you for years, if they still don’t want to trust you. They won’t.

And it can take a million reasons to earn somebody’s trust.
And only one to break it.

And the same works for building trust with ourselves.

Trying to earn our own trust

We tell ourselves:

• Once I have learned all the skills, I’ll feel confident.

• Once I’ve gotten the title or the role, I’ll believe I’m good enough.

• Once I’ve accomplished so many things, I’ll believe I can have an impact.

We treat self-trust as a reward. Something we earn after we’ve proven ourselves to… ourselves.

But the problem with this approach is that there’s so much dependency; the milestone we’re looking for is always just a probability. And even if the milestone does happen, the goal post always seems to be moving.

So even if we’ve given ourselves so much evidence to trust ourselves, our capabilities, our capacity, if we’re afraid to do so, then we don’t.

There will always be one more milestone to achieve first before we believe we can feel confident, good enough, or have an impact. Rinse and repeat.

Self-Trust is hard

But before we talk about flipping this pattern, it’s worth calling out why trusting ourselves can be so hard.

Because it requires more than just a mindset shift (and that’s already difficult on its own).

Self-trust is a muscle we have to train, even on the days when we’d rather choose what feels easy.

Why is it hard?

• Because the stakes feel high. We worry about what happens if we’re wrong.

• And if things go wrong, it feels like we can’t go back from it.

• Because doing the hard thing means letting go of certainty, and by default, we avoid uncertainty.

But this is precisely why it’s worth doing.

Because the more we practice, the more our capacity grows. And the more we can trust ourselves to figure things out, even when the path is unclear.

Self-trust is not binary

And just to be clear, self-trust isn’t a one-time decision.
It’s not a single, epic moment of courage.

Sometimes we have it, sometimes we don’t.
Sometimes it’s strong, sometimes it needs 3 mugs of coffee before noon.

It’s not a single choice to be made. It’s a consistent practice, one uncomfortable decision at a time.

When Self-Trust is having a good day:

I remember being so surprised with myself when I said no to an opportunity in my old job. Knowing that saying NO will have consequences. But the cost of saying YES felt bigger.

So I trusted what my intuition was saying. I trusted that I am capable of bouncing back regardless of the consequences. I trusted myself to make the right decision. So I did.

And you know the story. I got laid off.

But if I may so myself, everything turned out so much better than I could have imagined.

When Self-Trust is NOT having a good day:

It was in the day-to-day when the lack of trust showed up. And cost was high.

“How can I coach Product Leaders and functional experts in tech when I’m no longer working as one? Losing the title felt like I lost my credibility too.”

And this is where I caught myself falling into an old pattern, the one where I tried to earn my own trust through external validation.

A confession

Summer 2024, a few months after getting fired, I was already questioning whether or not I had the chops to be a coach for PMs and Product Leaders. (Never mind that I have been doing it for years at this point)

I was getting leads, having discovery calls, but nobody was clicking.

Every call felt like a performance, and my friends, I was tanking the reviews.

In hindsight, it was indeed a performance. I was so busy trying to compensate for the lack of title, trying to prove that I am qualified to help, that I forgot to do the real work. The more I tried to prove, the more I drove away potential clients.

It was exasperating. And I honestly wanted to give up. I considered just taking the rest of the year off and going back to my corporate tech life in the new year (half serious but not quite.)

But there was one more call on my calendar. One last chance to “impress”.

But since I was ready to raise the white flag, I just I told myself to fuck it.

I wasn’t going to let go of all expectations, so there was zero pressure to close. And if I didn’t have the pressure to close, then I didn’t need to prove anything.

So I stopped looking at it as a “sales call”. And just focused on wanting to help.

And that I know I can do.

By the time the call ended, I had a new client.

And also a reminder:

Self-trust isn’t the result of success. It’s the foundation for it.

It’s not something we earn after we’ve proven ourselves. It’s what makes the proof possible in the first place.

A pattern I see all the time in the real world

And it’s not just me. I see it all the time with my clients when we first start working together:

The Over-Preparer: The aspiring Product Leader who kept taking courses, hoping a new certification would make her feel credible enough to apply for senior roles.

There was always something she needed to know how to do first before she could feel ready. But every new course just moved the goalpost. Because the context for leadership is always different everywhere, everyday.

The Hesitant Leader: The senior leader who kept doubting her capacity to lead because her style didn’t look like everyone else’s. She didn’t speak the loudest in meetings or had a million ideas per second. She thought that meant she was less capable.

So she held back, hesitated to share her thoughts, and resisted making the changes she knew would bring the results her team needed. It wasn’t that she lacked ideas. It was that she lacked the self-trust to act on them.

🧠 Reflection pause:

Was there an opportunity that you wished you trusted yourself more and took a chance on? 

When Self-Trust comes first

But when they finally flip the script and realize that the decision to trust was theirs to make, true empowerment comes in.

Choosing stability on their own terms: One client took a stable, “less sexy” role, not because it was her dream job, but because it gave her the bandwidth to figure out what she truly wanted next. She didn’t worry about how it might look on her CV or what it might signal to future employers.

Instead, she trusted herself to use the role as a platform for clarity and momentum. She’s now creating opportunities for herself in ways she hadn’t even considered were possible for her.

Saying yes before feeling 100% ready: Another client got tapped to try out for a Product Lead role just two months into a new company. She said yes. Not because she felt fully ready, it was the opposite. She didn’t feel ready at all. But she trusted her ability to learn fast, adapt as needed, and gain the tools that she would need along the way.

So she chose to bet on herself despite the doubt that was gnawing at the edges of her brain. As of writing, the process is still ongoing. But she’s already secured senior leadership backing.

Both of these clients made moves without guarantees, without waiting for someone else to clear the path. They chose to trust themselves first, and the results have been more expansive than just a title change.

They’re building careers that feel more aligned, more authentic, and more theirs.

🧠 Reflection pause:

When was the last time you trusted yourself to make a hard decision, even when you didn't truly feel ready, or have everything figured out?

How did that feel?

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Build trust, don’t earn it

Trusting ourselves” is easier said than done, especially when there are days when it feels like the world is just handing us evidence that we shouldn’t. I get it. I promise.

It’s because self-trust is a muscle we build every time we choose to back ourselves, even when the definition of “hard” keeps changing.

It’s the small, everyday choices that stack up over time to create real, lasting impact:

• Declining meeting invites because we trust our priorities, even when the meeting feels “important” and FOMO creeps in. (FOMO over a meeting exists, I swear)

• Pushing back on a bad idea, even when it comes from someone with more seniority, and not taking it personally if our voice is overridden.

• Being the person who asks the difficult question in a company all-hands, even when our voice shakes.

• Taking a break, even when our to-do list is still long.

• Asking for a raise or a promotion, even if we feel like the timing isn’t perfect.

And these choices are a reminder that we have more autonomy than we thought we did and a declaration that we believe in ourselves and our ability to figure things out, even if the outcomes aren’t guaranteed.

And this matters because when we trust ourselves:

1. We make decisions more clearly and quickly.

2. We take bigger swings. We stop waiting for perfect timing and just move.

3. We bounce back faster from setbacks, responding to the situation rather than wasting time spiraling.

Sometimes, trusting ourselves means knowing when to ask for help. When to invest in our own growth, even if it feels like an indulgence. When to lean on others without letting it undermine our belief in ourselves.

💡 If you’re ready to stop waiting for the perfect conditions and start building the career (and life) you actually want, I’d love to support you. 

Let’s chat about how you can strengthen your self-trust muscles and move with more clarity, confidence, and conviction.

🔗 Click here to book a call

TL;DR: Self-Trust as a Career Strategy

We often treat self-trust like a reward. Something we have to earn through milestones, approvals, so we can prove our worth.

But in reality, self-trust isn’t earned, it’s built on the decisions that we make over and over, even on the days when the ideal results feel impossible to achieve, and the self-doubt is loud.

It’s the foundation for the big, bold moves we want to make, built on the muscles we’ve strengthened through the daily, seemingly small choices we make to back ourselves.

The quiet “no” to a meeting that doesn’t serve our priorities.
The pushback on a bad idea, even if it comes from someone more senior.
The courage to speak up in big spaces even when we’re feeling small.
And sometimes, it’s knowing when to ask for help

When we choose to trust ourselves first, we stop waiting for the perfect conditions and start creating them for ourselves.

🧠 Reflection pause: 

If you trusted yourself 5% more today, what would you be doing more of? And what would you finally let go of?

📌 Coaching Bulletin Board:

📌 From Stuck to Expansive: The Full Journey is an 8-week program for people who want to be career-ready before the next shift hits. Whether you’re feeling the itch to move, wondering what’s next, or simply tired of waiting for the system to reward you, this is your space to build your career stack with clarity and confidence.

We start on May 21. Enrollment closes on May 19.

📌 1:1 Coaching for the new Product, UX, and Tech Leaders going through career dilemmas. If this is you, I’d love to help you define your strategies to set yourself and your team up for success. Book a free call and let’s discuss how we can work together.

If you’ve always wanted to work with a coach, but budget is a constraint, we can talk about how you can work with me for free through Inciteful :)

📌 Magical Audios is partnering up with companies to provide stronger and more effective support to their leadership teams so they can lead with presence, confidence, and resilience. If you would like to know how this can work for your organization, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me until the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that you’d like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.

❤️

Kax

So by the time you’re reading this, you might have heard already about the Great Big Blackout that hit Spain and Portugal on April 28, 2025. We still don’t know what caused it (as of writing), but the internet sure is full of conspiracy theories.

But I’m not here to write about the conspiracies, I’m here to write about being a prepper. As in doomsday prepper. 😂

I’ve always been a prepper. Having grown up in Manila when we had regular power outages in the 90s, and typhoons that killed both power and water supply while also blocking off roads for days (weeks for some) — it’s hard not to be.

I grew up knowing that we always had to have, at least, the following at hand:

1. Source of light: battery-operated lamps, flashlights, candles, batteries, lighters

2. Source of food and water: including food that can be eaten without cooking (bonus: ice packs to keep the food in the freezer frozen longer)

3. Fully charged power banks and devices + a battery-operated radio

4. First aid kit and extras of basic OTC medicine

5. And emergency cash

Since I’ve moved to Europe, some things have been modified like: swapping my car preps (I don’t have a car here) with sturdy shoes and socks in case there’s a need to evacuate. If you need a list, let me know and I’ll send you mine. 😂

I grew up with disasters, so I was always prepared for disasters.

During the early days of the Covid lockdown, I made sure we had a full fridge and pantry that could last us weeks without needing to go to the store.

When there was a water supply issue in Catalunya in 2023, I made sure we always had palettes of water, empty containers we could fill up, and water-purifying tools.

My friends thought I was being paranoid. Maybe I was. But I’m ok with that. When you've gone through the disasters that I have as a kid, it’s better to be paranoid than caught unprepared.

But I never prepped for doomsday. I prepped for Tuesday, as the more hardcore preppers would say. As in, I prep for the most likely to happen scenarios vs prepping for the apocalypse that’s likely to wipe out the entire human population in one go.

Some examples of Tuesday scenarios:

1. Service interruptions

2. Sudden layoffs

3. A natural disaster

So I prep for when electricity and water are out, and we’d have to bug in.
And I also prep for having to immediately rush out of the house in case of fire or earthquake.

What does this have to do with the blackout?

Well, on Tuesday, while some of my friends were out of water, or had no cash to buy supplies from the very few open stores, or had no means to get information from anybody…

I was having a candlelit dinner of “lomo bajo” and kimchi fried rice with my boyfriend while we listened to a woo-woo audiobook for fun.

We were comfortable, and could invite our friends over to cook their food (or have some of ours if needed), refill their water/ take a shower. At least I could tell them when our mobile coverage was not failing (which is a prep improvement for later).

But before you go rushing to the nearest supermarket or fill up your Amazon carts with power stations and emergency kits (don’t, they’re useless) — I just want to tell you that the preps we have at home were not made in one day. That would get ridiculously expensive very fast and also hard to plan out (which is what usually turns most people off from prepping, apart from not wanting to be seen as a paranoid, off-the-grid, wild person).

My preps were made over time. Slowly. Sustainably.

• Buying extra tins of tuna, canned veggies, or a bottle of honey when doing the groceries

• Subscribing to battery orders so I’ll always have a fresh supply every 10 months

• Watching out for sales in camping stores so I can buy water containers and portable lighting equipment

My point?

Most people think prepping is about stockpiling out of fear. Hoarding things “just in case”. But at its core, prepping is about readiness. Not for catastrophe but for disruption.

And before you think you just signed up for a prepping newsletter (that’s an idea though!)…

What does this have to do with careers?

Right! Plenty!

Because career disruption is a Tuesday scenario that can’t be solved by just purchasing extra cans of tuna the next time you do your groceries.

And because most people don’t prepare for Tuesday, they only realize how unprepared they are when something breaks: a sudden layoff, a messy reorg, a promotion that doesn’t come, a job that slowly stops fitting.

And I’ve seen it up close with my clients, ex-colleagues, and friends.

Here are ways being unprepared can look like in the wild:

• Believing the career myth that having a full-time job is real security, until the layoff hits, and they realize their LinkedIn is empty, their CV is five years old, and their network doesn’t reach beyond their team.

  

• They believed that if they just kept working hard, volunteered for more initiatives, and kept their head down, the reward would come… until they get their third “not yet” in a row. And they want to get out because it's been truly frustrating, but after being told so many times that they're not ready, they’ve started to believe it.

• They want to get out of their 9-5 grind and build something of their own. A startup, a business, a hustle. But they don’t know where to start. And the risk feels too big for them to truly bet on it (or themselves). After all, there are bills to pay.

• They’re craving a full career pivot. They want a role that’s different from what they used to do. But they have zero credibility in the new field, unable to connect the dots between what they used to do and where they want to be, each rejection chips away at what’s left of their confidence. And motivation can only last so long.

And it’s not that they don’t have the talent or potential. The people I know who are in these situations are some of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met, and I wish I had half of the talent that they have 😂

So this is absolutely not a talent problem. It’s not a potential problem either.

It’s a system problem. Or more accurately, the absence of a system.

And by the time people realize they need one, it’s like showing up to the supermarket to grab toilet paper… but the shelves are already empty.

So what does being a career prepper actually look like?

So what does being a career prepper actually look like? It’s not about perfecting your CV in 47 formats or doomscrolling Linkedin, saving posts from the 5 million thoughtfluencers who’re preaching that if you’re not learning AI, you’re going to get left behind.

Career prepping is about building your career stack:

• Being able to name what you're actually great at and how that’s created success (for you and the people or orgs you’ve worked with).

