About a year ago, I was hitting my 3-month mark at Hampton. I was adjusting to a new kind of messy and a different kind of pace that I can only now recognize as working at a startup. I spent my entire career in Big Tech and the transition to a startup, particularly after working for myself, was jarring and at times, painful.

Through that discomfort I learned how to adapt my ways, my assumptions and my nervous system to a sea of uncertainty while the ground continued to shift underneath me. It was one of the hardest professional adjustments I’ve ever made and one that gave me this new skill set I’m reflecting on during pregnancy: true mental agility.

As a seasoned PM that worked in agile development I thought I knew speed, scrappy and living in the ambiguity.

Spoiler: I didn’t.

Startup life blew my practices out of the water. Out with the old and in with the new: Improvisation, incrementally and incomplete information. Somewhere in there, the startup training started to prepare me for the life chapter I’m in right now: pregnancy.

Every week is something new: a physical curveball, a mental hurdle, a crash landing into a new trimester. It’s thrilling and downright exhausting. Friends say pregnancy’s stages are the actual preparation you need for having a kid, because its quite similar.

And so, today, I’m sitting with a moment of gratitude for how working at at startup better prepared me to weather the unknowns of pregnancy. And how both of those experiences have possibly better prepared me for when my daughter arrives in the fall.

How? I’m more accepting of the unknown, welcoming of it rather victim to its grip. I don’t have all the information because I refuse to read all the baby books (I have no interest). And despite all the spreadsheets and project management I’ve inflicted on my household, I know that the lowest priority items on our to-do list will not be done by the time the baby arrives. And I’m not as upset about that as I would have been in the past.

So while the meta point, How working at a startup prepared me for pregnancy, is the most click baity Substack topic one could ponder, I’m sitting in the truth of that as a teeter on the edge of my 3rd trimester.

Passing through my portal of change.

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Things I Stacked

After reflecting on a year at Hampton, I was compelled to deep dive on real-life experiences in product strategy and product market fit.

And yes the product market fit includes Karaoke.

Culture Clicks

Move over fro-yo, Culture in the Garment District has a dessert worth traveling for. No but for real, the black and white cookie 🍪 is only secondary to Levain. Despite having grown up in Chicago, I had never visited nor done the Chinatown experience. Boxes checked - karaoke and dim sum, ✅ ✅. In NYC, I finally tried Kings County Imperial and it was excellent.

I visited Metro 🎥 for a friends birthday - the private movie theater experience was incredible. I also made a poor choice to watch The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare before bed 📺 and I’m continuing to practice sitting in the uncertainty. Because I have many questions.

In my final stretch of pregnancy, getting dressed continues to be a struggle. When I’m not renting things from Nuuly, I’m lounging in my favorite oversized t-shirts which are definitely overpriced but are certainly the most cozy. I pre-ordered this one because I’m a classic millennial.

Substack clicks

I’m Jori Bell, VP of Core at Hampton and a coach for Product Leaders. Learn more about my coaching practice here.

If product market fit happens when a product satisfies a strong market demand then what do you call it when your customers take your product and start building on their own because the limitations of the product don’t serve their needs enough? Fan fiction? Creativity?

I’ll call it product market fit plus.

Last year, my childhood friend Alexa corralled a group of 15ish friends, family, coworkers and neighbors to join her on an app called Music League.

What is Music League?

Music League is a competitive app1 that lets you share and discover new music with friends. It’s like if Name that Tune and Trivia had a baby. It’s a sticky, social way to stay in touch with friends through music.

For those curious on the details, here’s the app’s lengthy App Store description2:

Some of the highlights

• It’s incredibly fun to share music week in and out, showing people your favorites and discovering new music from other people outside of an algorithm.

• It’s not about taste, it’s about reading the room based on the theme. The ultimate curation game. With categories like “Best Roadtrip Song” and “Best Song to Bawl to” we really run spectrum on genre, artist and album.

• Music is fun. It’s also inherently social and a treat to be reminded, and required, to listen to new music every week. It’s like a healthy dose of culture, weekly.

Some of the limitations

The social component

Music League is meant to be social experience. Yet, the execution of social features doesn’t mirror how people actually communicate on a day-to-day basis. While there are chat features within the app, it’s slow and clunky and doesn’t live within the native spaces that people want to chat (i.e., in iMessage or Whatsapp).

Side note: I spent almost a decade in audio streaming at places like Soundcloud, Spotify and Audible. I’ve explored numerous ways to make audio more social and nothing has come close to the experience of using Music League for social connectivity around music - but not exactly through the app (see below). The closest was turntable.fm.

