How to tell if you are (or have) a good manager

One test of a good manager is to ask them to write down the name of every person they work with and what makes them tick. The best managers can do this without hesitation.

Why is this important? Getting the most out of people is not a one size fits all solution. Every person is different, with unique personalities and emotional triggers. Our job, as managers, is to solve the puzzle of who someone is psychologically so that we know how best to motivate and grow them.

This isn’t a comprehensive list, but to throw out some archetypes:

• Achievers love a goal and metrics that show progress to goal.¹ Some do it to prove to themselves or to others that they can. Some do it because they want to accelerate their career progression.

• Builders love to create something from nothing. They’re not in it for the metrics or to win, they want to bring something new and novel into the world. There’s a couple flavors of this, one more artistic² and one more hacker.

• Competitors love to win. They show up every day because they want the company to win and/or the team to win. They hate losing deals or market share to competitors.

And then layer onto that an entire emotional profile. This often gets oversimplified into “psychological safety” but it’s worth getting into the weeds.

• Does someone prefer clear, direct instruction so that they know exactly what is asked of them? Or do they bristle at feeling micromanaged and want the autonomy to decide for themselves how to achieve the assignment?

• What form should constructive feedback take that will leave them motivated to improve, instead of demoralized and demotivated?

• What form of positive feedback is the most energizing and nourishing?

Some managers develop a belief that their job is simply telling people what to do, and authority + a paycheck alone will do the rest.³ And for some employees, that’s true. But for many, the opposite is true — relying on authority will create attrition instead of inspiration.

To get the best out of your people, really understand what makes them tick. Use that to craft your messages and interactions. It’s proof that you see them as a person not a pawn, you care about them and their feelings, and in return, you ask that they give you their very best.

The Workshop

This is a newsletter-only section where I share a half-baked idea in hopes that y’all who are smarter than me can work it out with me.

A few weeks ago, we removed the waitlist from the AI-powered health chat app that I, and the team at ClosedLoop, have been working on. You can try it on our website here. We also went live in the Apple App Store.

It’s very much at the “I’m deeply embarrassed by it but we need to learn” stage of pre-PMF. As in, our vision for it is so much bigger than what it actually is today, not to mention the fact that the design of it makes me cringe (we’re working on it!)

But at the same time, now is the right time to have it out in public so that we can learn from real people what they think is great with it, what they hope it could become, and what needs work.

Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been conducting hour-long user interviews, talking to people about their health and watching them use our AI health app. It’s been fascinating, watching people interact with a conversational AI about their health.

I’ll skip over any proprietary analysis of the user research and make a more generic point: it’s becoming more and more obvious that this new age of LLM-powered products is going to be a golden age for Product Managers and others who are skilled at inventing great products.

LLMs are a technology that needs a purpose. It can do anything and everything, but it also needs to be shaped into a product and given a value prop.

The average user is not going to learn how to be a prompt engineer. When faced with the choice of typing in their own question or choosing a canned one, most prefer the canned one. People don’t want to stare at a blank canvas and have to do all the work.

And that’s really exciting to me. We still have to do the work of inventing something valuable, and designing the affordances that make it easy and obvious to users what that value is and how to get it. And if we’re successful, we get the reward of knowing we built something that made a difference to a lot of people, helping them in a way that they wouldn’t or couldn’t have done by themselves.

1  Often, achievers will want to not only hit the goal, but hit it faster or more than expected. Some might call them overachievers.

2  I don’t just mean artistic literally like how a designer or marketer will think about user experience or brand assets. I also mean the exacting way in which engineers will care about perfecting their system architecture or how they write their code. Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham is worth a read.

3  My favorite founder delusion is the one where the founder believes part of the compensation is the privilege of getting to work at this company on this project. That might have been true when they were growing up, but it’s not true anymore, after an entire generation has seen themselves or their friends get laid off and taken for granted by corporate executives.