• Being clear on what you want to be known for and being intentional about what you want other people to say about you when you're not in the room.

• Building relationships beyond your job title and current organization with people you can learn from, collaborate with, support, and be supported by.

• Knowing how to show up with a strong voice, a clear story, and a presence that says “I know I’m awesome. Have you met me?”

• And perhaps most importantly: having a self-worth that doesn’t rise and fall with the market. A value you carry even when the org chart doesn’t know where to place you.

That’s what I mean when I say career stack.

It’s not just a 10-year plan. Or immediately posting every day on LinkedIn, thinking that’s how you build a personal brand.

It’s having a full ecosystem that you can build over time, piece by piece. In a way that’s sustainable, real, and rooted in who you are (not just who you think the market wants you to be).

And because you build it slowly, you get to experiment. To have your preps ready and your pantry full before the storm hits. To make moves that feel aligned, not reactive.

Practical examples, let’s go!

1. For someone still employed but watching layoff waves roll by? It might look like updating that CV and their LinkedIn profile now — not because they’re panicking, but so they’re never scrambling. Or warming up connections and making new ones (because we all know that the application that matters these days is a referral). Quiet prep that turns into confidence when it counts.

2. For someone stuck in “not yet” promotion purgatory? It’s not about asking for more responsibilities. It’s tracking the impact that they already make. Creating a brag document, even if no one asks, and turning it into a bullet-proof case come the next promotion cycle.

3. For someone dreaming of leaving the corporate grind? It’s not quitting and building a business from scratch overnight. It’s talking to people. Running low-stakes, high-insight experiments or research. To test ideas. Validating that the problems they want to solve are real, and that their way of solving is something people would want to pay for.

4. For someone craving a pivot? It might look like mapping the common thread across their career. Reaching out to five people in the new field, not to ask for a job, but to learn, connect, and be seen before they even send a single application.

Small shifts that compound to create big impact.

One of my 1:1 coaching clients did exactly just that. When we started working together, she introduced herself as “I’m just a Product Owner.” She didn't think she had the chops or legitimacy to go after something big. She was applying for roles, but none of them were landing.

She saw herself as small, so other people saw her as small too.

We didn’t jump into CV mode. We built her career stack instead.

1. We got clear on her edge: the things she was brilliant at, and how her presence made teams stronger and companies better.

2. We defined what she wanted to be known for and helped her show up as that version of herself, consistently.

3. We mapped possibilities: spaces, people, problems, where aligned opportunities could come from

4. She started building real connections: joining communities, learning from peers, and being seen by the people already doing what she wanted to do.

5. And we worked on her voice. Her stories. Her self-worth. So she can align with the things that matter to her and not make herself smaller to fit the container that her fears want to box her in.

She finally stopped waiting to feel legitimate, and she started showing up fully knowing she already was.

The results soon came after.

Two months ago, she was tapped to lead a project with the exact ownership, scope, and visibility she used to think required someone more… “legit.”

Now she’s up for promotion. But the best part was what she said after:

“If the promotion happens, amazing. But if not, because of politics or budget or whatever — I’ll be okay. I know I can move somewhere better for me.”

That’s what building your stack does. And that’s what career prepping looks like.

It’s not scrambling for a plan B. It’s building a foundation so solid, you always have a plan A, B, and C… and the power to choose which one feels right.

⛑️ If you're in the middle of your career crisis (or you're on the edge of one), and need help prepping for your ideal scenario. Click here to book a discovery call with me and let's chat about the support you need and how we can collaborate together. 🤙

p.s. Or you can join my 8-week group coaching program, From Stuck to Expansive: The Full Journey. It's an 8 week group experience to help the often high-performing professionals in tech who are feeling stuck and unsure about where to take their careers next.

TL;DR Career Prepping in a nutshell

Being a prepper was never about stockpiling canned goods for the end of the world. It was about being ready for the disruptions that are likely to happen on a regular Tuesday (sometimes Monday).

And career prepping works the same way.

Most people wait until they need to make a move before they even start thinking about their next step. But by then, the layoff has already hit, the role has stopped fitting, or the opportunity has passed them by.

Career prep isn’t just dusting off your CV or downloading a free resume template from some influencer’s newsletter. It’s building your career stack over time. Quietly, sustainably, and with intention.

• It looks like knowing what you’re great at and how you’ve made a difference.

• It looks like knowing how to make your name carry weight so you can show up in spaces with presence, not because of your title, but because of your impact.

• It looks like having a story you can tell without cringing, a network that extends beyond your team

• It looks like having self-worth that doesn’t fall apart when the org chart does.

And when all of that is in place? You stop chasing stability in systems that were never built for you. You stop waiting to be picked, validated, or promoted to feel like you matter.

You start building on your own terms. With more clarity and conviction.

While it creating a career stack as a prep is a smart strategy — for me, it’s also a quiet rebellion.

Because the real goal isn’t just to survive your career. It’s to build a life that doesn’t revolve around it.

Let the companies keep their tables. I’d rather that the rest of us are building entire homes, so we can invite more people in to have tea. 😎

📌 Coaching Bulletin Board:

📌 From Stuck to Expansive: The Full Journey is an 8-week program for people who want to be career-ready before the next shift hits. Whether you’re feeling the itch to move, wondering what’s next, or simply tired of waiting for the system to reward you, this is your space to build your career stack with clarity and confidence.

There are only 20 spots — because this isn’t just another course meant to teach you how to be more productive. It’s a small, high-touch group designed for support, accountability, and expansive conversations with people who get it.

We start May 21. Early Bird pricing (€599) is available until May 5.

📌 1:1 Coaching for the new Product, UX, and Tech Leaders going through career dilemmas. If this is you, I’d love to help you define your strategies to set yourself and your team up for success. Book a free call and let’s discuss how we can work together.

📌 Magical Audios is partnering up with companies to provide stronger and more effective support to their leadership teams so they can lead with presence, confidence, and resilience. If you would like to know how this can work for your organization, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me until the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that you’d like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.

❤️

Kax

The biggest career myth ever told? That having a full-time job is the safest, most secure path. That we just need to keep our head down, work hard, follow a straight line, and we’ll be rewarded with shiny titles, fat paychecks, and a golden reputation in record time.

I believed it. Until I didn’t.

I got laid off in January 2015 from a startup after an M&A (now that I’m typing this down, what happened in 2024 feels like a deja vu lol). Everybody in the company was sacked. I have no beef, though. They gave us a generous severance package and off-boarding support.

I still didn’t lose faith in the myth.

I even thought of it as just the universe creating space for something bigger/better. Still think it’s true!

Because after that, I got a job as a Product Manager in a multinational tech company and moved to Barcelona after that. I was living!

But that job came with caveats. They sponsored my visa. I didn’t think much about it because hey that’s a huge deal for me and my Philippine passport.

Until that visa became a dependency.

3 years later, I found out that I was the lowest-paid and lowest-level Product Manager in our group. This, despite leading a product that supposedly unlocked opportunities for the business and reshaped how our group operated. Despite hearing glowing feedback and being told that my work was “a game changer.”

Despite having all the receipts to prove that I had an impact. I was not rewarded nor recognized.

At first, I tried the usual route: as in I asked for a recalibration and pushed for a raise. But between multiple manager changes and bureaucratic messes, the answer was always: not yet.

And I couldn’t easily leave for another job either. Visa sponsorship is a big ask, and most companies weren’t easily convinced that I was worth the investment of both time, money, and dealing with the stress of the paperwork.

That’s when it hit me. The thing I thought would keep me secure, my job, was the very thing that was keeping me stuck.

My employer didn’t just control my employment. They also decided whether I could stay in a country I now called home.

And all I could do was hope that someone else would pick me. Promote me. Rescue me.

I kept waiting. Still thinking that working hard and being the ‘ideal employee’ would be enough. Because I didn’t really feel like I had any other real options. Not unless someone else said yes.

I knew I wasn’t bad at my job. My recalibration case proved that. And my revolving door of managers who wanted to support me but couldn’t prove it too.

But there was still the nagging feeling at the back of my head that “clearly, I wasn’t good enough” if I was having a hard time finding anybody to bet on me again while out of the promotion cycle, or to invest in me again despite the bureaucratic nightmare for a visa sponsorship.

That was the wake-up call. I didn’t like having this much dependency on anybody.

It was bad enough that I was dependent on somebody else to stay in Barcelona. But I was also dependent on somebody else to say that I was awesome for me to fight harder for what I deserved.

I did not fly halfway across the world just to feel helpless.

There is no reward in “just” working hard

And that wake-up call was the start of my villain era (aka my “strategic about my career” era). 😂

So I took a deep breath, stopped feeling sorry for myself, and took a long hard look at myself in the mirror — asking these questions:

1. What do I really want? Was it really about the title? Yes. But I also want to be autonomous. Have less dependency and not need to wait to be chosen. And I also want to enjoy my professional life.

2. Who do I need to become to get it? Do I need to be a Senior PM? Or do I need to be the kind of person who behaves like one already? Who knew their shit and wasn’t afraid to tell the world about it? But also wasn’t afraid to admit what they didn’t know (to themselves) and take it from there.

I stopped performing for a title and started performing for myself.

What does this mean, actually?

• I started showing up differently at work. I gave myself permission to show up in spaces where I thought, in the beginning, that I didn’t belong. I spoke about the topics that I thought, at first, I had no say in. And I said no to the things that kept me busy but also kept me from having a real impact.

• I didn’t stop there. I showed up differently outside of work, too. As in, I started showing up. I started experimenting with what else I can do with the things I know how to do, and how I can have more fun with them. So I started teaching and mentoring, did my first public speaking stints, and even started a community for professional women.

And that’s when things changed.

Suffice to say I got what I wanted after that.

I ended up staying in the company. I got the promotion — a 2-level jump and the appropriate salary too. And I never had to send a single CV since then to be considered for an open role.

But in reality, I got so much more. I got self-trust. And the realization that I can give myself options by making myself visible. Not to build a brand. But to build proof so I can stop waiting to be picked, and start positioning myself to choose.

I didn’t know it then, but what I was doing was building my career stack.

Not a list of skills on a CV. But the deeper assets that can travel with me across seasons, titles, and industries.

The Career Strategy to rule them all

These days, when companies are laying off left and right or every CEO thinks that AI can do the job of 10 people, being able to give ourselves options is even more important.

I have a friend who’s been in her company forever, got let go without a warning. And this has impact, both emotionally and financially. And to think that she wanted to leave before; but stayed because according to her the company has been good to her and didn’t want to let people down.

Another friend is still traumatized from a previous lay-off so she’s started to play safe in her current one to not be in the firing line. And this has impact too. On how she engages with her new role and in her confidence.

We’ve all been taught the same myth. Get a full-time job. Work hard. Keep your head down. And you’ll always be safe and rewarded. Security.

But this myth has been debunked over and over again, moreso in the last 2-3 years.

The real safety? It’s in ourselves. From knowing that whatever happens, we’ll be able to bounce back because we’ve created options for ourselves. Because we’ve created career optionality.

Career optionality isn’t just a cool word that a bunch of influencers have been throwing out these days.

It’s a career strategy. It’s the ability to move between roles, industries, and domains because of the experiences and impact we’ve accumulated (and have receipts for them too) over the years. It’s being able to respond to the waves of hype that disrupt the industry with calm and perspective.

It’s a way of leading our careers that doesn’t rely on being chosen but on knowing what we carry.

And these days, it’s a critical career strategy.

And no, it’s not about being a solopreneur or building a side hustle. It’s about being able to do so if we want to.

It’s about building a career stack that can hold us, stretch with us, and reflect who we truly are.

Everybody’s career stack is different, but often it includes:

1. The things we’re great at and the ripples we create

2. The way we show up to truly represent our value

3. The ability to track possibilities and turn them into opportunities

4. The connections and relationships we’ve built and nurtured

5. The way that we take care of ourselves and protect our boundaries

And each part of the stack works like a lever. When one is strong, like our relationships, the self-talk, or our proof impact, it builds momentum.

But when several are strong? That’s when things start to compound. That’s when you stop asking for permission and stop waiting to be chosen… and you start feeling your oats. (side note: honestly, if you haven’t yet — please watch Ru Paul’s Drag Race for the best life school there is)

And the thing is that we never actually need to build from scratch. Most of us already have the pieces that build up to a stack. What’s often missing is the ability to see them, the courage to name them, and the audacity to use them.

But the rules of the job market have changed. And they keep changing.

And while building a career stack to create career optionality as a strategy is not a new thing… if it’s new to you, I encourage you to start exploring it.

Because the job title? It won’t protect most of us..

That full-time job? It can’t guarantee anything to us (no matter how many times slides about how “we’re a family” are shown at every All Hands).

But the career stack we can build? It can do all of that… and maybe even more.

It’s time to get off my soapbox now. But if any of this made your stomach clench or your shoulders ride up to your ears… that’s your signal.

You don’t have to wait for the rug to be pulled out from under you. You don’t need to wait for the right time either (because when is that, really?). You can start building your stack now.

Start with what’s already true:

• What do you have that you’ve been hiding behind “it’s not good enough”

• How have you made the people/company you’ve worked with successful or better?

• Who knows what you’re great at?

• Also… do you? And if not, maybe it’s time to find out.

You don’t need a 5 year plan. Just a little more self-trust.

This is the work I do now with my clients inside the Career Expansion Playbook… and honestly even with myself (yes, still). Bit by bit. Layer by layer.

I’ll share more about the playbook soon. But for now:

If this is something you want to explore more deeply, I’d love to invite you to:

1. Get on the waitlist for my free workshop, From Stuck to Expansive on April 24. It’s full but just in case somebody cancels, you’ll be the first to know.

2. Or if you would like to explore 1:1 support, book a discovery call with me and let’s discuss what that can look like for you.

Thanks for reading!

💙

Kax
(i’m also on LinkedIn and on Instagram)

📌 Coaching Bulletin Board:

📌 1:1 Coaching for the new Product, UX, and Tech Leaders going through your dilemmas. I’d love to help you define your strategies to set yourself and your team up for success. Book a free call and let’s discuss how we can work together.

📌 Magical Audios is partnering up with companies to provide stronger and more effective support to their leadership teams so they can lead with presence, confidence, and resilience. If you would like to know how this can work for your organization, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

This isn’t my usual newsletter drop, but it's a special edition for the quietly restless (maybe that's you).

Because this 👇 keeps coming up in client calls and drinks with friends lately, and I think it’s worth pausing for:

It’s not that everything’s falling apart. It’s that the old version of “success” doesn’t feel quite right anymore. And the question bubbling up behind the scenes is:

“So… now what?”