The solve: We’ve solved for this limitation by creating our own group text outside of the app. It’s so active that I have to mute it, with 20+ people commenting on each other’s selections, bullying and smack talking and chatting about anything music-related throughout the week.

The user experience

The app is supported by ads. But, not just ads that are annoying, ads that prevent you from using the core features and functionality. Ads where you have to shut the app down multiple times to clear the cache. Week after week, we complain about the ads, yet we still power through.

The solve: There is no clear solve other than paying for the ad free version. This creative group of people has now deemed Royal Match’s King Robert (a top advertiser) a mascot for the League. He is featured in a lot of our “marketing materials” and now, he’s officially part of the lore. We officially love to hate him.

The underutilization of data

As someone who’s spent over a decade in streaming audio and someone who’s deeply entrenched in the tech space, the sheer underutilization of user data is appalling.

The solve: See below…

The product market fit plus

As you can see, we’ve gotten around a lot of pain in the core interface by building.

And by we, I mean Alexa.

At this point, it’s important to tell you more about what Alexa did to take this experience out of app and into product-market fit plus land.

It’s best told through The Leaguies, an event that she curated in July3 to celebrate, honor, and drive home the community we’ve created around Music League.

Here’s what happened leading up to July 25th, 2026.

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Alexa set a date for the “Leaguies” in Chicago. New Yorkers booked flights and accommodations to join the Chicago based crew.

On July 24th, 19/22 Leaguers descended on West Chicago for a celebration.

We decorated and dressed to impressed.

Alexa made yearbooks

We then party bussed to Karaoke in Chinatown

Where we ….

Watched the Seasons Wrapped reveal (using some AI + Canva)

Got awards

Revealed next season’s rounds, as submitted by leaguers

And sung until we injured our vocal chords.

If you’re thinking wow this is all absolutely outrageous, you’d probably be right.

But to me, this is product market fit plus.

When your customers love the product so much they decide to go rouge and create something 10x better than you intended, you better be paying attention.

Music League team: If you don’t take cues from your #1 customer, Alexa Berg, I’m not sure what you’re doing. She’s got many ideas for you.

I’m Jori Bell, VP of Core at Hampton. I’m also a Coach for Product Leaders. If you’re working on building a team that tells you the truth, I’d love to hear from you.

Last week, after a strategy meeting, someone on the team privately apologized for critiquing the work I prepared for the meeting. She felt like she was too blunt and perhaps critical of my work. I assured her she was exactly where I wanted her to be:

It was from that interaction that this Substack post was born…

Here’s what happened

I scheduled a strategy meeting last week with a plan I vetted thoroughly. I’m experimenting with evolving our product, and I had built the plan out in preparation for the meeting. The strategy, the sequencing, the rollout. I was ready to talk next steps and owners.

Instead, we spent 90% of the meeting unpacking my strategy.

Are we optimizing for the wrong thing?

How do we not burn our customers?

What exactly are we asking people to walk into, and are we being honest with them about it?

Every one of those questions poked a hole in assumptions I had made, mostly solo.

Younger me would have gotten defensive. She would have heard all of that as “your strategy is bad” - then "you are bad” - and spent the meeting defending the plan. I know this because I used to do exactly that. All. The. Time.

Older me has learned something different.

Dissent doesn’t mean your strategy is bad.

It means your strategy isn’t strong enough.

Yet.

The reality - in the workplace and in many relationships - is that agreement is comfortable. Because it can feel good. And often in the workplace, we treat perfect agreement like it’s the goal. Everyone nods, the meeting ends early, we all feel good. But teams that agree don’t produce the best work. They produce good enough results. And good enough results are a surefire way to build a product that doesn’t differentiate. It’s what kills a business, really.

The best ideas don’t come from building alone. And they definitely don’t come from a room where no one is willing to push.

My take: It is lazy to agree. It is competitive and excellent to dissent.

One of my teammates said it perfectly: “Our strategy is sound. I just want us to poke holes, not to derail us, but so that first message lands.” That is the whole point. She wasn’t tearing down the direction. She was making it strong enough to survive contact with real customers.

By the end, I wasn’t deflated. I had clearer next steps. Every dissenting opinion had turned into a named non-goal or a risk we now knew to prepare for going in. I left with a better plan than the one I walked in with, precisely because no one let me keep the one I walked in with.

How to dissent

A team doesn’t magically become one that welcomes dissent. You have to build the muscle, and you have to make it safe to invite dissent.

