9. Inspiration Isn’t Optional

Who inspires you? Are you finding inspiration? Are you inspiring?

One of the tenets in my Product Leadership presentation—the one I give to every new product manager—is a section called The Practices of a Product Team. It’s meant to offer directional vision. A way of saying: these are the things I expect us to do, whether or not they show up in your job description. What I’m naming here isn’t about role or scope, but about the posture of our department, the culture we’re trying to build together.

4 Practices of the Product Team

Embracing these practices can unlock a team or product group towards their best work, together. In these practices, it’s not about effort or to‑do lists, but about shifting the group mindset to be one of collaboration, rather than hoarding information and using your knowledge as a way to protect your seat on the bus. But a great team isn’t a team that hoards knowledge; great teams find ways to be conveyor belts of information sharing, adding value and expanding the opportunity of potential within the department.

Inspiration is not optional; it is necessary to push us towards our best. Even now, I seek out inspiration and motivation to continue to pursue my best. This mindset led me to an incredible networking event, in which Kerri Walsh‑Jennings was the keynote speaker. Anytime you get a chance to meet an Olympic gold medalist—let alone a three‑time gold medalist—you jump at the opportunity. In listening to her talk about her experiences and what is still driving her to this day, I was struck by one of her mantras she used whenever she set foot on the sand court. Kerri said, “Find in yourself, the ability to play with joy.”

When Kerri played with joy, things opened up. The game slowed down and positivity flowed from her effort whether they won the point or lost it. In embracing joy, we can find our effort becomes sustainable, as every lost point wasn’t a tragedy but a step in the journey. Lost points don’t have to lead to a lost match. If you have the right perspective, micro losses can actually teach you ways in which to turn the game around and as you stack micro wins, success in the macro becomes inevitable.

I’ve seen this happen within the best product teams. Finding the joy in work, in team collaboration, in partner communication, allows great teams to work almost effortlessly towards a shared goal. Not that there isn’t energy expended, but with the right perspective the effort becomes sustainable, because it is getting you somewhere. Fulfillment in the work is seeing the effort pay off into something that creates value for the customer, the brand, and the organization.

The practices are meant to push you towards practicing things together as a group, not just an individual mindset. I’ve already written about practices three and four within this book, but a quick refresher can’t hurt, before we jump into the first two practices below.

In habituating ideation, we surface opportunity for innovation and potential for disruption. You can’t do both, but creating a habit of ideation gives you the chance to find the unfindable and explore without consequence.

Then, when we embrace a fail‑forward mindset, our exploration isn’t wasted, as we learn from them and apply these lessons into our next adventure. Our capacity to have success in the macro is dependent on our wisdom developed within all of the micro failures we’ve had along the way.

Practice #1: Be Curious

Yvon Chouinard never wanted to be a businessman. His entrance into business was reluctant, exploratory; he might even say it was accidental. He started by forging climbing gear for himself and his friends—not to build a company, but to solve a problem. This company, Chouinard Equipment Company, already a leader in the hardware space for climbing enthusiasts, sourced rugby shirts to use as climbing shirts because they were made of a tough material that would not wear out. Patagonia Clothing was then created to sell more of these types of garments.

Yvon was good at finding novel solutions to what he saw as nagging problems in the spaces he found himself in. And he was not against cannibalizing his own business if he found he was contributing to the problem. When he realized his pitons (70 % of his revenue) were unsustainable and causing harm to the rock faces he so dearly loved, he quickly transitioned his entire company to produce removable climbing gear. The “Clean Climbing” movement began with the introduction of Chouinard Equipment Company’s new products; pitons were replaced with removable nuts, chocks, and eventually adjustable cams[^1].

With Patagonia, his frustration with the environmental impact of the blue dye in jeans and the unsustainable way cotton was being produced led him down a costly rabbit hole to find a way to be “as responsible as they can be,” knowing that the clothing business could never be a fully sustainable business. He nonetheless worked to find alternatives to cotton and the toxic chemical dyes that better suited their values. Organic cotton was more expensive to grow, ship, and manufacture, but they found a way to shift their entire product catalog that relied on cotton to now utilize organic cotton. They forced transparency with their mills, dyeing plants, and manufacturers to establish regular reporting and commitments to improve upon their footprint, to continue to be a supplier for Patagonia. Yvon is the epitome of being curious, asking questions, not settling for cliché answers, but digging into the workflow to find a solution that would be better than the current way of doing things[^2].