They’re high-achieving, thoughtful humans in tech. People who’ve done all the “right” things, only to find themselves stuck, uninspired, or unsure of what’s next.

Some of them are sitting in personal development talks with their manager, dreading the question: “So… what’s your next goal?” Because they don’t have an answer.

Others keep saying yes to the big, complex projects hoping it’ll rekindle inspiration — but all it does is inch them closer to burnout.

And a few have asked me directly:

“How did you do it?! Go from Head of Product to Coach & Founder so fast after getting laid off?”

Was it fast? Not at all. I didn’t really have a get-out-of-corporate master strategy.

But yes, technically — I had a "plan". If you count side projects with no guaranteed outcomes and a healthy dose of "it'll probably be fine" energy a plan.

By the time I got laid off, I’d already shaken hands with my Magical Audios co-founders, and I had a coaching business that could pay the bills.

But these plans didn’t appear overnight. They were breadcrumbs I’d been dropping since 2019:

• Mentoring someone who reminded me of younger me.

• Teaching a workshop I wasn’t sure I was qualified to lead.

• Sharing violent reactions about the industry in my newsletter.

None of those breadcrumbs looked like “a pivot” when I first said yes to them.

In the beginning, they were just things I wanted to try because they looked fun, exciting, and a little bit terrifying (in a good way).

But those tiny yeses? They gave me energy, confidence, and eventually, the freedom to choose. Now here we are.

That’s what this workshop is about:

🗓 From Stuck to Expansive: Free 90-minute workshop
🗓️ April 24 | 19h CET
📍Zoom
🎟 Save your seat → Click here to register

Click here to join the workshop

This isn’t about building a business (unless that’s a door you want to open later).
It’s not about polishing your resume or building a personal brand empire.
And I won’t ask you to define your entire identity in three sticky-notes.

But it is about:

• Naming the quiet hunches you’ve been ignoring.

• Making space for the stuff that actually gives you energy.

• Designing one tiny, honest next step—whether it’s tweaking your current role, testing a wild idea, or just feeling a little more like yourself again.

You might realize you’ve been optimizing for the wrong outcomes.
Maybe your job isn’t broken.
Maybe you’ve just outgrown the container you put yourself in.

Because you weren’t meant to sacrifice your sanity to build another CEO’s dream life.

You don’t need a master plan. But you do deserve to feel like your work fits you — not the other way around.

Come join us. We’ll name what no longer fits and explore what might.
Maybe this workshop is your breadcrumb. Just one honest next step... together.

See you there? 🔮
Kax + The Universe

p.s. If this feels personal, and you're looking for more high-touch support, I’ve got 1 more 1:1 coaching spot left. Book a call with me.

1. They struggle to make the shift from being the executor to enabler

2. They struggle to navigate people and politics

3. They struggle with the mental load of being a leader - this issue ✍️
   
   

   Thanks for reading How to Build What Feels Good & Other Stories! Subscribe for free to get new posts on Product & Tech Leadership

It’s not as sexy as we think it is

A lot of Senior PMs want to move up to a leadership role.

• Maybe because it feels like the natural step — the only one.

• Maybe because it looks like the place where real influence happens.

• Maybe because the role just looks like success. Sexy title. Endless opportunities.

But when we finally get there? It’s a lot messier than we expected.

Not because we’re doing anything wrong; but because what the job actually requires is nothing like what we were doing before.

Not because we’re just bad at leadership, but because leadership asks us to show up in ways we were never trained for. (but also real talk, nobody’s good at this from the beginning, though!)

In Part 1 we talked about shedding the identity of the executor and stepping into the role of an enabler. Someone who empowers their team to deliver value, instead of trying to do it all themselves.

Then in Part 2, we explored politics. Not the shady stuff, but the real work of building influence, alignment, and trust in a system that doesn’t always make that easy.

And now, we arrive at Part 3: What happens when we’re doing all the “right” things and it still feels like we’re drowning?

This is about the mental and emotional overload of leadership.

Because if you’ve ever thought:

• “I don’t know what I’m doing and I can’t ask anyone.”

• “Everyone needs something from me, and I haven’t peed in six hours.”

• “I’m trying so hard, but people still aren’t happy.”

You’re not broken. You’re carrying the load most people don’t talk about.

And you might be doing it without training, support, or space to breathe.

Let’s talk about what that weight really is and how to finally set some of it down.

Share

Why this feels so hard

Let’s be honest: most new Product Leaders don’t get real training on how to lead.

Especially if we’re promoted from within. One day, we’re the safe space for venting about leadership. The next, we are leadership.

And that shift? It’s jarring. For us, and for the people around us.

We’re no longer “one of them,” but we’re not fully trusted as “the leader” either. Not yet.

So we tiptoe. We overexplain. We second-guess. We don’t want to overstep. But we also don’t want to let anyone down.

That in-between space? That’s where mental and emotional overload lives.

So we carry:

• The pressure to have the answers, even when we’re still figuring it out

• The responsibility to hold space for everyone else’s emotions, even when we’re unsure of our own

• The unspoken expectation to speak the right language with leadership, while shielding our team from chaos below

And we often feel like we have to do it all alone.

Our new peers don’t quite feel like peers yet.
Our old peers now look to us for direction.
We’re managing up, trying to prove we deserve the role.

So we start second-guessing everything. And we hear vague feedback like:

• “Be more strategic.”

• “Drive alignment.”

• “Coach your team better.”

Cool. But what does that actually mean?
Do we need to be louder? Bring more frameworks? Pretend to have it all figured out?

Sometimes the pressure gets so loud we start to believe:

“Maybe I’m just not cut out for this.” or  
“Maybe I should have just stayed an IC.”

One of my coaching clients, a new Product Director told me she’d leave every leadership meeting feeling like she didn’t belong.

She thought her peers were faster. More articulate. Infinite well of ideas. And she can’t keep up, or so she thought.

But she wasn’t “behind.” She was just wired differently. And in leadership, different can be a strength. But only if we stop treating it like a flaw.

Honestly, even seasoned leaders still wrestle with this. They’re just better at hiding it. Or they’ve built more tools to catch the spiral before it takes over. 😅

When we don’t pause to question these beliefs, we internalize them.

They shape what we say yes to. What we carry. And then we twist ourselves into knots trying to meet expectations that were never actually spelled out.

I’ve been there.

And then we’re like… why does this still suck? Even when nothing’s on fire?

Leadership isn’t just a role shift. It’s a reality shift. ✋🎤

⛑️ If you're a new product leader going through your dilemmas, I'd love to support you. Click here to book a discovery call with me and let's chat about the support you need and how we can collaborate together. 🤙

Strategies for Change

So how do we stay centered and fulfilled in the face of all this?

Here are four strategies I’ve leaned on (and helped others lean into) that make the emotional load of leadership feel a little less heavy, and a lot more doable.

disclaimer: Not every environment makes this kind of leadership feel possible especially when the culture values output over people, or speed over care. But if we’re going to stay in these roles and make a real difference, we have to find ways to lead that still feel true to us.

1️⃣ Define your values and align your leadership to them

When we’re navigating expectations from all sides, our values become our anchor.

• If transparency is one of our values, maybe that looks like looping our team in even when we don’t have all the answers… and trusting them with the nuance.

• If collaboration is a value, maybe it means making space for input, even when a top-down decision would be faster.

• If fun is a value (yes, it counts), maybe we add some humor into our meetings, even during crunch time; because our teams perform best when morale is high.

Our values become our internal compass when everything else feels uncertain.

They help us make better calls, faster. And they give us a sense of what “good” actually means — not some LinkedIn version of leadership, but the one that makes sense to us.

And here’s the part we forget: We are not just our titles.

Even if it feels like our self-worth is riding on every decision we make.

The more we detach our identity from the title, the easier it is to lead with integrity not fear.

Because when our sense of self is rooted in our values, not our job, we make decisions that reflect what actually matters. Not just what quiets the noise or wins approval.

Even when the work is messy, we stay steady; because we’re anchored in something we chose.

2️⃣ Define your leadership presence

This isn’t about looking polished or performing leadership. It’s about the energy we bring into the room.

People aren’t just responding to our strategy or ideas. They’re responding to us and how we make them feel.

And that response is shaped by how we carry ourselves, how we communicate, how we hold space in a room (or a Zoom), and how we manage pressure.

Because presence isn’t just tone or posture or eye contact. It’s steadiness and how it builds trust. It’s being someone people want to follow.

Not because we’re the loudest, but because we help people feel seen, safe, and supported.

It’s also about restraint. When everything feels urgent and emotionally loaded, our job isn’t to react. Our job is to respond. And sometimes, not at all.

That means learning when to speak, when to pause, and when to let go.

Because if we respond to every fire with fire, we’re going to burn ourselves out soon enough.

3️⃣ Give yourself the support you need

We’re not supposed to have it all figured out.

And yet, so many of us feel like asking for help means we’re failing. That we should already know how to hold hard conversations, coach effectively, align with leadership, manage team dynamics, and juggle all the processes around budgets, performance, and promotions too. Wow. The pressure!

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

And no one taught us how to lead, then we get to build our own curriculum.

We can work with a coach. Find a community. Ask our manager what support exists.

And if nothing is offered, we start with our peers. Some of the most useful insights come from honest conversations with other leaders figuring it out, too.

Just because no one gave us onboarding document doesn’t mean we have to figure it out alone. Doesn’t matter where the support comes from, but sometimes we need people who can hold space for us. People we can be honest with, vent to, and get perspective from.

No shame confession: I used to have group calls with my peers who are also first time product leaders blocked out in my calendar just to vent, ask for advice, or gain perspective. It was like group therapy. And the relief after every call was real. 

Asking for help isn’t a weakness thing. It’s an “I actually give a damn about doing this well” thing

The strongest leaders aren’t the ones who go it alone. They’re the ones who know when to ask for help and aren’t afraid to do it.

4️⃣ Lead with a vision for your product, your team, and yourself

Without a clear direction, it’s easy to get swept up in every escalation, preference, or request that comes our way.

We don’t need a five-year plan. But we do need a sense of what “good” looks like. A north star. Not just for our product strategy but for our team culture and leadership, too.

Some guide questions:
What kind of team are we building?
What kind of environment are we nurturing?
How do we want people to feel when they work with us?
What kind of leader are we working toward becoming?

When we know the answers to those, it becomes much easier to decide what to prioritize, what to let go of, and what to simply not respond to without spiraling into self-doubt.

Not everything’s ours to fix. And not everything going sideways means we’ve failed as a human.

But our vision? That’s ours to hold. And that’s where we lead from.

TL;DR: Leadership is being human.

No one tells us that stepping into a Product Leadership role means walking straight into a storm of expectations… many of them unspoken, conflicting, and some that can feel impossible to meet.

We’re not just managing roadmaps. We’re managing people’s emotions, team dynamics, career growth, stakeholder tension, and our own self-doubt. Often without much support.

That’s a lot. And yet… it’s the job

It’s no wonder we start to question ourselves.

But maybe we’re not doing it wrong. Maybe we just need to lead from a different place.

And here are four ways we can start anchoring ourselves:

• Define our values. Make decisions we’re proud of and lead in a way that reflects who we are — not just how stressed we are

• Own our leadership presence. We don’t need to be the loudest voice. But we do need to be a steady one. Leadership becomes more sustainable when we’re intentional, not performative.

• Give ourselves the support we need. Ask for help. Share the load. Leadership isn’t a solo mission.

• Lead with a vision Not just for our product, but for the kind of team we want to build, and the kind of leader we want to become. It keeps us grounded when everything else feels chaotic.

Leadership isn’t about doing more, being more, proving more. It’s about leading in a way that doesn’t make us want to run away from Slack forever.

Turns out, the key to not burning out isn’t working harder. It’s leading on our own damn terms.

📌 Coaching Bulletin Board:

📌 1:1 Coaching for the new Product, UX, and Tech Leaders going through your dilemmas. I’d love to help you define your strategies to set yourself and your team up for success. Book a free call and let’s discuss how we can work together.

📌 Feeling stuck in your career but not sure what to do next? Join my free 90-minute workshop on April 24 to explore new possibilities and create your own opportunities

📌 Magical Audios is giving away a free guided self-hypnosis for healing burnout. Click here to start listening.

1. They struggle to make the shift from being the executor to enabler

2. They struggle to navigate people and politics - today’s issue! ✍️

3. They struggle with the mental load of being a leader - coming soon!

In the previous issue, we talked about the importance of shedding the identity of executor and shifting into an enabler role that empowers their team to deliver value.

This means resisting the urge to fix everything, micromanage, or rely on old habits as an individual contributor. And instead, putting our energy into making sure that:

• The team has clarity, alignment, and focus.

• Communication flows efficiently without unnecessary overhead.

• Team members feel supported in their growth and decision-making.

Ok so we’ve got a strategy for our team, we’ve put into place communication and processes that work, and team members feel empowered!

In an ideal world, our teams would be fully independent and can achieve their goals on their own.

But the reality is actually the opposite:

1. Dependencies exist and often create competing goals and constraints

2. What your team needs help with might come at a cost to others

3. Leadership priorities don’t always align with what’s best for your team.

And this is where POLITICS comes in.

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Politics can feel gross. I get it.

I used to work in an industry back in the Philippines where if we needed to get buy-in from the teams we depended on, we’d buy them gifts or treat them to expensive lunches. 😅 So I didn’t exactly have a healthy view of politics in the beginning too.

These days, I hear a lot from many of the Product folks I talk to that they want to look for a new job because they want to be in a place with no politics.

That place does not exist.

So avoiding it is impossible. And not wanting to engage in it only makes the job harder.

Because the more Senior you become, the more the job involves the need to navigate relationships and align more and more complex stakeholders to make sure that the team can move forward in an environment of uncertainty.

At its core, politics is really about

1. The relationships we build in the organization

2. The trust and confidence these relationships hold in us

3. And the influence we have as a result.

Often, people mistake attaching a “Senior”, “Lead” or even “Chief” in their titles grant them automatically influence.

Sure you may have gained some level of authority with the title change. But authority is limited. It doesn’t translate sideways or upwards where getting buy-in tends to be critical.

So if politics is so simple at its core and so important, why do some people still avoid it like the plague?

🔥 If you don’t know how to navigate it, it’s easy to get burned out by it. It takes a lot of time and effort to “people”. The common complaint is constantly being pulled into meetings and never-ending push and pull to get an alignment.

How this looks like in real life: A Product Director trying to create a new process but constantly facing resistance from their peers. It takes many weeks and some escalations to get an agreement.

