Before I took the VP Product role at Twiggle, a good friend gave me a piece of brilliant advice. She said I should write down all the ideas and thoughts I have when I start because that would be the only time I’m able to think about the product, the market, and the company objectively without being too immersed in it. And so I did. It was true – I had the opportunity to apply critical thinking to everything I learned, identify potential pitfalls and opportunities, and curve in my head the path to pursuit them.

I kept it as a Trello list. Initially, I added items to it every day, a few times a day. Then it became once or twice a week until it became much rarer to not at all. At first, I used the list on a regular basis. I looked at it at least once a week to make sure I’m working on the important gaps and opportunities that I identified as part of my onboarding. Later on, I decided to compile a full-blown product strategy out of all the ideas I had, but it wasn’t the right time for the company for such an effort, and the list was abandoned. The next time I looked at the list, all I could hear in my head was why things actually didn’t matter as much, and they don’t really need to be taken care of as a high priority. Some of these things really weren’t that big of a deal, but some came to bite us later on.

Remaining objective is one of the hardest things for an involved product leader, but you must master it to succeed in your role and truly fulfill your responsibilities towards the company. This is especially true when the objective reality isn’t as nice or simple as you would like it to be. Here are a few ways to make sure your view of reality is intact as well as how you operate against it.

Explain It to Someone Else Who Is Objective

Explaining your thoughts to someone else is a very powerful tool to help you organize and understand what matters. Like in rubber duck debugging, the other side of the conversation doesn’t even need to understand or answer, the mere fact that you are explaining it to them does the work for you. However, if you decide to use a person for that mission, make sure it is not someone with a stake in the matter. Ideally, it shouldn’t be someone from your company, since you are all already invested in your own opinions and experience, and we are trying to avoid group thinking here.

You can share your thoughts on your current status, a potential strategy, existing risks, or even something that you heard about the market and wonder whether or not it means anything for you.

When you do, make sure the other side – be it a person or an object of your choice – understands it. If you talk to a person, ask them to ask any questions on information they are missing in order to fully understand and agree with your conclusion. If you chose an object, you would have to come up with their thoughts and questions on your own. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it actually works. Did you ever argue with someone in your head, and knew exactly what they would say, running the whole argument without them being present? It’s something like that.

Listen to Your Gut Feeling

As you are talking to this other person (real or dummy), some things won’t add up. You wouldn’t be able to explain exactly why something is right or wrong, for example. Some of these logical gaps are easier to note than others, so in some cases, you will have a minor feeling that something might be off, but it isn’t big enough to stop and watch closely.

That’s exactly what you want to start paying attention to. These little places where you have – for a brief moment – a gut feeling that there might be something there worth checking, but it goes away so quickly that you immediately think it was probably nothing.

It is often these moments that uncover the most important things. It is like pulling a splinter out of your finger, it is often much longer than what you see, and most of it is simply hidden under the surface. Make it your mission to pull these out and not ignore them simply because you can only see a small dot.

Another example of it is when, every now and then, you will hear something that will create an uncomfortable feeling in your gut. It can be a competitor launching something that you have thought about for a long time. A change in the ecosystem that may or may not be significant. A number of small hints that together indicate that your customers aren’t as happy as they used to be. These things typically aren’t expressed as clear data or sharp insight, and your reaction to them is at the instinct level, not at the thinking level. 

The problem is that most of us are well-trained thinkers. In a world where data rules, if it is only a gut feeling, we let ourselves ignore it. In many cases, that would be a mistake. Data might give you a signal only when it’s too late. While I’m a big believer in intuition, I don’t think you should make decisions solely based on it. But definitely when you have that feeling, even for a moment, that something is not right – check it out. You can start by writing it down or talking about it with your colleagues. Bring it into daylight instead of burying it because it is too complex to handle. Ignoring it, unfortunately, won’t make it go away, and if it’s bad, you better prepare and react as soon as possible.

State the Truth Even When It’s Inconvenient

In the roadmap lecture that I give in the CPO Bootcamp, I talk about how to communicate time estimates without having everyone thinking about them as commitments. One of the tricks I use is related to the legal disclaimer that I was forced by legal to show whenever showing the roadmap presentation to customers. Instead of adding it in tiny print at the end, I made it my opening slide, stating it super clearly upfront. And whenever I present the roadmap internally, I “forget” to remove this slide. Not only do I include it in the deck, but I also stop and talk about it, clarifying the point I want to make with it as the first thing I say about the roadmap. 

Don’t get me wrong, not all managers love to hear this, or simply agree when they see it. If your manager believes that what you are about to present needs to be 100% accurate and never change, a single slide won’t change that. But it will, at least, clarify that you are in a disagreement about it, and by stating it clearly upfront you might have an opportunity to start an honest discussion with your manager about it. That puts you in a completely different place.

I always like to start any presentation or brainstorming session by tackling the most debatable topic first. By discussing it first you either get to an agreement and align on the areas where there was most disagreement before or understand that you still disagree, which may or may not prevent you from moving on. This might sound trivial, but there is also a third option that you eliminate this way and is much worse: being in deep disagreement with each other without knowing so or fully recognizing it. 

Even if the truth isn’t pretty – for example, understanding that you actually have much less money than you thought in your bank account because some of it wasn’t really yours – knowing and acknowledging it puts you in a much better position to act right. Unfortunately, truth doesn’t tend to change itself only because you ignore it, so your only real option is to face it boldly.