This is the muscle every product manager needs to build. And it’s often the exact thing that drives business leaders, department heads, and marketing leads up the wall. Curious product teams slow things down. They ask hard questions. They don’t just take the roadmap as dictated to them. They challenge assumptions, reframe the problem, and offer a different path.

They are not Yes Men.

And that alone can be infuriating to people who came to the meeting expecting agreement.

This comes from experience, as I’ve been called many things to my face and I’m sure a lot more behind my back.

You are a challenger.
You’re not a Yes man, are you?
Are you naive?
Sam, you are persistent to a fault.

I’m not going to lie. These kinds of critiques are hard to take. I can get defensive when someone calls me out in this way. Hey, I’m human too, just trying to do the job that’s actually written in the job description.

But when I step away from the critique and toss my ego in the trash can, I can usually find the root of what they’re trying to express.

At the bottom of most frustrations with Product is a misunderstanding of what Product is actually here to do. What we’re meant to deliver. A misunderstanding that usually comes from what they’ve seen in the past—a project manager managing people within a process.

In project management, the PM is a facilitator, an organizer, someone who repeats the business directive and makes sure things are delivered on time and on budget. They’re the heavy, dropping the name of the executive and hoping the fear of misalignment fuels urgency.

So when executives who are used to PMOs bring in Product teams, they’re often not ready for what happens next. They’re not used to being questioned. They’re not used to having the premise of the project examined. Especially not in the moment by someone they assumed was just there to execute.

You can imagine the amount of ego in the room, with many companies still shaped by years of a command‑and‑control style of leadership. For these executives, delivery meant obedience to the directive. No feedback. Certainly, no questions—just compliance.

It must come as a shock when they hire a strong product leader and end up in something that feels like an inquisition. Questions. Pushback. Challenges to the premise. Not because the team is being difficult, but because the team is doing its job, trying to understand the what and the why, so they can better construct the design brief.

Executives who are used to directing traffic are now sitting across from people asking if the road even needs to exist.

And it’s overwhelming. Especially when they’ve never had to think in nuance. Only in broad strokes, milestones, timelines, and budget.

But Product isn’t here to ship fast and stay quiet. Product is here to deliver the right thing, to the right people, at the right time. To do that correctly, we ask a lot of questions. We chase clarity and press into the “what” and the “why” before we ever hand over the “how.”

When I ask those questions, I’m not trying to show anyone up. I’m trying to make sure I understand the problem. Not trying to prove someone wrong, or push back on authority, just seriously trying to build the best product we can.

Curiosity isn’t about having the right answers. It’s about holding your assumptions loosely, and asking the kind of questions that invite a candid response. Yvon does this innately, evident in the books he’s written and content out there in his documentaries. In researching Yvon, I’ve pulled the following three takeaways from his curiosity in work, life, and his hobbies:

With these three takeaways, I’m convinced that product teams can become curious without burning bridges. To deliver products that create belonging, we have to be able to successfully question the hypothesis, while embracing a more transparent discovery process, by finding ways to integrate our learning across the departments, and communicating all along the way to keep our teams aligned on the goal.

Practice #2: Become a Connoisseur

Where Yvon Chouinard begins with questions and evolves toward a conviction, David Ogilvy begins with discernment and insists on standards from the start. His posture is that of someone who knows what good looks like, and wants to teach others how to recognize and reproduce it.

Enter the zone of the connoisseur.

To be sure, it takes someone curious to become a connoisseur, but we’re not talking about baseline curiosity here. The connoisseur label is reserved for the initially curious who become obsessive about a subject, who store up mountains of knowledge, only to descend their climb with explicit expertise. Maybe not just expertise, because the word connoisseur evokes a certain je ne sais quoi—an intangible quality that separates it from sheer knowledge into something more irresistible and follow‑worthy.

When you enter a room full of connoisseurs, it may initially feel like you’ve walked into a Snobbery 101 convention. But as you sit down and interact, you realize these people aren’t snobs; they’re just incredibly passionate about the thing they’re focused on. They not only speak to the benefits, but they can also speak eloquently to the differences within the nuances of the subject.