🔥 If your approach to politics is not working, the lack of results can feel frustrating. There is no one-size-fits-all all approach to corporate politics. It’s highly dependent on you, the person, your values, your style. And until you find that combination that hits the spot, seeing your peers constantly get the buy-ins and opportunities you’re gunning for can feel demotivating.

How this looks like in real life: A Head of Product gets backing from leadership all the time when it comes to organization-wide priorities even if what they’re proposing doesn’t seem to have the highest potential for impact.

🔥 If your perception of the people who are good at politics is clouded, it can feel like a shady game to play. The people who might be raising your hackles might be the same people who are great at politics and who get the results you’re looking for. Turning you off from politics completely.

But if we go back to the core of what corporate politics is, it isn’t the problem. It’s how people choose to engage with it. And sometimes, our perception of the people who engage with it.

***

⚙️ If corporate politics is burning you out and this is blocking you and your team from achieving your goals, I offer 1:1 coaching support to new and aspiring product leaders and this is one of the most common struggles people work on with me. Would you like to explore how we can work on this together? Let’s chat.

Book a call to know more

Strategies for Change

Instead of avoiding politics, the solution is to get good at it. Corporate politics doesn’t have to mean selling your soul to the devil.

Let me share 4 mindset/behavior shifts that helped me and my clients expand our influence:

1️⃣ Shifting the mindset from “wanting to win” to “aligning interests”.

Influence isn’t about having the last word. It’s about creating alignment, building bridges, and finding paths forward that benefit the broader organization.

True story: After an acquisition, our department merged with the acquired company's equivalent department. The result? Multiple teams doing the same things. 

My tech partner in crime and I and our counterparts from the other department were put together to figure out what to do with the duplicate products in our departments. 

We had a deadline but no real guidance on what the outcome should be. Just "figure it out". 

Both sides were worried about the potential consequence for our teams. 

We couldn't agree on what to do. We all had a case for why our product should stay and the other should be deprecated. 

We all had the motivation to be right. And we were all suspicious of one another.

But we were also getting nowhere. 

I wish I could tell you that how we got to a solution was a stroke of genius on my part. But it was mostly because I was really frustrated and I needed to let my feelings out. 

So in one of our meetings, instead of arguing again about which case was stronger, I just asked my counterparts if we can talk about:

- What did we really want to achieve
- What were we really concerned about

Just a conversation about our feelings and fears.

And that hour of vulnerability unlocked everything for us.
We found our common ground, we started speaking the same language. 
And we "figured it out". 

Only to be told after we presented our case to our leadership that we shouldn't do anything anymore because we were changing directions and we'd be told more soon (that soon was 1 year later lol). 😂 

In a complex environment, even with aligned goals, every department has its own concerns, constraints, and contexts that can seem to contradict each other.

And having blinders on a single solution can put everybody, including ourselves, in defense mode.

But when we keep the focus on what really matters, the objectives, the problems to solve, and the humans involved… the conversation shifts. Most of the time, it even opens up opportunities for better and stronger solutions.

Try: Instead of “We need to do this” try “How can we achieve this goal together?”

2️⃣ EARN people’s trust by being trustworthy

In this part, I defer to Rachel Botsman who’s always been my reference for any topic related to Trust.

We can’t make people trust us. It’s a belief that we can’t control.

But we can be trustworthy. This is within our control and shaped by our behaviors and motivations.

She further shared these 4 traits that can make us more worthy of someone’s trust:

What do these traits mean?

1. Competence - Can we do the job we say we can? Do we have the skills, knowledge, and resources? Are we honest about the things we say we can and cannot do?

2. Reliability - Can we be depended on to keep our commitments? Do we set clear and correct expectations? Are we consistent in our behaviors?

3. Integrity - Do we mean what we say and do we say what we mean? Are we honest about our intentions? Are our words and actions cohesive?

4. Empathy - Do we genuinely care about other people’s interests aside from our own? Do we stop to consider how our actions, decisions, and behavior impact others?

While we cannot control nor predict if people will trust us in the end, our capability and character can have a huge influence on how people perceive us.

Think: Do you want to be right or do you want to do the right thing?

3️⃣ Align with the leader you aspire to be.

How we show up matters. What trips most people up is that they see how others navigate politics in ways they don’t respect and they assume they have to play the same game to succeed.

And then they find themselves in complete misalignment with their values.

But gaining influence doesn’t have to mean manipulation or behaving in ways that feel wrong.

Defining the kind of leader we want to be and letting that guide our approach to politics is what makes things authentic and sustainable.

Our values as a leader will shape the way we communicate our intentions and the way we respond to setbacks

• If you're a leader who values collaboration, then your approach to politics will be guided by that. You’ll be inclusive of other people’s opinion and will be open to co-creation of solutions that lead to the same goals you’ve set out to have.

• If you’re a leader who values openness and transparency, you’ll seek to understand other people’s concerns behind their pushback. So you can adjust accordingly if needed (or not). While at the same time being able to distance yourself from the outcomes and not take things personally.

When our actions align with our values, we can gain influence without compromising who we are.

Try: Define what kind of leader do you want to be?

4️⃣ Get to know people and seek to give first. Seriously.

It surprises me how seldom new leaders know people outside of their own teams/departments when they begin their leadership life. Making their area of influence really small just because people they have to work with don’t know anything about them.

🔗 Read: This has been shared as one of the top reasons some PMs get passed over for promotions.

So this point is last in this list; but definitely not the least.

• If you want to be a leader, start getting to know people outside of your immediate environment.

• If you’re a new leader, start a listening tour ASAP.

Why? So you can have a grasp of what other teams are doing, what their goals are, and what they’re struggling with.

Don’t know how to approach people? Come from a place of curiosity.

In the oldie but still a goodie book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie he shared that people respond well to a genuine interest in them. So taking the time to understand their context helps to earn their trust over time.

And a bonus tip from Sarah Heal, Founder and CEO of Information Leadership which I love.

Giving is a great way to start gaining influence because it builds reciprocity and establishes us as a leader who really cares about delivering value vs winning. This can shift the relationship we have with our peers from being transactional to meaningful.

To be aware of: Expanding influence is extremely important to get things done and deliver something of value however just be mindful of the overhead and the dependency this can create. Read this post for tips co-written with .

***

💡 IMPORTANT:

Building relationships and earning trust to expand one’s influence TAKES TIME! Like all good and sustainable things do. This doesn’t happen overnight.

As Joy Adamson, Product Leader and Coach shared.

So the best time to start building these relationships and earning the trust that you need from your most important connections? Yesterday.

The second best time? Today.

This also calls out the need for patience. Meaningful changes like this need it.

TL;DR: Come to the dark side, it’s bright and shiny

Corporate politics doesn’t have to be that shady thing where you bribe people with expensive lunches to get what you want (though it can happen).

It's really just about building relationships, earning trust, so you can gain influence.

So instead of running away from politics, get good at it by:

• Shifting your mindset from "wanting to win" to "aligning interests"

• Earning trust by being trustworthy

• Aligning with your values as the leader you want to be

• Getting to know people outside your team before you desperately need their help (prevention > cure, folks!)

Politics is unavoidable in any organization with more than one person. But it doesn't have to mean we need to resort to shady tactics to get ahead.

It's simply how things get done when your team depends on others, which is basically always in the Product life.

The sooner we accept this, the sooner we can stop fighting it and start using it to help our teams succeed.

Because gaining influence through relationships takes time. And the best time to start doing this was yesterday. The 2nd best time? Today.

📌 Coaching Bulletin Board:

📌 1:1 Coaching for the new and aspiring Product, UX, and Tech Leaders! I’d love to help you define your strategies to set yourself and your team up for success. Book a free call and let’s discuss how we can work together.

📌 The Network with a Purpose program is live and running! Meltem and I designed this program to help ambitious professionals find AND create opportunities for themselves to achieve their career goals through building relationships in the industry. Apply to join.

📌 Magical Audios is giving away a free guided self-hypnosis for healing burnout. Click here to start listening.

If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me until the end. And thank you for your topic contributions!

❤️

Kax

PS. Here are more ways for us to connect:

1. Follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Bluesky for thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions that take less than 10 minutes to read. 😂

2. Follow Magical Audios on Instagram for announcements of new programs and events

The great leap into the unknown: from excellent Product Manager to brand new Product Leader

The PMs who find themselves becoming new Product Leaders usually get there because:

They’re great at their craft. They’re excellent at being Product Managers.

This can mean that they have a reputation for building good products that bring value and know how to build them well. They’re strategic within the context of their scope.

They might also have a relatively strong influence as in they have good relationships with their immediate stakeholders and their name is known by senior leaders in the organization.

But even for excellent Product Managers, the leap to becoming a Product Leader can be jarring.

Especially since the change in role and scope, rarely comes with any training.

If the change is done internally, it’s even worse. There’s no 3-6 month onboarding period. Just the expectation that you can do the job from one day to another.

The Product Leader role in a nutshell

When I was a new Product Leader, I didn’t fully understand what it meant to be a Product Leader. I thought I “just” needed to do the following:

1. Define a product strategy for our group

2. Have 1:1s with the people reporting to me to check in

3. So I can make sure my team delivers what they committed to deliver

Until I realized that it’s a lot more than that.

Simply put, I always like to say that:

Our role as a Product Leader is to create the ideal environment for our teams to successfully deliver value.

We’re no longer the ones delivering value. Our teams are. And to be able to provide that ideal environment we need to wear three hats simultaneously.

1. The People Manager - As people managers, we oversee the day-to-day operations of the team. We make sure that the way the team is organized fits the team dynamics we want to have. We make sure our teams are working on the right things and we help them develop their skills so they can deliver value in the best way possible.

2. The Strategic Leader - As strategic leaders, we create a compelling product vision and accompanying strategy that the team can rally behind; that’s rooted in the company goals. We create alignment between senior stakeholders through influence and trust. And we make sure that priorities and constraints are clear for everybody involved.

3. The Coach/Mentor - As coaches/mentors to our team, we help them grow as professionals. We help them address their challenges by giving them advice, tools/frameworks or by helping them see their strengths and use them to solve their problems. We help them shift their mindsets and consider different perspectives to address their frustrations and even prevent burnout.

In short, the leadership role requires more than scheduling 1:1s.

🔗 click to read 👉:  I’ve broken down the scope and responsibilities of the 3 hats further in a previous newsletter.

Why the change feels hard

Aside from having our scope multiply by 1 million from one day to another, there are 3 common challenges I see that new Product Leaders face when they first take on the role (I faced them too!)

1. They struggle to make the shift from being the executor to enabler - Instead of doing the PM work, the focus is now on setting direction, aligning teams, and creating the conditions for success.

2. They struggle to navigate people and politics - Influence matters more than authority. This means managing up, down, left and right, advocating for the team, and navigating organizational dynamics while balancing competing priorities.

3. They struggle with the mental load of being a leader - There can be so much emotional baggage that comes with leadership. People will have their preferences, biases, and diverse opinions to sift through. And if we’re not careful, that can have a huge impact on our well-being. Not to mention all the ambiguity that needs to be combed through while juggling increasing expectations on ourselves and on our teams can feel too much sometimes.

The “New Product Leader Dilemma” is going to be a 3-part series (for now) so let me tackle the challenges one by one. Starting with the first one 👇

💡 Are you a new Product Leader struggling to navigate the change in your leadership role? I’d love to help you set yourself up for success so you can help your team set themselves up for success! Book a call with me to chat and see if we can be fit for a coaching collaboration.

Book a call

Challenge #1: The shift from being the executor to the enabler

When I first start working with my coaching clients who are new Product Leaders, the first question I ask them is this:

“What kind of leader do you want to be?”

And the answers are different variations of the same thing:

I want to empower my team to do their best.

Vision seems simple. Why is it so hard?

When we were PMs, our work (while challenging) was pretty straightforward. We work with our squads to build the right thing. This means:

• We define our roadmap, we prioritize our sprints, we write the requirements, and we follow along on the progress of the development and make quick decisions with our squad.

• We deal with our stakeholders directly. We negotiate, we share progress, we manage dependencies.

Our success as a PM is strongly influenced if not directly impacted by our input. We are the captains of our own ship. And the more senior we become, we develop our own ways of doing things: tools, mental models, and communication styles — just to name a few.

And then we become leaders…

We’re no longer captains. We’re commodores, overseeing multiple captains running their own ships.

And while the imagery is sexy, the discomfort that comes from the context switch is not.

What does this mean?

• The temptation to swoop in and fix or do things for the team or even tell them exactly what to do when they might be struggling with something (and then giving in followed by remorse because nobody wants to be a micromanager!)

• The judging side eye or the muffled gasp when they do something differently from how we would have done it ourselves

• The stress of having to deal with the many biases, preferences, and feelings of different people and not being able to meet all of them (and feeling like a complete disappointment to humankind — people pleasers, raise your hand!)

• The pressure and mental overload of trying to stay on top of every single thing that everybody is doing… because ~*visibility*~

• And the existential crisis of not knowing whether we’re doing well, much less succeeding

Have you ever done a presentation yourself, attended a meeting, or replied to a Slack message that your team should have done themselves? But you did it anyway because you thought it would be faster, easier, or done better?

And then we wonder why our team just won’t get better at communication or why our team is not being proactive at communicating with us or their stakeholders.

Strategies for Change

While there are many tactics to implement the change, the root of the change comes from the understanding of the responsibility of the role.

Our role as a Product Leader is to create the ideal environment for our teams to successfully deliver value.

Our role is no longer to deliver value directly but to create the ideal environment so that others can.

What does an ideal environment mean?

1. [Strategic Leader 🎩] An environment where there is a clear goal, a strategy to create focus and help decision-making, and communicated constraints. For us, as the leader, quite “simply” this means having a compelling vision, a relevant strategy, and being clear on the expectations and constraints that can impact the work.
   

   Why? It establishes a common ground for what the team is trying to achieve, what is important, and what is not. It gave our team a clear purpose. Which created space and reason for the teams to work together vs fight over dependencies and blockers.

   An example: When I was a new Product Leader for our Tribe, I established a business domain for us. 
   
   Before that we were different teams tackling related but still disconnected topics on "Trust". On top of having multiple teams working on the same thing (an impact of M&A). And that came with heaps of challenges. Duplicate products. "Competing" teams. And stakeholders throwing requests at us as if nothing happened. 
   
   The creation of a business domain gave us the same direction of travel: a common ground for the team to decide how to tackle the duplication of products, and a better starting point for our conversations with our stakeholders. 
   
   important note: this was not a silver bullet and it was not a one day change.

