Archive

Navigate Hard Conversations by Finding Shared Goals

When you’re having a tough time navigating a disagreement, put down the problem for a minute and identify some common goals. Some of those goals might be ones you haven’t thought of but that make sense once you hear someone else’s point of view.  Story Time! A

Bragging is a Microphone, not a Megaphone

I’ve been thinking lately about difference between the kind of bragging that gives bragging a bad name, and the kind of bragging I think is a force for good.  Good bragging is a microphone. A microphone helps you be heard better, especially if you’re naturally soft spoken. A

Uncomfortable Networking? Get Comfortable Asking Questions!

So many of flinch when we hear that we should network more. It feels awkward. We’re worried we’ll seem self-serving. Maybe we only think of it in the context of looking for a job. But networking isn’t just for job seekers. When you have a job, you

Freaked-out people need you to understand them before you fix it

We need to talk about humans. And feelings. Ugh. (Shoutout to Murderbot*, the books and the TV show.) People in tech, especially those of us who came through engineering, have a tendency to be problem solvers. We love to solve a problem and often want to ignore all the extraneous

A Job Title is Not a Brag

A job title is not a brag. A brag is a story about the difference you’ve made and the challenges you've overcome.  When I say that I help people brag better some people laugh and say the people they work with certainly don’t need any help

Develop a reputation for taking feedback really, really well to get more and better feedback

I’ve been doing a little mini-series on feedback. How to give feedback graciously. What to do when great work gets drowned in enthusiastic feedback. How to look at feedback as a gift and manage your emotions when you’re scared of what you might hear.  A lot of people

Brag Better! Metro Innovation Hub Startup Café Slides and Handout

On April 4, 2025 I led a bragging workshop for the Metro Innovation Hub Startup Café. And in the spirit of practicing what I teach, the organizers told me it was the best turnout they'd ever had for one of these events. Here are the slides and the

Shake Off Small Mistakes with an "Awooga!"

This newsletter went out last week with a big old typo right in the title. I schedule these to be sent bright and early so I spotted the typo (“manager” instead of “manage”) while I was having my first cup of coffee. And you know what my first thought was?

How to Manage Your Fear of Feedback

Intellectually we know that feedback makes us better. But emotionally it’s easy to resist or fear feedback. Maybe it’s part of being human. Software engineers are nervous about code reviews, or at least I always was. What kind of stupid mistake was someone going to find in my

Feedback is a Gift - No, Really!

Looking back at the last two issues, I realized that they were both about feedback. Feedback is a juicy topic. In fact I’ve got a whole folder full of ideas about feedback, so I’m going to turn this into a little mini series. You can find all the

What to do When Your Best Work Gets the Most Feedback

Here’s something weird but true: sometimes really great work gets more critical feedback than work that is mediocre, bad, or good enough. That’s because when a deliverable or work product is almost perfect people get excited and want to help push it over the line. And when work

A Writer's Tip for Giving Product Feedback: Say something true, kind, and helpful

Getting critiqued as a writer is hard. You take this fragile creation that only exists because you made it up from scratch and ask people, sometimes even strangers, for feedback.  When I went to my first fiction writing workshop I was very nervous about getting and giving feedback because I’

Four Tips for Hard Conversations When You've Got Higher Status

Today I’m wrapping up a three part mini-series that looks at how you can improve hard conversations by understanding the hierarchical difference between you and the person you’re talking with. I’ve already talked about hard conversions with peers, and hard conversations with people in power. So logic

Speed Bragging for Product People Slides

I led a session at Product Tank Portland that focused on bragging for product managers. Here are the slides. I've got lots more bragging resources, including How and Why to run a Brag Lunch. Speed Bragging Product TankSpeed Bragging Product Tank.pdf70 KBdownload-circle

Five Truths to Improve Hard Conversations with People in Power

The delightful fantasy novel The House in the Cerulean Sea features a good-hearted bureaucrat’s struggle with his organization’s leaders, known only as Extremely Upper Management. This week I’m going to talk about how to have successful conversations with people above you in the hierarchy and I’m

Hard Conversations with Peers

A real-world factor in hard conversations is the relative status of you and the person you’re talking to. Every social group has formal and informal hierarchies, and taking that into account increases the odds of a hard conversation going well. I’ve teed up three articles about this, each

When to Start Hard Conversations with Your Point of View

We all have biases and opinions and it’s often helpful to just be up front about yours. You don’t have to do it like a jerk, and you can leave room for discovery and changing your mind. Doing that actually builds trust and can make it easier for

Why Active Listening is Essential in Hard Conversations

Last week’s article was about asking questions to protect yourself in hard conversations. Rebecca Campbell shared this on my LinkedIn post about the article.  “I've been thinking about this one for the last couple of days—probably because I've advised people to do exactly what

Ask Questions to Protect Yourself in Hard Conversations

Today I’m going to talk about why it’s often a good idea to start a hard conversation with questions. And while there are a lot of good, values-based reasons to start with curiosity, today I’m going to explain the benefits in very pragmatic terms.  Let’s face