Model It

Radical candor gets a bad rap. But, it’s useful. And, one of the most effective ways I’ve taught dissent is by modeling it as a leader. Take my counterpart and I at Hampton. We are the dearest of friends and also go toe-to-toe regularly, disagreeing and challenging each other in front of our teams. It might even be uncomfortable to watch. But, we don’t do this for sport. We do this because we both care deeply and want to get to the best outcomes possible. Often we’ll come to a disagree and commit moment, which helps us move quickly not for the sake of it but to learn faster.

As a leader, demonstrating the type of behavior that you want to see from your team is step one.

Pre-empt it.

One of the most powerful tools I’ve used in years of product development is a pre-mortem.

A pre-mortem is an exercise where a team imagines that a project or initiative has completely failed, and then works backward to identify the causes of that failure.

How does it work?

• Before we commit to a plan, we imagine it’s six months later and the whole thing failed. We outline all the reasons it failed.

• Then we work backward: why did it fail? What did we miss?

Instead of defending the plan, everyone is suddenly motivated to find its weak spots, because naming the failure is the game.

It turns this is a great idea into here are the five ways this could fall apart and here’s what we’ll do about each one.

The dissent stops feeling like a personal attack and starts feeling like insurance.

Reflect on it.

No one is a bigger champion than me for a team retrospective. Two things we do at Hampton that amp up the candor on retrospectives are meeting ratings and a Hampton exercise I conceived of called, The Gap.

Meeting ratings

This we borrow from EOS. At the end of a meeting, all participants rate the meeting on a scale of 1-10. It sounds almost too simple. But its something I’ve never done before. In real time, if forces everyone to be real and reflect on what’s working and what’s not. It looks something like this:

The exercise forces us to think about how to do better in the moment. Real time feedback is the best kind of feedback. It invites candor and ensures that everyone has a low-stakes way to signal something was off. Further, it holds all of us accountable for making the time worth it. Meetings are expensive. So they better be worth it.

Related: The art of an inexpensive meeting

The Gap

Last year, we introduced a reflection exercise at the end of every Core Group meeting called The Gap. The best groups run it comprehensively at the end of every meeting.

How it works: Members go around the room and each person answers one question in a single sentence: Did this session reach its highest level, and if not, what was the gap?

No fixing. No defending. No debating. Just one honest observation, said out loud, before anyone leaves the room.

Our strongest groups can say uncomfortable things to one another like: I feel like you steamrolled me today or I didn’t feel like I got answers to my problem or even, I didn’t like how you moderated the meeting today. Members who use this tool know that real time feedback help the space get stronger so that these sessions are valuable. These are busy founders after all.

Without The Gap, problems in a group stay invisible until they become crises. The members who feel unheard say nothing, and the sessions that stayed surface-level are good enough because no one named what was missing. The Gap makes naming conflict or dissent the norm. And it makes the best groups even stronger. Because, dissent isn’t bad. Like I said before:

It is lazy to not say anything. It is competitive and excellent to dissent.

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All of these tools do the same thing underneath. They make candor the expectation, not the exception. They normalize directness so that it’s not about protecting feelings. It’s about protecting the customer experience.

Importantly this all works when and only when dissent is delivered with respect.

When I look at my strategic plan from last week, I still love the plan I walked in with. But, I love the plan I walked out with more.

We don’t build great things alone. We build great things together, will differing ideas and opinions.

The next time your team nods along and the meeting ends early, don’t celebrate.

Invite a challenge and see how your projects get even better.

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I’m Jori Bell, VP of Core at Hampton. I’m also a Coach for Product Leaders. If you’re working on building a team that tells you the truth, I’d love to hear from you.

I’ve been at Hampton for a little over a year. Time flies! I came in with one mandate: own and grow the Core Group experience.

Before I tell you more about that, let me tell you about Hampton and what Core Groups are.

Hampton is a network for high-growth founders. At the heart of the membership is our Core Group product: monthly sessions where 8-10 founders, led by a trained Moderator, come together and work through their biggest professional and personal challenges. It’s a place where a founder can say the things they can’t say to their team, their board, or their spouse: the deal that’s falling apart, the co-founder they need to let go, the fact that they hit the number everyone wanted and still feel imposter syndrome, etc.

Core Groups are a place where founders have conversations they can’t have anywhere else that sharpen every decision they make everywhere else.

Everything I do on a day to day basis is in service of making Core Groups feel safe enough for those conversations to happen.

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I’ve spent a good chunk of my life in connective spaces: on retreats, in therapy, in coaching… and I walked into Hampton with strong instincts about what makes connective spaces work. A lot of those instincts were right. Some were incomplete. The gift of this year was that a lot of my underlying instincts hardened into principles I can name, teach, and design around. A connectivity playbook, if you will.