2. [People Manager 🎩] An environment where communication flows vs getting stuck in reporting overhead. Visibility is important. And it goes in multiple directions. We’ll need visibility of our team’s work so we can give feedback, help unblock things, or share more context that can help move forward. That visibility will also be contextualized for our stakeholders and the leaders we report to.

   
   The “how” of getting visibility is the point of contention though. And while I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all answer, being careful of eating up everybody’s time (including our own) with reporting overhead is generally best practice.

   An example: For my team there were some processes I co-created them and other to help create a flow of communication vs reporting nightmare. It included a mix of several things: 
   
   1. Tooling - with the help of our Product Ops, we started using Product Board for our roadmap with some rules of engagement so we didn't always have to be in meetings asking for progress updates. 
   
   2. Meetings/Shared sessions with specific purposes - we minimized reporting sessions but there were non-negotiables (e.g. once a month OKRs/Roadmap reviews). Not just for reporting but for visibility to the rest of the organization. Where everybody can ask questions, give feedback, etc. 
   
   3. Team-wide "newsletters" that went out to company - we sent out official communication as a tribe to share priorities, results, plans to our stakeholders and leadership. So instead of waiting for them to ask, we proactively shared our stories. 
   
   important context: my tribe was part of a 5k+ multinational corporation.

3. [A mix of Mentor/Coach and People Manager 🎩] An environment where my team can feel celebrated, safe, and supported in their growth journey. As leaders, I believe that we need to build relationships with our team that are rooted in trust. We trust them, they trust us — so everybody can have a constructive conversation about what’s working, what’s not, and what can be done to improve things.
   
   But to get there some rules of engagement need to be established (to name a few):

   1. Expectations are clear both ways. Especially from me. What does good mean? What standards am I holding my team to?

   2. Personal goals are owned by the team. Where do they want to go? What do they want to do more of? What do they want to learn?

   3. Defined team culture with defined and agreed-upon values and behaviors so that we can hold each other accountable to them.

   An example: I invested a lot on building relationships between ourselves. 
   
   1. I organized team-building sessions where I shared with them my vision for us (as a team not the product) so that they can share theirs too and come together on one that matters to us. We worked together to define ways of working, and surface the important behaviors to support our vision. 
   
   We even ended up with a team manifesto: "Be Bold, Take Risk, 
   And We Will Be There For You!"
   
   2. 1:1s with my team where we got to talk about what they achieved, their challenges, and a space to brain storm on next best actions. 
   
   3. We set aside time for learning. A session to share with each other what they've recently done that got good results so others can also learn from them. Or challenges so that others can chime in with their expertise.
   
   Important note: And these spaces also gave the team encouragement to also share their feedback with me so I can also grow and improve as a leader.

4. And last, but not least, I established my definition of success. There are 3 parts to this:

   1. My teams’ success. If they were able to achieve their goals (ideally without drawing blood), then I am successful too.

   2. My teams’ feedback and growth. If they’re growing as PMs, and sharing good feedback about our collaboration, then I did my job well.

   3. Alignment with the leader I want to be. To make sure that even in high-pressure and high-uncertainty situations, I’m still leading by my values.

TL;DR From Captain to Commodore

Many new Product Leaders struggle with the transition (I did too), because while we were excellent PMs, being a leader is a completely different ball game.

And often, we don’t get the right support to prepare for the shi(f)t.

Instead of delivering value directly, our work now is to create an ideal environment where our teams can succeed in delivering value.

To do this, we need to juggle wearing three hats:

• 🎩 Strategic Leader: Setting the vision, aligning stakeholders, and creating focus.

• 🎩 People Manager: Facilitating team organization, visibility, and communication.

• 🎩 Coach/Mentor: Helping their team grow, navigate challenges, and build confidence in their strengths and achievement.

One of the biggest challenges? Letting go of execution. And empowering our teams to deliver instead.

This means resisting the urge to fix everything, micromanage, or rely on old habits as an individual contributor. And instead, putting our energy into making sure that:

• The team has clarity, alignment, and focus.

• Communication flows efficiently without unnecessary overhead.

• Team members feel supported in their growth and decision-making.

The shift is uncomfortable but necessary.

And it starts with redefining success… no longer from our own output or outcome but from the team’s collective achievement, and always in alignment with our personal values and the leader we want to be.

See you next week for part 2!

📌 Coaching Bulletin Board:

📌 I’ll be going live with Linda Kugblenu and Inciteful App. For the people who always felt like they had to work twice as hard to be seen, decode unspoken workplace norms, or navigate career challenges without a playbook, this webinar is for you.
Click here to register.

📌 1:1 Coaching for the new Product Leaders, UX Leaders, and other new functional leaders in tech. I’d love to help you define your strategies to set yourself and your team up for success. Book a free call and let’s discuss how we can work together.

📌 and I are launching a program for the ambitious professionals in tech who struggle with networking and building relationships in the industry. Apply to join.

📌 Magical Audios is giving away a free guided self-hypnosis for healing burnout. Click here to start listening.

If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me until the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that you’d like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.

❤️

Kax

PS. Here are more ways for us to connect:

1. Follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Bluesky for thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions that take less than 10 minutes to read. 😂

2. Follow Magical Audios on Instagram for announcements of new programs and events

If you’re new here, I’m Kax — welcome! How to Build What Feels Good is my weekly newsletter about becoming your favorite version of a Leader, building a purpose-driven career, and navigating all the human mess in this often cynical world of tech… while still having a happy and healthy life.

From Senior PM to Leader

Back in November, I wrote about why some managers hesitate to promote PMs to more senior roles. And several product leaders and career coaches have chimed in to share their thoughts and experience.

There’s a point in our careers when being really good at our job is no longer enough to get us to our next career goal. Often it’s the jump to Senior PM to either a more senior IC role or to a people management one.

At the Senior PM level, delivering impact is expected.

What actually sets people apart? Behaviors and values.

These aren’t always explicitly stated, but they play a major role in leadership promotions. Whether for Staff/Principal ICs or People Managers.

(For simplicity, let’s call them both leadership roles since both require stepping up in new ways.)

Let’s unpack.

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Behaviors and Values as Criteria

I’ve spoken to several Product Leaders at the Director level (some of them my coaching clients) about what gets Senior PMs promoted into leadership roles.

And some patterns emerged:

• How they respond to uncertainty. Do they offer thoughtful feedback or stay silent? Do they frame concerns as complaints or as constructive reflections?

• How they make others feel and how they’re perceived. Do they make people feel heard and included? Are they respected and trusted beyond their immediate team?

• How proactive they are. Do they spot opportunities and take action, or wait for direction? Do they shape their role by driving initiatives, or focus only on assigned tasks?

• How they hold others accountable. Do they address misalignment or quietly pick up the slack? Do they rally the team to collaborate, or default to fixing everything themselves?

• How they show up authentically. Do they lead with their values, or adapt to please the room? Are they confident in their voice, or do they say what they think others want to hear?

Why? Because at this level, it’s no longer about just what they do. It’s how they show up, how they think, and how others experience working with them.

And these things don’t just come from leading more complex initiatives.

They come from the way we engage with the world: how we process uncertainty, how we advocate for our ideas, and how we step into leadership moments before they’re handed to us.

And all of these are a reflection of something deeper: our identity.

And identity isn’t something we build only within the walls of the meeting room we always find ourselves in.

Share

Your identity is not how good you are at writing PRDs

Some of the most effective, well-rounded product leaders I know didn’t just get their leadership skills from being a good Product Manager.

They’ve become the leaders they are because of how they engage with life outside of their roles.

How?

It can be anything. From hobbies, personal experiences, and even everyday routines.

It’s not about having a flashy side hustle or an extreme hobby. It’s about having a diverse range of experiences that have shaped their perspective and mindset.

01 How they respond to uncertainty.

A stand-up comic? Great at thinking on their feet, at recovering from unexpected moments, and adapting their approach when things don’t go as planned.

02 How they make others feel and how they’re perceived.

A great cook? Understands that a great dish isn’t just about individual ingredients -- it’s about how they come together. Knows how to balance strong personalities, foster collaboration, and create alignment.

03 How proactive they are.

A plant lover? Doesn't wait for plants to tell them they need water. They anticipate, nurture, and adjust as needed, just like a proactive PM spotting risks and opportunities early.

04 How they hold others accountable.

A parent? Has mastered the art of balancing encouragement with firm boundaries, ensuring that responsibilities are shared and commitments are met.

05 How they show up authentically.

A Hufflepuff? Rooted in their values of loyalty and hard work, they show up consistently as themselves. They lead with authenticity, integrity, and a strong sense of purpose, rather than trying to play office politics or be someone they’re not.

Why is this important?

Because leadership isn’t just about what we do, it’s about who we are. And when we’re clear on who we are and what we stand for, everything shifts:

• Our leadership becomes more intentional. We stop trying to mold ourselves into what other people think is good and we become more clear about what kind of leader we want to be.

• We become strong in setting our boundaries. We filter noise more effectively because we’re clear on what matters to us and what doesn’t. And we become more mindful of respecting other people’s boundaries too.

• We become more resilient. Setbacks don’t feel personal when we’re anchored in a strong sense of self.

• Because our self-worth is no longer tied to our title. We recognize that our jobs are just that… jobs. Enablers for us to live a good life. Another avenue for us to exercise our strengths and have an impact. One of many.

And this is why identity comes first. When our actions and decisions are aligned with our values, we we start to embody the kind of leader we want to be… the kind of leader that people trust, respect, and want to follow.

And for the Senior Leaders who have the “power” to grant titles, these shifts that we gain can be seen as potential:

• A higher-level view of the business. They see how all the moving parts connect.

• Confident and concise communication. They craft compelling narratives that influence decisions.

• Expanded influence through relationships. They don’t just operate within their function. They build trust and credibility across the organization.

• Strong presence. They command attention. Not by being the loudest in the room, but by speaking with clarity, conviction, and purpose. They know when to lead, when to listen, and how to make their contributions count.

🌱 If you need support aligning your actions and decisions with the leader you want to be or surfacing your strengths and perspectives that positions you as ready for your next step into leadership.

Let’s chat! I have 1:1 coaching slots available and I’d love to collaborate with you.

TL;DR Why do all of these matter again?

Senior PMs don’t get promoted just because of their execution skills. They stand out because of who they are, how they think, and how they influence.

And those traits? They aren’t just developed at work. They come from the sum of our experiences, perspectives, and how we engage with the world.

When we have a strong identity:

• We don’t shape-shift to fit what others expect. We show up consistently as the leader we want to be and with confidence.

• We don’t rely on a promotion to validate our worth. We already know our value.

• We become the kind of leader that naturally attracts opportunities; because people trust leaders who are grounded in who they are.

So that promotion? The title?
It’ll come after we've embodied the person we need to be to get it.

Even better? When they don’t come, it doesn’t matter.
We know our value. We know that our success is not measured by a title alone.
But we’ll also have the strength to seek out where our value can be a fit.

We don’t need the promotion.
We need to build a strong identity and fully embody that…

if you want to create your opportunities vs waiting for somebody to say “you’re good enough” that is.

📣 2 remaining 1:1 coaching slots open!

• Are you a Senior PM and this post resonated with you, and you want to start taking control of your career and become the leader you aspire to be?

• Are you an accidental Product Leader and you need help navigating your new leadership role, setting up your team for success, and making sure you have time for the rest of your life?

• Are you an experienced PM wanting to be perceived as more senior and be top of mind for cool opportunities that always seem to pass you by?

I’d love to support you! Combining coaching and consulting, we’ll address real scenarios, and get practical and tactical by evaluating opportunities, so you can define actions to help you confidently make an impact.

We’ll also mix it with a holistic approach to ensure you have the right internal system to take on your challenges with confidence, energy, and strength.

If this is the kind of support that you’re looking for, I’d love to chat!

Book a call with me!

If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me until the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that you’d like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.

❤️

Kax

PS. Here are more ways for us to connect:

1. Follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Bluesky for thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions that take less than 10 minutes to read. 😂

2. Follow Magical Audios on Instagram for announcements of new programs and events

If you’re new here, I’m Kax — welcome! How to Build What Feels Good is my weekly newsletter about becoming your favorite version of a Leader, building a purpose-driven career, and navigating all the human mess in this often cynical world of tech… while still having a happy and healthy life.

Do you have a long-term career goal?

Do you know what role you want to be in, 5 years from now? 10? 15?

I’m doing an experimental program with PMs to help them with their job search and at some point we started discussing long-term career goals.

One of the members asked me:

My response?

At least the short version: “no sweat!”

The 3 sides to the same coin:

One of my colleagues, A, has a super clear career roadmap.

She knew from the beginning of her career that she wanted to be a people manager. So her actions and her career conversations with her manager were driven by that.

When there was no opportunity for her to be a people manager in our organization, she considered moving to Engineering to become an EM. That’s how you know she’s serious about wanting to become a people manager.

So when a Product Lead role opened up she got the role because she had already positioned herself for it.

From Product Lead, she then became Head of Product, and now she’s a Sr. Product Director. At this rate, she’s on the fast track to CPO.

When we talk about it she always references back to her “plan”.

When I’m in the season of trying to organize my life, I talk to her. 😂

On the flip side, I have another friend, B, who’s super clear that she wants to be a Product Director at some point. Preferably in the next 2-3 years.

The laser focus on the goal though has given her more stress than inspiration.

She keeps on second guessing whether or not whatever she’s on working on now has high impact to position her for Director role later on.

Every feedback she receives feels like somebody chipping away at her dream.

Until she burned out. Her journey to becoming a Director has been more frustrating than it was enjoyable.

And now she’s questioning whether or not she wants it. But she’s sticking to that plan because that’s what she knows. And not having a plan felt worse.

And then there’s me. I didn’t really have an answer for what roles do I want in the short term, much less in the long term.

If you would have told my 30-year-old self that in the next 10 years I would become:

• A Product Leader

• A startup co-founder

• A coach

I probably would have laughed in your face for being ridiculous.

I would have told you back then that:

1. Me and people management are like oil and water. We don’t mix.

2. Entrepreneurship is hard and I’d rather not spend my days suffering.

3. A coach? As in sports?! Athletic??! What?!

And yet here we are just the same.

I never really had a roadmap for my career. And by roadmap I mean, what role should I take next? Simply because I didn't know…

At least not in title.

But I did know some things:

• what I liked to do and didn’t

• what I’m great at and what I could improve on

• what problems I care about and what kind of human/leader I want to be

• how I can help people and organizations succeed

• and what kind of life I want to enable with the jobs I can have

And if I look back at my entire career, everything has worked out a lot better than what I could have imagined.

I got to experience roles that I thought weren’t for me and ended up enjoying them immensely. At some point, I got to create roles for myself in our organization.