Two ways to make hard conversations that are about you easier

When I talked about how you should start hard conversations with altruism, I said this works even when you’re the topic of conversation.  Sometimes you need to have a hard conversation whose goal is to benefit you. Here are some examples from my own career: * Telling my boss that

Tiny Wins Build Trust

Hey there! I don’t have a new "hard conversations" article ready this week but I do have something pretty awesome for you. I just read Jade Rubick’s post on how he implemented a way to deliver small improvements while keeping bigger projects moving. He calls it

Assume Positive Intent

One obstacle to approaching hard conversations with altruism is other people. Other people make us grumpy. They’re not good at their jobs. They have it out for us. They have secret agendas. They’re stuck in their ways. They will never admit if their team is wrong. All those

Start Hard Conversations with Altruism

I believe that to be great at hard conversations you have to start with altruism. To do this, you have you to take a good look in the mirror, be honest with yourself about what’s in your head and heart, then discard what doesn't align with your

Get Great at Hard Conversations

People tell me that one of my superpowers is my ability to productively have hard conversations. In other words I can get and keep people engaged in a conversation about a difficult topic, navigate the conversation to satisfactory (or at least clear) outcomes, and keep or improve relationships in the

Hack Continuous Learning with This One Easy Trick

I’m going to share something that helped me cope with the FOMO I had trying to keep up with the overwhelming amount of great books, newsletters (cough!), articles, and podcasts about leadership and product management. A couple years ago I felt like I was just always behind. I couldn’

Product Management in the Wild: Threadloop Pricing

I just got back from spending several days hanging out with my Dad (a reader of this newsletter, hi Dad!) while my Mom was traveling. We talked, played a fun game (Fox Experiment), talked, went to Mysterious Galaxy, talked. We also went out to eat and I cooked shrimp scampi

Leadership Incidents

Last week I talked about Manager Bugs, which are the commonplace mistakes managers or leaders make. This week I’m talking about Leadership Incidents—the bigger failures that hurt more and are harder to recover from. In software engineering we talk about bugs, which are when something isn’t working

Manager Bugs

Last week a Dot Release reader and former coworker hit reply to the "Brag Lunch Leader Edition" article and said, “Do owning your failures as a leader next.” What a great idea! I knew I wanted to write about this, but he was quite right that talking about

Brag Lunch Leader Edition

So perhaps you’ve been thinking about this brag lunch thing, but you’re still uncomfortable. “That’s great for individual contributors,” you’re saying to yourself. “Heck, I’ll even coach my team so they can brag better. But I’m a leader, I shouldn’t brag, right? And

Brag So You're Known for What Matters to You

One of the worst conversations I ever had with a boss started with him saying, “everyone likes you, but…” He then proceeded to tell me that I “wasn’t technical enough.” Reader, I have a degree, and a state license, in electrical engineering and he had one in economics. At

Good News! Smart People Misunderstand Each Other, Too

Dealing with disagreement can be hard and messy, so here’s some good news. Sometimes a disagreement is just a misunderstanding. Misunderstandings can come with a lot of the same energy and emotion as a disagreement, but once you’ve found the end of the knot they often untangle much

When You're the Smart Person Disagreeing—Restate the Problem

There’s a special case of “Smart People Disagree” you may have been wondering about. It’s when you’re one of the people disagreeing. You don’t just have skin in the game, you’ve got elbows, knees and half your chin. You care a lot and you want

Describe it to Defuse it When Smart People Disagree

So you’ve encountered a disagreement. Wonderful! Great ideas usually don’t emerge fully formed and without controversy. They’re honed through debate and testing. But a lot of time the reaction to an honest disagreement is to * Ignore it. We’re uncomfortable so let’s pretend we didn’t

Smart People Disagree. That's Not a Bug, it's a Feature.

Smart People Disagree. If you’ve ever worked with me, you’ve probably heard me say that. Getting people aligned starts with being OK with disagreement. Which is tough because lots of people are uncomfortable with disagreement or its neighbor up the escalation path, conflict. So we’re going to

Alignment 101: What is Alignment and Why do I Care?

Today we’re going to start talking about how to get people and teams aligned. When I told people I was starting a newsletter, several folks said to me “you’ve got to write about that thing you do where you somehow get people on the same page without pissing

Keep an Achievements and Mistakes List

A shorter article today folks, after the deep dive into brag lunches in the previous article. Do you ever feel like you don’t have anything to brag about? Here’s what to do.  Keep a running list of your achievements and mistakes. Keeping this list makes performance reviews, resumes,

How and Why to Host a Brag Lunch

A brag lunch is a supportive place for women (and others!) to practice talking about how awesome they are. In this article, you’re going to learn how to host and facilitate your own brag lunch.

Coming soon

I'm Nadya Duke Boone and I'm starting a newsletter about things I'm passionate about. That list includes general career advice, management and leadership, and product leadership in particular. Each article will have one topic and be geared towards practical actionable advice - because you