Amongst all these principles, there’s a clear through-line: the fastest way to build a high-connection space is to ask more of people, not less. Commitment is the precursor to everything else. You’ve often got to commit deeply to something uncomfortable to get the real, can’t-find-this-anywhere-else kind of value. As Obama said in his 2014 State of the Union, and an oft-quoted line in my household:

“Nothing in life that’s worth anything is easy.”

So what are my hardened principles for building connective, group experiences?

Connection matters most at moments of inflection.

People crave connection most when they’re standing at a moment of inflection… right when the ground is shifting under them.

For Hampton founders, in business it’s selling the company, fundraising a round, stepping back from the thing you built. In personal life, it’s a move, a marriage, a new baby, a loss. Those are the moments when people go looking for connection beyond the relationships they already have.

It’s why segmenting connective group experiences around a shared inflection point is so powerful and long-lasting.

It’s not just about clearing a bar of accomplishment, or being in the same place at the same time. It’s about catching people in the window where they’re most open, most in flux, most in need of a room that gets it.

When you design for the moment of inflection, the connection almost builds itself. And it’s incredibly sticky.

The more specific and formative that moment is, the stronger the connection, and the more likely it outlasts the moment itself. It’s why people still have a college group chat or why new parent groups are so powerful.

Formative inflection points yield everlasting connection.

The professional and the personal go hand in hand.

Founders come to Hampton for business results, the same way people seek out coaching for support with their professional goals. The difference is mostly scale. In coaching, the goal is usually individual: I want the promotion, the raise, etc. At Hampton, it’s company-wide: sell the business, hire the exec team, 3x the company.

But here’s the mistake I see people make: treating the business goal and the personal one as two separate things. They almost never are.

I’ve seen this a lot in my own coaching work. It’s one of the reasons I start with a very integrated discovery process. I don’t just ask people what their professional goals are. I ask what their personal goals are, because I don’t believe the two can be seen or treated in isolation: If you’re trying to become a Chief Product Officer, what’s happening in your personal life that might block you from getting there?

Underneath the professional hurdle, there’s almost always something more personal. A pattern. A fear. A story someone tells themselves that keeps them from making a clear decision. The professional reason gets them in the door. Yet, the personal work is what actually keeps people coming back. Because when you understand the underlying pattern thats impacting your professional decisions, you can see how it impacts all decisions and behaviors in your life, not just the issues that show up in your work.

Pretending that professional and personal are separate is exactly what keeps people stuck. They are intertwined and they feed information back and forth that’s crucial to grow in both facets of your life.

Go deep first, not last

Hampton Core Groups start by going deep, fast. On day one, before founders know a single thing about each other, we ask them to share their 5% moments: the highest 5% and the lowest 5% of their life. No business, no numbers, nothing performative. We go really deep, really quickly, to unmask the most pivotal parts of their life, because when they do that early, they build trust. Coming from a business frame it feels a little unexpected, and quite uncomfortable. That’s the point. We’d rather push them to say the thing rather than let them perform politeness for six months.

Going deep first is about unmasking. Founders walk in wearing the version of themselves that raised the round and closed the customer, and that version is exactly the one that can’t be helped, because it isn’t allowed to have problems. The whole game is getting the mask off early. Not oversharing, just naming the real thing.

Related reading on unmasking:

Depth isn’t the reward you earn at the end of a relationship. It’s the on-ramp.

Ask people for something real on day one and and you signal that this is a place where real is allowed and necessary for real change. High-growth founders are starving for that. They have plenty of rooms where they can be impressive. They have almost none where they can be honest.

Spoiler alert: It’s not just a founder thing.

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Presence is not a nice-to-have. It’s the whole thing.

When I started at Hampton, Core Groups were mostly virtual. We’ve since flipped it: the majority of our Groups now meet in person. That was not a small logistical tweak. It was one of the hardest operational lifts I’ve ever been part of. So why do it?

You cannot manufacture the thing that happens when people are in a room together, phones down.

Think about it: we barely have tech-free spaces anymore, where you sit for an hour, two hours, three hours with no screen at all.

Those in person experiences are the meat. But like a good meal, you need more than a main dish. You need the apps and side dishes: the dinner after, the text thread that lights up at 11pm, to complete the meal.

Think about the strongest groups in your own life. The in person time is important but the connections were strengthened because there was connective tissue between in person time that kept the energy flowing.

Anchor groups on in person connection but don’t discount how important the in-between moments are to strengthen the bonds.