And when I got laid off as collateral damage of an organizational transformation, I already had things to fall back on.

My approach to my career has been, serendipitous in titles. But intentional in desire.

And I don’t think I’ll change that approach anytime soon. Why? 👇

Because I believe: If we keep chasing job titles, we’re going to run out of options real quick.

The industry is evolving so fast.

Companies are laying off hundreds of people left and right every time the CEO sneezes out a new strategy.

The industry can’t even agree on whether or not there will be more demand for PM generalists or PM specialists.

Do I think the role is dead? Far from it. But I don’t know what it will be called 10 years from now either.

I’m seeing people looking to hire for new titles like “Product Makers” which feels so early 2000s to me. But I’m also seeing that it’s 2025 and we’re still arguing about Product Owner vs Product Manager.

So if we’re always optimizing for “Product” called roles, we’re going to be waiting for people to create opportunities for us. And having strong dependencies never sit well with me.

Share

So what can we do instead?

Just because we don’t know what we want to do exactly 10 years from now, doesn’t mean we still can’t have a vision.

Get to know yourself. Sounds simple? Not really.

Most of the people I coach, when we start working together, don’t really know how to answer the questions below. And it took some time and a lot of reflection to get beyond surface-level answers.

1. What makes you awesome? ⭐

   What are your values? 
   What can you do? Do you know your strengths, skills, and talents?  What impact have you had? What positive change or results have you brought to the organizations you've been part of?

2. What are you good at? 💪

   What comes easy for you? 
   What do you do now that makes you happy or gives you energy? 
   What work/tasks makes you annoyed or frustrated?

3. What do you want to be known for? 🏆

   What kind of problems do you want to solve?
   What do people ask you to help them with? 
   What good feedback do people give you?
   What kind of leader do you want to be? 

4. Where do you want to grow? 🌱

   What do you need to improve in?
   What are you curious about? 
   How do you learn? 

5. What does a life well-lived look like? 🧓

   If this year was a perfect year, what does that look like? 
   What are you doing more of? How would you be feeling? 
   Imagine you're 100 years old, what does a life well-lived look like? 
   What would you be proud of? What would people be thanking you for? 
   And who do you need to be to make all of that happen?  

The list of questions is not exhaustive but you get the picture.

The beauty in this discovery is that:

1. Your options become only limited by your imagination

2. It allows for change. You will evolve. Which means your options can evolve too

3. You can start building a sustainable system, networking with people, and building a personal brand that allow you to be open to opportunities OR to create your own

4. And the jobs you can have along the way? They’ll just be that. Jobs. Enablers for you to enjoy today, exercise your strengths, be an outlet for your interests, and support you as you live out your purpose

To conclude

If you already have it clear what your long-term career goal is? That’s awesome! Let’s build a strategy to get you there. And let’s make room for iterations too just in case :)

If you’re not quite sure but you have some ideas? That’s fantastic! Let’s experiment. So you can gain confidence over time or you might change your mind completely. Who knows? But sounds exciting, right?

If you have absolutely no idea what you want to be X years from now? That’s absolutely fine! There are no rules in life saying you have to. Maybe it’s just that you don’t dream of labor 😂 Let’s surface some information though, that can help you have a strategy and experiment along the way.

None of those situations is better than the others. They’re all paths to get you to a future that has yet to be written.

And at the end of the day, what matters the most, is that we all end up writing a good story for ourselves.

📣 I have three 1:1 coaching slots open!

• Are you an accidental Product Leader and you need help navigating your new leadership role, setting up your team for success, and making sure you have time for the rest of your life?

• Are you a Senior PM not sure if you want to make a jump from IC to Leadership or just feeling very very very unsure about your performance and where you want to take your career?

• Are you an experienced PM wanting to be perceived as more senior and be top of mind for cool opportunities that always seem to pass you by?

I’d love to support you! Combining coaching and consulting, we’ll address real scenarios, and get practical and tactical by evaluating opportunities, so you can define actions to help you confidently make an impact.

We’ll also mix it with a holistic approach to make sure you have the right internal system to take on your challenges with confidence, energy, and strength.

If this is the kind of support that you’re looking for, I’d love to chat!

Book a call with me!

If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me until the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that you’d like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.

❤️

Kax

PS. Here are more ways for us to connect:

1. Follow me on Instagram, Bluesky or LinkedIn for thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions that take less than 10 minutes to read. 😂

2. Follow Magical Audios on Instagram for announcements of new programs and events

Last week, January 29, 2025, our startup turned year old! While the product itself was launched on June 2025, my co-founders and I said YES to each other on January 29, 2024.

Magical Audios are guided self-hypnosis audio programs that are specially designed to tackle problems that negatively impact our well-being.

Since then many people have asked me how to find their startup co-founder, what steps they can take to find their product-market fit, or find customers without funding.

So to celebrate this milestone, I’ve been sharing a 3-part story about the practical step-by-step of how we started and how we got here with Magical Audios.

So in this series, I’m writing about:

1. How to find a startup co-founder

2. How to bootstrap an MVP

3. How to find customers - this issue

This is not a best practices story nor is it a success story (at least not yet). Just a “this is how we’re doing it in real life” story.

And today I’m sharing with you:

1. how we found our first paying customers

2. how we’ve lost them too

3. and what we’ve been doing to grow our customer base.

Because if you think that you can’t do it because you don’t have funding, product marketing skills, or permission from your boss… let me assure you that can!

Disclaimer: Product Marketing is not my expertise but I believe that every PM still needs to know how to GTM. And if you’re an aspiring startup founder, then this is a must.

Step 0: What do we need to do?

If only us shouting out from the rooftops of Barcelona that “Magical Audios is awesome and effective!” is enough to bring us our ICPs with wallets at a ready, to buy whatever we were selling.

If only.

There were 3 things we needed to do to sell:

1. Find our ICP and convert them to a captured audience

2. Once we’ve got them into our orbit, convert them to paying customers

3. And ideally, our paying customers will be repeat customers

Simple right? — said no one, ever.

Step 1: Building a captured audience

Building a captured audience was the first step (and honestly, the most perplexing step for me)

There were so many things to consider just to get people to:

1. pay attention

2. get them interested enough to maybe:

   1. follow us on social media

   2. subscribe to our communication channels

And it felt like we had a lot of things working against us:

1. We didn’t have a budget for ads so this will be slow

2. We were talking about a topic that some people can be suspicious about (i.e. hypnosis as means for therapy)

But as we’ve seen before, constraints are a means to exercise creativity and resourcefulness. And an enabler for focus.

Knowing that there are more steps to get people to convert to a paying customer, we focused on a single goal:

Capture the audience and move them to our own channels. 

Meaning: instead of simply trying to grow our social media followers, we wanted to get them to something we own so we can customize our communication with our audience.

Getting followers on Social media is great and all for social proof but:

• Algorithms are flaky and we’d always be competing with everything else they have in their feeds. Our engagement was also too low so our social media audience did not give us much confidence at all

• We wanted to also identify who our ICPs were and learn from them vs people who found our content “interesting” but we didn’t stand a chance to convert

How did we do it?

1. We invited people to events that demonstrated the value of hypnotherapy

2. We invited people to download free hypnosis audios that can solve problem x

3. We invited people to join our Whatsapp group as a means to test our MVP

These invites were shared across multiple relevant communities, our personal social media accounts (IG, Linkedin), people we’ve met at various events, and more.

These invitations were mostly personal. And we iterated on our messaging a lot.

Although we did spend a few € on ads on Meta just to test.

The result?

All in all, we captured 500+ people who shared their contact information so we can send them hypnosis audios and more information about what we were building before we even launched.

500 people who were listening to our audio and were generous with giving their feedback whenever we were wondering why things were not working.

This also allowed us to continuously refine our ICP.

Professional women who are burning out from juggling the demands of their careers and their personal lives.

Our Current Focus:

Today, this is still our main focus. To increase our captured audience. Even though we’ve definitely got more than 500+ people in our captured audience by now, having a sizeable volume is necessary for us to build a viable business.

So what have we been doing these days?

1. We’ve been focusing on improving our SEO

2. We’re investing on Youtube where we can create longer videos to explain the value of hypnotherapy, show it in action, and other mindfulness techniques that we’re passionate about.

3. We’re also investing in building our personal brands. Trust is a huge factor, especially for a product like ours. So showing credibility and humanity has been high on our agenda.

All to get people to: subscribe to the Magical Audios newsletter so we can keep talking to them there.

Step 2: From captured audience to paying customers (PLG irl)

The second part of our funnel was critical as this is where we hope to convert our captured audience to paying customers.

Needless to say, our first paying customers were our friends.

But our first customers who were not privy to what’s happening behind the scenes were:

The people who were able to try out a free self-hypnosis audio and had a positive experience with it. 

As in after listening to an audio they could:

1. Think more clearly

2. Wake up feeling refreshed and rested

3. Come up with ideas to solve a problem they’ve been dealing with for a while

These would be people who joined us at an event or downloaded a free self-hypnosis audio.

As a next step, we would immediately send them a follow-up email to ask them for feedback and to continue their healing journey by joining one of the 7-day programs available.

The result?

The people who had a positive experience listening to a free audio were likely to buy a full program within 48 hours.

But this is also where we dropped the ball.

When we were diligent with setting up our email journeys, the conversion was consistent.

Then we stopped. For one reason or another.

• The journey broke in Mailchimp

• We got distracted by a different problem

• We were spreading ourselves too thin and didn’t prioritize well

And this oversight had a direct impact on our business because this is where the majority of our paying customers were coming from.

Our Current Focus:

This is a huge priority for us — a big item in our roadmap for Q1. Especially since bringing in more captured audience is a big priority too.

So it doesn’t make sense to get them to:

1. sign up to receive information and not send them any

2. get them to try a free self-hypnosis audio and not tell them how they can have more

3. have them feel the positive impact and not tell them that there’s more where that came from

Users came to us with a problem. We told them there’s a solution. We even showed it to them. The least we can do is tell them how to get the full package for themselves.

Also, you can’t have much of a business if you fail to sell.

Step 3: When they become buyers

Approximately 15% of our customers who complete the first program they bought become repeat users. They would either buy a 2nd program or buy access to our full library of self-hypnosis audios. Without any prompting.

That’s why we’re so confident that our programs and audios work because the behavior of our users tells us so.

And they also became our advocates!

How we’re taking care of them:

1. We have a fast response time for our customers. If they send us a support ticket asking for help, our response is immediate and as detailed as possible

2. We keep a community for our customers that they can joino. So they have access to Andrea, our hypnotherapist, and they can ask anything and everything about hypnotherapy, suggestions for audios, and how to tackle a different problem.

These might not scale later on; but we’ll cross the bridge when we get there.

Our Current Focus:

Apart from letting them know that we have new programs, incentivizing them with additional discounts, making sure we stay responsive to their questions and concerns, and keeping the line open to Andrea — we’ve decided to not prioritize anything more on this.

We’ll probably revisit this in the future as we know we have areas of improvement in this regard, but when you’re 3 people… ruthless prioritization is important.

To Conclude (this post and this series):

I’m sure you’ve heard this before but just in case

Building a startup is not as glamorous as some people make it out to be.

You gain autonomy in some and lose it in others.

This endeavor requires investment in both time and money (especially when you don’t have funding).

But it can also be the biggest adventure, if not the most rewarding one.

So if you’re thinking of setting out to build your product and company — here are some takeaways I’d like to impart to you:

1. Finding a co-founder who is aligned with you in both values and ambition and is somebod you actually enoy spending time with — is critical. Too many startups end too soon because of founder misalignment or founders playing the blame game.

2. The sooner you can have a tangible way for people to experience the solution, the sooner you can get real behavior and not just feelings and false promises. People will always say they’re interested in what you have to offer. But until they actually use it and later on, pay for it… you’ve got nothing. Assume every idea is wrong and get creative on how you will validate your assumptions.

3. Your GTM strategy is important! Yes you’ll need to create visibility and awareness for your product (and knowing whose attention you need is key). But getting them to an owned channel is crucial so you’re not at the mercy of algorithms (which is expensive).

4. Giving free value in the beginning is a great way to get people to your owned channels, give you feedback, and turn them into customers. You want to convince people to buy? Give them a reason to. Earn their trust by showing them truth.

5. Get clear on your priorities. Consider not just the impact but also the risks, the cost if not done well, and the implications of executions. When you’re still in the validation phase, you’re not always doing things at scale so the steps to getting done might require more effort than you estimated.

   
   Note: There will be many things that need to get done. Truth. Your capacity will always be limited. Also truth. Even truer when you’re also working a job that pays the bills. So being super strict on what balls can’t get dropped is needed otherwise you also can compromise your customer’s journey and experience.

Honestly, you’re going to make mistakes. It’s inevitable. And I’m not sharing our fuck ups so you won’t make the same mistakes we did. You will. If not the same, something else. And I think it’s a good thing. The sooner the better.

Why?

Because the cost of those mistakes is not yet so high (except maybe on our egos). This will help you iterate faster on both your product and your ways of working as the founding team.

Because there will be more mistakes ahead in your founder future. So the sooner you normalize them, the sooner you can laugh about them when they happen.

Because your biggest ally when you’re building a startup with no experience and no funding?

A strong sense of self and an even stronger sense of humor.

📣 My 1:1 coaching waitlist for March is open!

• To the accidental Product Leader who needs help navigating the new leadership role, setting up the team for success, and making sure that there is still time for thinking strategically and for having a life.

• To the Senior PM who wants to make the jump from IC to leadership but not sure how to do that.

• To the Senior PM who’s not sure what’s next for them and even less sure how to position themselves for opportunities.

• To the experienced PM who is struggling with their day to day: collaborating with cross-functional peers, managing relationships with stakeholders and leaders, or being seen as having impact.

I’d love to support you! My approach is a balance of practical work - wherein we define goals for what you want to achieve, design a strategy for it, and identify next best actions that you can take in your day-to-day. As well as mixing it with a holistic approach to make sure you have the right system to take on your challenges with energy and strength.

I’ve built products and product organizations before. I know how it works. And I definitely know how it feels.

If this is the kind of support that you’re looking for, I’d love to chat!

Book a call with me!

If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me til the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that you’d like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.

❤️

Kax

PS. Here are more ways for us to connect:

1. Follow me on Instagram, Bluesky or LinkedIn for thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions that take less than 10 minutes to read. 😂

2. Follow Magical Audios on Instagram for announcements on new programs and events

If you’re new here, I’m Kax — welcome! How to Build What Feels Good is my weekly newsletter about becoming your favorite version of a Leader, building a purpose-driven startup or any business, and navigating all the human mess in this often cynical world of tech… while still having a happy and healthy life.