I would describe myself as a coffee snob. A connoisseur of coffee dating back to 2012, when I led marketing and business development for a burgeoning coffee equipment company in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was in the Alpha Dominche warehouse that I became curious about the differences in brewing techniques, roasting profiles, regional single‑origin beans, plant varietals, elevations’ impact on flavor concentration, and all of the differences in processing the coffee fruit into a coffee bean ready to be roasted.

You could say my curiosity evolved very quickly into obsessiveness. I was a vacuum for knowledge and experience, tasting coffees from top roasters in their tasting rooms and cafés across the United States. Importing coffee from Asia, Australia, Europe, Africa, Mexico, and South America. Drinking so much coffee in one sitting that my heart felt like a jackhammer in my chest, my fingers and toes venturing into the stratosphere with a baseline restlessness even a marathon couldn’t burn off.

It wasn’t only the volume of coffee that passed over my palate, it was the obsessive documentation of these profiles into my nerdy coffee notebook that created the connoisseur before you. It was a combination of time, experience, and study. An understanding of the history and the tactics of propagation that seeped and stewed into my very being. I wasn’t just a snob; I was the snob.

Being a connoisseur takes dedication—and a touch of obsession. As David Ogilvy puts it, “We prefer the discipline of knowledge to the anarchy of ignorance. We pursue knowledge the way a pig pursues truffles. A blind pig can sometimes find truffles, but it helps to know that they grow in oak forests.”

I absolutely love this quote. Truffle pigs are something else, and I’m very glad I don’t live in Europe, because I would definitely be on the truffle train. Ha.

But I digress.

David Ogilvy is a giant in the field of advertising. His global brand still thrives, even though he retired in 1973 and passed away in 1999. He is still widely cited because of his passion for the craft. He was a salesman first—something he reminds us of throughout his memoir, Confessions of an Advertising Man. His mantras have become folklore:

We sell—or else.

You cannot bore people into buying your product; you can only interest them into buying it.

The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife. Don’t insult her intelligence.

The longevity of his writing is a testament to his discipline and deep knowledge, not just of advertising history, but of its potential. He should be required reading alongside Michael Porter’s The Competitive Advantage and Seth Godin’s Tribes.

Part of Ogilvy’s charm is his forthrightness, his sense that his opinion is the correct one. That’s the difference between a snob and a connoisseur. Knowledge is table stakes, the entry fee to even be considered as an expert. The real art is in how you apply it. You need to correct someone, sometimes abruptly, with enough grace that they walk away not resenting it, but appreciating it.

The goal of a connoisseur is to correct with clarity and grace, so that even an abrupt truth feels like a gift.

With that in mind here are three inspirations from David Ogilvy, cultivated from his books The Eternal Pursuit of Unhappiness, Confessions of an Advertising Man, and Ogilvy On Advertising:

Everyone can be a connoisseur of something. Creating space for a connoisseur to share is the trick of a great leader. Every team I’ve built, we’ve created a kind of space—whether in person or virtual—for sharing what we care about.

Planting clover in your backyard.
New coffee in the break room.
A weekend project at the house.
A new artist showing at the museum.
Books you are currently reading, et cetera.

Whether it’s a knowledge drop, a picture blast, or a direct link in the Slack channel, or just the small talk before a meeting begins, the best teams make room for each member to speak up, chase side quests, and follow their trails of interest.

What you’re passionate about is part of what makes you unique. Great teams are made up of unique voices with divergent experiences.

You never know when that unique perspective on foraging mushrooms will be the missing piece in solving the difficult puzzle in front of us.

In Summary

Inspiration isn’t optional when you are a builder. Yvon Chouinard and David Ogilvy, though very different in how they built, have been influential in shaping the tools in my toolkit.

From Chouinard, I learned that values should influence the route to success and a rabid curiosity is the key to unlocking better, and better, and better.

From Ogilvy, I learned the importance of curation and taste in how we solve problems, develop features, and create environments. Being a connoisseur is a superpower to be chased, caught, and folded into your being.

Their work reminds me that a product is not just problem‑solving. It is creating an experience in which we can inspire and influence our customers towards better.

[^1]: Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley, The Responsible Company: What We’ve Learned from Patagonia’s First 40 Years (Ventura, CA: Patagonia Books, 2012), 2–3.

[^2]: Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley, The Responsible Company: What We’ve Learned from Patagonia’s First 40 Years (Ventura, CA: Patagonia Books, 2012), 48–51.

[^3]: David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 22.

[^4]: David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 39–40.