🎉 Happy Birthday Magical Audios!

Today, January 29, 2025, our startup will turn 1 year old! While the product itself was launched on June 2025, my co-founders and I said YES to each other on January 29, 2024. 🎉

Magical Audios are guided self-hypnosis audio programs that are specially designed to tackle problems that negatively impact our well-being.

Since then many people have asked me how to find their startup co-founder, what steps they can take to find their product-market fit, or find customers without funding.

So to celebrate our upcoming birthday, let me share with you a 3-part story about the practical step-by-step of how we started and how we got here with Magical Audios.

So in this series, I’m writing about:

1. How to find a startup co-founder

2. How to bootstrap an MVP - this issue

3. How to find customers - coming soon.

This is not a best practices story nor is it a success story (at least not yet). Just a “this is how we’re doing it in real life” story.

And today I’m sharing with you:

• How we went from idea to MVP

• What research looked like for a team of 3

• How we validated our assumptions around our ideas

Because if you think that you can’t do it because you don’t have funding, tech skills, or permission from your boss… let me assure you that you’re wrong. And that’s a good thing!

01 We started with an idea

I can almost hear the collective groan of the PMs and UXers out there who have been fighting the good fight of convincing their organizations and stakeholders to start with the problem 😂

But also to the leaders and stakeholders out there reading this post, this is not meant to defend your feature requests either.

Instead, this is to say that it’s ok to start wherever.

You can start with an idea. Or you can start with a problem. It doesn’t matter.

We started with the idea of making hypnotherapy audios (like guided meditation audios) to make the treatment accessible, especially for women who have a multitude of problems that often get ignored. 

And that idea alone gave birth to a long list of questions that we needed to find answers to (in no particular order)

• Why hypnotherapy?

• What can we solve with hypnotherapy?

• Who would we solve these problems for?

• Will people be willing to try hypnotherapy?

• How can we serve hypnotherapy to these people?

Pretty much to sum it all up — what does our idea even mean?!

02 Which triggered the need for research

We had so many questions and not a lot of resources so we needed to prioritize.

We started with the questions that we can easily find answers for.

Why hypnotherapy?
What can we solve with hypnotherapy? 

Good thing we have a professional Hypnotherapist in the team who can answer these first 2 for us.

There were so many problems we can solve with Hypnotherapy like pain management for women in labor or with period problems, symptoms management for perimenopause and menopause, insomnia, addiction, phobias, wellness problems, mindset problems, and even fears and self-limiting beliefs.

At that point, the question was — what can’t hypnotherapy help with?

And why hypnotherapy? Without going into a full thesis here… because hypnotherapy works. (But you can read the short article Andrea wrote to explain how it works here)

But for every answer Andrea gave us, it just opened up a box of about 500 more.

So now we know that hypnotherapy can solve a lot of problems and that it works, it gave birth to 300 more questions.

Questions that science journals and Andrea’s training won’t be able to answer for us.

03 It was time to talk to our target market

We started with having an assumption for WHO:

We had a wide target audience: Professional Women mid-careers in their 30s to 50s

We assumed that this segment of women were juggling the complexity of navigating a career alongside being: a caregiver, going through hormonal challenges, or potentially going through transformation in their personal lives (ending relationships, starting new ones, deciding to be child free, etc)

Still broad but at least narrow enough to start identifying who we wanted to talk to.

Once we knew WHO, it was a question of HOW and WHAT:

As in how do we reach them and what do we want to know.

The list of the things we wanted to know was long. So we had to prioritize.

• We wanted to know what were the most common pain points that had the biggest impact on women’s lives

• We wanted to know what they were doing to solve them and if they were effective

• And what would their reaction be to the idea of hypnotherapy

Where and how did we reach them:

1. We joined many relevant communities as possible (e.g. Facebook groups, SubReddits, Slack communities, Whatsapp groups, meetups, etc.) and sent out surveys

2. We organized events and focused group discussions in exchange for a free hypnosis audio

3. We wouldn’t shut up about it to anyone and everyone we know in an attempt to get any serviceable insight (I, for one, was insufferable 😂)

spoiler alert for next issue: this is how we also built our waitlist and got our first customers.

🎙️ I’m going to get on my soapbox on this one because a lot of the Product Managers always complain about this part one way or another:

1. PMs in bigger organizations complaining about how their organizations don’t allow them to talk to users. Lucky PMs in smaller companies.

2. PMs in smaller organizations complaining about how they never have budget nor infrastructure to talk to users. Lucky PMs in big companies. 

A common theme that surfaced from these complaints is that talking to users seems to equate to fancy user interviews. 

That plus the grass is always greener on the other side. 

So let me say this: You don’t need to have fancy interviews and all the processes and costs that come with it to be able to talk to your audience.

If you’re a PM or a Product Leader and this 👆 right here, is your struggle - I’d love to help you think about different tactics to talk to your users, influence your leadership to adopt a Product centric culture, or just feel good about where your career is going. Let’s chat!

Book a Call

04 We started validating our idea.

Insights gathered, problems prioritized, target market identified, we wanted to start validating our assumptions around our idea.

Assumption Example: We wanted to validate that the problems that people mentioned were important were really THAT important.

As in they were willing to do anything about it.

How did we test this:

1. We invited people in the communities we’re part of to join a Whatsapp group if they wanted to solve problem X.

2. We told them we’ll be sending corresponding hypnotherapy audios for their problems.

3. Everyday, new audio. All they had to do was listen.

So we measured success and increased our confidence through:

• how many people were joining our Whatsapp group

• how many plays our daily audios were getting

And we kept getting feedback.

So from here, we started building.

04 We started building

We built many things before we landed on the iteration we have now. But let me share the last 3 and all the fuck ups that went with it 😂

Important caveat here is that we don’t have anybody who can code in our founding team. So anything that needed coding has to be outsourced.

Fail Build 1: We built a library of guided self-hypnosis audios

Our premise was that since women already knew what they needed help to feel better about, we can just give them an entire library’s worth of audios and they can pick and choose.

Did not work.

We got feedback that having a library worth of guided self-hypnosis audios felt intimidating. Which one worked best for their problem?

Guided self-hypnosis audios still felt too foreign for people. How does it work? Is it safe? How often should they listen? Can they choose listen to different audios from different themes at the same time? What if they chose the wrong audio?

Back to the drawing board!

Tool of choice: Wordpress
Outsourced help: Hired a designer who also helped us out with the Wordpress set up

Fail Build 2: We designed courses/tutorials

Our premise was that if we help people understand how hypnotherapy works, we they’d get over the initial fear, and feel more confident to choose their audios well.

Did not work.

We got feedback that well… people just didn’t want to bother with learning. To no fault of their own. They were already exhausted, demotivated, in pain. Adding to their mental overload was definitely not the value they were looking for.

Back to the drawing board!

Tool of choice: Teachable for the courses
Outsourced help: None. I set up and designed Teachable. 

Our Current Build: We designed programs targeting specific problems.

Putting everything we learned from the previous build and the learnings from our experiments before — we landed on a few conclusions:

1. The Whatsapp group experiment worked because people were being given the audio. They didn’t have to think. We were thinking for them.

2. Which makes sense considering the majority of the problems we prioritized to solve meant that our target audience was just too exhausted to think at this point.

And that’s how we landed in our current version:

• We started targeting the specific problem areas our target audience complained to us about

• Andrea put together several audios in a specific sequence that she deemed to be most effective at addressing the problem + other underlying problems that contribute to it

• I set them up in a way that we were delivering the audio to those who signed up every day for 7 days. With clear instructions on how to listen + optional materials that can help amplify the impact.

And we’re on our 3rd program and people are signing up to join, completing the programs and giving good feedback.

This version also opened the doors back to our first build. With customers who have tried the available programs but feel more confident now in choosing audios for themselves.

Our biggest challenge now is to widen our potential customer pool — but that’s for another story.

Tool of choice: We continued using Teachable for this since it can support the set up that I needed.
Outsourced help: Design was outsourced to a friend who agreed to do it for free in exchange for hypnotherapy. I did all the technical setup. 

05 In Conclusion

It took us half a year to get to the version of Magical Audios that we have now that’s actually getting traction.

We had our constraints:

1. We were a team of 3

2. We didn’t have any funding

3. We didn’t have any designer nor developer in the team

But knowing our constraints early and not fighting against them is what, I think, helped us move faster.

1. Kat and Andrea’s out of tech experience actually brought us so many ideas that did not require a single line of code (yet another point for diversity, friends!)

2. We had no processes but we had learning intentions. Which made it easier to find insights every single opportunity we can.

3. We purposely wanted to make fast decisions so we can change our mind quickly too if we need to. And our size and stage is an advantage for us to do this.

4. But every decision meant cost. And we were draining money from our pockets fast. So we also needed to be mindful of those decisions and be intentional about where we want to put our money.

5. Instead of spending so much time being frustrated by our constraints and limitations, we let go. We can’t change our situation. But we can change our mindset about it.

So note to PMs:

1. If you feel like you don’t have the means to talk to your users or experiments, think again. 👆 you might not have the means to do it as the books say, but you definitely will always have the means to do it one way or another.

2. If you feel like you don’t have the permission to talk to your users or experiments… do it anyway!

And a note to the leaders out there:

1. If you give your team the right environment to build, even with half the resources, I assure you they can build value. If we can do it with 3 people, you can do it too.

Questions for you!

For the startup peeps reading this who have co-founders:

How did you get to your MVP?

I’d love to read your stories in the comments section below 👇

📣 My 1:1 coaching waitlist for March is open!

• Are you an accidental Product Leader and you need help navigating your new leadership role, set up your team for success, and make sure you have time for the rest of your life?

• Are you an experienced PM wanting to be perceived as more senior and be top of mind for cool opportunities that always seem to pass you by?

• Are you a Senior PM not sure if you want to make a jump from IC to Leadership or just feeling very very very unsure about your performance and where you want to take your career?

I’d love to support you! My approach is a balance of practical work - wherein we define goals for what you want to achieve, design a strategy for it, and identify next best actions that you can take in your day to day. As well as mixing it with a holistic approach to make sure you have the right system to take on your challenges with energy and strength.

I’ve built products and product organizations before. I know how it works. And I definitely know how it feels.

If this is the kind of support that you’re looking for, I’d love to chat!

Book a call with me!

If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me til the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that you’d like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.

❤️

Kax

PS. Here are more ways for us to connect:

1. Follow me on Instagram, Bluesky or LinkedIn for thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions that take less than 10 minutes to read. 😂

2. Follow Magical Audios on Instagram for announcements on new programs and events

Get Free 1:1 Coaching for Women in Tech with me through Incitefulapp!

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Sign up today using invite code KAXUSON. Got questions? Let me know!

🎉 Happy Birthday Magical Audios!

On January 29, 2025, our startup will turn 1 year old! While the product itself was launched on June 2025, my co-founders and I said YES to each other on January 29, 2024.

Magical Audios are guided self-hypnosis audio programs that are specially designed to tackle problems that negatively impact our well-being.

Since then many people have asked me how to find their startup co-founder, what steps they can take to find their product-market fit, or find customers without funding.

So to celebrate our upcoming birthday, let me share with you a 3-part story about the practical step-by-step of how we started and how we got here with Magical Audios.

So in this series, I’m writing about:

1. How to find a startup co-founder - in this issue.

2. How to bootstrap an MVP - coming soon.

3. How to find customers - coming soon.

This is not a best practices story nor is it a success story (at least not yet). Just a “this is how we’re doing it in real life” story.

So if you’re looking for a co-founder for your startup or considering being one, then my goal is to share with you some insights to help you decide. 😉

How to find your startup co-founder

Long story short, CEO + main Magical Audios honcho, Katherine Navarro Brand, who is also a product marketing expert, found us.

She found me on Linkedin and sent me a message:

If you’re the person with the idea, let me just be upfront with you that you’re about to embark on a difficult journey. So it’s very important to find people you will enjoy working with.

How did Kat choose?

01 Have a clear WHY and criteria to choose your co-founders

There are pros and cons to having co-founders.

When you’re by yourself there’s so much flexibility:

• Full ownership and control

• Less time spent on managing roles and relationships

On the other hand, being a solo founder has its risks:

• Higher workload when there’s nobody to share it with

• It’s unlikely that one person has all the experience and skills needed for the product to build so this can be a limitation overtime

• There will be bumps in the road and results are unpredictable. So when things are not looking good, burn out is a risk when there’s nobody there to support you

When she found me, she already found the mental health expert and professional hypnotherapist side of our trio, Andrea Ramirez And she was looking for a product/technical expert to complete her team.

Did she really need a product/technical co-founder? Not really. But without one, it would have taken them much longer to build an MVP.

Also, in the beginning, getting investment was part of the plan. And most investors have a preference for startups that have a technical person in the team.

But she also had her personal requirements:

✅ Somebody who had a women-related advocacy
✅ Somebody open to hypnotherapy or alternative practices that are probably more prevalent in non-western cultures
✅ Somebody who can add to the diversity of her co-founding team.

02 Comb through your network and communities

Kat found me through good ‘ol searching. On Linkedin.

Since she already had criteria, it was easy to narrow down the search.

• She looked for people with a Product Management and a startup background.

• She looked for people with relevant advocacy.

How did she know if the person was worth talking to? Their personal brand (or lack thereof) spoke a million words.

In my case, I’ve always been loud and proud about my impact and advocacies. I’ve always been open about:

1. My experience as a Woman of Color in EU Tech

2. My experience and achievements as a Product Manager and Product Leader in multiple tech companies of varying sizes

3. I’ve always been active in various Women’s centric communities like AllWomen and I also had experience starting my own.

These made me an interesting candidate for her.

03 Conversations with potential co-founders are pretty much job interviews

Kat asked really difficult questions.

She asked about my experience building things, not just as a Product Manager, but also my entrepreneurial ventures like my coaching business and my old mentoring community, Career Hacking for Women.

At the top of my head, she asked about:

1. How I built things practically (product speak did not impress her, to put it mildly)

2. How I created opportunities and grew my business

3. What else I can I bring to the table aside from my practical skills (e.g. my network)

She also asked me questions that aimed to flesh out how I am as a colleague and partner:

1. How do I behave in the face of conflict

2. How do I keep myself and my team motivated in tough times

3. Did I share their core values and care about the problem they were trying to solve

She was trying to answer two very important questions for herself:

• Can I help her and Andrea make the startup successful?

• Would I, as a person, be a good fit for the two of them?

🔰 TL;DR: So if you’re a startup founder looking for your co-founders, here are some tips:

1. Get clear on your why and your co-founder criteria - who do you want to work with, what do you need to fulfill in your team

2. Comb through your network and communities - your co-founder might be one Linkedin search, a friend's introduction, or one industry event that's relevant for what you do away

3. Ask difficult questions and stalk like hell - Do a vibe and background check. Ask around about your prospect. Find out their social media activities. And make sure your as much of your requirements are being met

🧠 Something to think about: The steps Kat took to find me and vet me are not very different from how a recruiter or hiring manager would look for a potential candidate for a role in their team, isn’t it?

How to say YES (or no) to being a co-founder

I said YES to Kath months after we first started talking. Even though I wanted to say YES immediately.

What were my considerations? Let’s dive in!

01 Get clear on your motivations

Getting asked to be a co-founder is a huge ego boost! It was glorious to be recognized for my work this way.

But soon after the reality of what being a co-founder came knocking in.

It’s a lot of work, huge accountability, and incredibly high risk.

• The failure rate of startups is HIGH! 90%!

• The time it takes for startups to be profitable can be long! 2-5 years at best.

On the other hand, I’ve always advocated for “building something for yourself” (whenever possible, in whatever shape or form). The problem that the startup was trying to solve was also strongly aligned with the things I cared about. So putting those two together made the pros higher than the risks for me.

02 Find out how serious was the founder

I’ve been in 0-1 environments. I was employee no.1 for a startup a few years back. My boss, who was the CEO/founder rarely slept and was constantly stressed out about revenue, board expectations, funding, and well… everything. The first few years were exciting but extremely tough.

Several of my friends also had their startup stints. Only one of them achieved their definition of success.

On the flip side, I’ve also seen people who wanted to have a startup because it’s 2023 and it was the cool millennial thing to do after avocado toasts.

I wanted to make sure that who I was saying YES to, knew what they were getting into, were prepared for the hard work that was waiting for us, and were not just motivated by a cool title on Linkedin.

Suffice to say, she was serious.

03 Check constraints and set clear expectations

This was 2023 so I was still working full time in my Head of Product role. The demands of that job was high. I was also already a Career Coach for Women in Tech.

This meant that I only have so much time and energy that I can give to this startup:

• I wouldn’t be so easily available for meetings

• I could be slow when it comes to my end of the responsibilities

• And having an MVP could take a long time since this was my primary outcome

I needed to be transparent on these so expectations are clear for all of us.

Why she was still ok with all of these constraints afterward is beyond me 😂

But it was important to be upfront from the beginning because these constraints were a huge factor in our ways of working and our roadmap.

⚠️ IMPORTANT CAVEAT

Since I was employed, before I could even consider saying YES I had so many things to triple check with my employment contract. Non-compete clauses, Ownership clauses, NDAs, etc.   

I also had to clear this up with my manager to make sure there’s no conflict of interest and none of these would blow up in my face later on once we go public with the startup.

Having a day job, a coaching business, and a startup all at the same time contributed to my burnout in early 2024. I do not recommend being this overloaded. 

04 Courage vs Confidence

When it became clear that I wanted to say YES, my self-limiting beliefs and fears came flooding in. 😂

• What if I fail and I drag them down with me?

• Do I really know how to build a product?

These two questions that kept me up at night.

My confidence failed. My lizard brain was working hard to keep me safe.

But there was a nagging voice at the back of my head that was also getting stronger after every conversation with Kat. I was still 50/50 until I attended one of their events where I got to try Andrea’s hypnotherapy for myself. I was won over 100%.

So I talked with my coach and shifted my perspective to help me make a decision that was not based on fear alone.

• Of course, I knew how to build a product. And if there was something I couldn’t figure out on my own, I had a bunch of friends who could help me.

• Of course,e I will fail. But isn’t that the point of product building? To keep failing so we can figure out what doesn’t work until we find out what does?

So in the end, the WANT won. And even though my confidence was low, I called for courage instead to take that leap of faith.

⚠️ IMPORTANT CAVEAT: 

I think it’s also important to mention my privileges made it possible for me to even say yes. I had a full time job, some savings, and a supportive partner. I had a a financial cushion to be comfortable with the risk should shit hit the fan.

🔰 TL;DR: So if if you’re being scouted to be a startup co-founder, here are some tips:

1. Get clear on your why. It's a huge ego boost but the reality is full of uncertainty and hard work. Make sure you weigh the PROs and CONs against each other. 

2. It's a partnership not a favor. There are many risks and the startup life can be stressful. Make sure your potential co-founder is grounded in this reality and not just here for the ego-trip.

2. Get clear on your constraints. There will be tons of work and there's no team to do the job except for you and your co-founders. Make sure you have the capacity and energy for this. If you're still employed, check your employment contract. 

3. Don't listen to your self-limiting beliefs. If you really want to do this, trust your gut and say yes. You don't have to know how to do everything from the beginning. You'll learn along the way. 

Conclusion

The startup life can be an amazing adventure. But the reality is also that the last 12 months have been intense.

We’ve made huge mistakes.

• We’ve made the wrong bets

• We’ve lost money and opportunities

• We’ve neglected important administrative work that had consequences

The 3 of us have also disagreed about many things.

But we’ve never fought. At least not a fight that made us question whether or not we would want to keep working with each other.

So if you want to get into it, grit is important.

Find co-founders who you could feel safe with — because you’re going to make a lot of mistakes and it makes a boatload of difference when you’re working with people who can help you learn from those mistakes without making you feel like an ogre.

Besides celebrating wins is more fun with people you actually like to work with. ❤️

Questions for you!

For the startup peeps reading this who have co-founders - how did you find each other? And what made you say YES to the opportunity to work together?

I’d love to read your stories in the comments section below 👇

📣 I will have 2 open coaching slots for February!

• If you’re an experienced woman in tech (in product, engineering, data, or design) feeling uncertain about your performance and your career.

• Or if you’re a new leader and you want need help navigating your new leadership role, set up your team for success, and make sure you have time for the rest of your life

• Or are you an aspiring entrepreneur. You have an idea but you’re not sure how to turn it into reality.

I’d love to support you! My approach is a balance of practical work - wherein we define goals for what you want to achieve, design a strategy for it, and identify next best actions that you can take in your day to day. As well as mixing it with a holistic approach to make sure you have the right system to take on your challenges with energy and strength.

If this is the kind of support that you’re looking for, I’d love to chat!

If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me til the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that you’d like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.

❤️

Kax

PS. Here are more ways for us to connect:

1. Follow me on Instagram, Bluesky or LinkedIn for thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions that take less than 10 minutes to read. 😂

2. Follow Magical Audios on Instagram for announcements on new programs and events

Hello friends! 👋

We met through our product management newsletters over a year ago. We decided it was time to write a collaborative article!

A lot has been said about the importance of building relationships when growing products. But what it really means is challenging for product managers. We see product managers at two ends of the spectrum:

1. The ones who think the many meetings they have to attend are enough to build relationships

2. The ones who over-rely on their relationships to do the work for them and wonder why they’re not getting positive outcomes.

Amy and I have been on the opposite but extreme ends of the spectrum. We both have struggled with balancing relationship building with delivering on our product initiatives. And we wanted to share with you what building relationships, the impact on our product work, and how to actually make it work in real life.

This article has two stories - one from Amy and one from Kax - and a conclusion on the sweet spot of adapting to each situation.

is the author of Product Management IRL
is the author of How to Build What Feels Good

Amy’s Story

The Beginning

“You are not meeting expectations.”

This is the opening to my annual performance review. I’m stunned.

For half of the review cycle, I was reporting to a skip-level VP after Mike, the Senior Director, left the company. I was expecting to hear positive feedback.

I said the first thing that came to mind “I will be laid off next month”. The silence stretched on for a minute.

“But Mike never gave me feedback that I wasn’t performing”, I said.

“You always need to ask for feedback”, replied the VP.

The VP went on to say stakeholders didn’t trust me and I didn’t collaborate enough. She urged me to speak to the stakeholders and get more feedback.

The Next Chapter

I was laid off.

My focus for the next year was finding a new product management job. There were few opportunities to work on collaboration and relationship building while job hunting.

I didn’t even consider finding a class on leadership or collaboration. I kept up my lone-wolf approach of working hard for myself. Networking seemed like a waste of time.

Early Changes

As I started a new product management role, I promised myself that I would listen more and always be friendly. That’s what I was missing when I was laid off - right?

These steps helped but it wasn’t enough. I watched people getting promoted around me. Organizational changes blindsided me. I had a lot of trouble anticipating what my manager wanted.

Some More Changes

I changed companies and moved to a more senior product manager role. I decided to make another change. I would talk to my manager and others one level up more than I had before.

This change helped me onboard and make my first deliveries.

But I forgot an important lesson - ask for feedback. I got my courage up and asked for feedback. I learned that my presentation and communication skills aren’t sufficient for a product manager who deals with customers.

I joined Toastmasters to improve my presentation skills. I studied leadership skills too.

These steps eventually earned a promotion to team leader. At this point, I needed to get more out of peer product managers. My new communication skills and leadership skills brought more product growth.

Due to the pandemic, company growth stagnated. As the company downsized, there were no opportunities to build cross-functional relationships. I moved to a new company and product role.

Reflection Finally Starts

I used all my newfound communication skills, friendliness, and leadership on my new team. Nothing worked. No one had time to talk to me.

I was back to the lone wolf product manager. My layoff experience taught me that the lone-wolf product manager approach was bad. What can I do?

I began to think about what I could have done differently to prevent that poor performance review. Maybe my performance depends on building relationships. How can I build relationships if no one has time to talk to me?

I decided to write my point of view on the new product I needed to bring to market. I scheduled 1-on-1s about my POV slides. I built relationships around these POVs. I asked for feedback and got suggestions to improve.

Finally, 2 jobs later, I realized the critical mistakes that led up to my layoff:

1. If I don’t communicate my value, the team doesn’t value me.

2. If you see co-workers as competitors, then your co-workers don’t trust you.

3. Strong relationships bring better results than going alone.

Kax’s Story

In a nutshell, I’ve had a very very opposite experience from Amy. My relationships have always been my biggest asset; building them easily was my strength. But I didn’t realize all these initially until I had an issue with one of my stakeholders that was not getting fixed.

Story time!

I was having a hard time getting alignment with one of my stakeholders and the issue was escalating to my manager’s level. Let’s call them Bob.

“I don’t have the same issue with my other stakeholders, so clearly Bob is the problem!”

I was young, ambitious, and hell-bent on making sure this problem didn’t reflect poorly on me.

My then-manager asked me to think about potential reasons why my other stakeholders were much easier to align with compared to Bob. And Bob being an ass was not a valid answer.

In the end, as you have probably correctly inferred, I had a very good relationship with my other stakeholders while I had none with Bob - which was understandable because Bob was new to the company.

When that clicked, the world was my oyster!

The benefits of having good relationships across our organization (in different levels included) are plenty.

As for me, I’ve reaped the following benefits:

• Getting alignment and buy-in in initiatives or cross-team dependencies is 100x easier.

• I’ve had senior leaders sponsor organization-wide initiatives that I would propose (or in some cases, they’d ask me to lead them).

• I became the go-to person for certain topics which really helped my credibility and personal brand within the organization.

• Conflict became easier to manage. Because I was having frequent conversations with people in the orgnization, conflicting priorities and ideals were easier to talk about and rarely resulted in an escalation (note: that this benefit came later on. See downsides below)

• And because of those 👆+ the results, I got to move to the Head of Product role later on.

But how did I build these relationships:

• I had 360 conversations with my stakeholders. This means I involved them early, kept them up-to-date on progress, shared results, and did it all over again. I also believed that if I wanted them to trust me, I had to start trusting them.

• I got curious about what other people were doing in the organization (including people I didn’t necessarily work with directly) which sparked interesting conversations moving forward.

• I also got to know the people beyond their jobs. Who they were outside of work hours, what were they into, and if they also liked the shows I was watching. This made the connection more genuine and in a way, the work more enjoyable.

I guess you can say that I invested a lot of time in this. Personally, connecting with people has always been one of my values so prioritizing building relationships came to me naturally.

But of course, everything has a downside.

In my case, I over-relied on my relationships. And doing so had its own consequences, especially at the beginning of my PM career,

1. Things took a lot of time! Because I was involving my stakeholders in so many steps, some decisions took longer than necessary just because every communication can become a possible entry point to negotiation.

2. Pushing back was tough. Because I was getting so much out of my relationships, this made me hesitate to push back or make tough decisions because I was afraid of “damaging the relationship”.

3. Relying too much on my relationships for customer/market insights. This is tough to admit but I got lazy. Because my co-workers were rich with input from their own domains or functions, I ended up relying on those vs. doing my own homework of looking at data or talking to customers. Which compromised my own understanding of the users we were building the product for.

Some Thoughts and Feelings.

At the end of the day, I will always advocate for building relationships internally.

Especially as you become more senior in your role, your growth and influence in the organization can be limited by the lack of these relationships. Various product leaders have weighed in on the importance of having relationships as a factor for one’s promotion.

But relationships can only bring you so far unless you do the work. Balance it out with having a clear strategy, cross-check their input with evidence from research, and don’t lose sight of having scalable systems for you and your team.

Our Conclusion: The Sweet Spot Between Trust and Results

As Amy and I shared, relationships are critical to a successful product career. They open doors, foster collaboration, and can even shape the trajectory of our growth. But as we’ve also shared, relationships alone aren’t enough.

Building trust with your team and stakeholders is essential, but trust should complement strategy, not replace it. The key is finding that sweet spot where relationships amplify your ability to deliver impactful work, without overshadowing it.

So, whether you’re starting from scratch like Amy or over-relying on your network like I once did, the key is to balance relationships with action. Build connections, but always back them with results.

Here’s to building trust, not dependency—and finding balance along the way.

Thanks, Amy! ❤️

Thanks Amy for writing today’s post with me! I loved putting our stories together!

Amy Mitchell is a Principal Product Manager at Dell. Subscriber to her newsletter Product Management IRL or follow her on Linkedin.

If you found our story valuable, why not share it with a friend?

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If you got to this part of this newsletter, thanks for staying with me til the end. And thank you for sharing with me topics that you’d like for me to share my thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions on.

❤️

Kax

PS. Here are more ways for us to connect:

1. Follow me on Instagram, Bluesky or LinkedIn for thoughts, feelings, and violent reactions that take less than 10 minutes to read. 😂

2. Looking to get 1:1 coaching support? Let’s chat!. I typically work with experienced Product Managers, Designers, Software Developers and new Leaders in Tech who want to achieve their career goals. (and if budget is a constraint: join incitefulapp and you can get coaching for free!)