You don’t need answers. You need someone to ask you the right questions.

Someone shares a problem, you want to solve it. You have advice. You may have even lived the exact thing they’re living. But copying and pasting what worked for you onto someone else is, more often than not, the wrong answer.

The people in these rooms are not short on answers. They’re some of the most capable operators alive, drowning in advice. What they’re missing is almost never the answer. It’s the right question.

So we take a no-coaching approach. When a founder brings a hard thing to the group, the move is not to fix it. It’s to ask the question that lets them find their own way through. Advice makes people dependent on you. A good question makes them more capable in the moment and in the future.

I apply the same to my coaching practice. I rarely tell people what to do - in fact, I rarely share my adjacent experiences with clients. I find that the best results come from asking my clients the right questions. Not because I don’t have related experiences, or because I’m trying to gate keep, but because we get to better answers for them when we stay in their world vs. muddling my experiences with theirs.

The highest form of support in a room like this isn’t the smartest thing you can say. It’s the space you hold to ask the right questions.

Stick with questions, always.

Connection is something you can design on purpose, and you do it by asking more of people, not less.

So ask for a lot.

And, guess what, you shall receive long lasting connection.

Cheers to one year 🥂

I’m Jori Bell, VP of Core at Hampton. I’m also a Coach for Product Leaders.

Glass balls were always rubber balls

Nearly a year ago, I wrote about Glass Balls, Rubber Balls in an attempt to ground myself during a chaotic time.

“The scope of my new role at Hampton has increased and my normal frameworks are being stretched. I’m finding it hard to resist overworking, impossible to shed my perfectionism patterns and difficult to model what strategic prioritization looks like for my team.

Imagine you’re juggling. Some of the balls you’re tossing are rubber: they’ll bounce if you drop them. Rubber balls represent the things in life and work that are important, but recoverable. You can drop them, pick them back up, and they’ll bounce back.

Others are glass: if you drop them, they’ll shatter. Glass balls are the things you cannot afford to lose track of. If they fall, the damage is lasting.”

I wrote about prioritization with a sense of having grasped it, but in reality I think I was smoke and mirroring my way through a difficult time. Cut to a year later (now) and the stakes have changed. At 5.5 months pregnant, the amount I can physically take on forces prioritization in a way I’ve never experienced before, and the hills I’m willing to die on have dramatically shrunk. To borrow from the glass balls, rubber balls metaphor: I’m switching many of my glass balls to rubber balls.

The thing I didn’t expect: almost none of them were actually glass. I’d just called them that because letting go felt unthinkable, not because anything would really break.

Being pregnant took the choice away from me, and once the baby’s here I know that’s only going to get more true. It turns out that when you literally can’t hold everything, you figure out pretty quickly what shatters and what doesn’t.

So I’ll leave you with the question I’m sitting in during this moment of physical limitation, waiting and anticipation: what are you treating like glass that would actually bounce if you let it go?1

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Things I Stacked

I went on a Babymoon and I came back with some revelations about product onboarding. Very product of me. Read my latest on experience design below.

Hiring Alert!

I’m growing my team and need to find a perfect match for the Moderator Success role. Learn more about it and apply here.

Culture Clicks

📚I crushed Yesteryear (contrary to Substack opinion, I liked it alot!) and The Lion Women of Tehran (My Brilliant Friend meets The Kite Runner). I also pre-ordered Looks Perfect, the debut novel from my dear friend I met during The Process, . I think you should preorder it too.

I think the Grainless Granola from TJ’s is better than most regular granolas, minus the Eleven Madison Park Granola. There’s a subculture to the fro yo trend in NYC that’s frozen Greek yogurt. My favorite is near my office at The Gyro Project, but I have a bone to pick with Go Greek in Noho where they charged me $1.29 for them to squirt honey on your DIY yogurt bowl. In what world am I living?

Fabrik was featured in The New York Times - I love everything they do there but especially the people :)

Robin Byrd was so ahead of her time on Manhattan public access TV in the 70s. And New York now? Knicks!2 World Cup! Tayvis Wedding! NYC is so alive … in ⑤. What a time to be a citizen of this gorgeous city.

Substack clicks

I’m Jori Bell, VP of Core at Hampton and a coach for Product Leaders. Learn more about my coaching practice here.

Last week I was fortunate to travel to a really beautiful hotel for my babymoon. Yes, that’s right. If you missed the soft launch, I’m hard launching that I am five months pregnant.

After a smooth flight to the Baja Peninsula and an easy drive to the hotel, my husband and I had some of the most magical 30 minutes we’ve ever experienced in hospitality. I wasn’t fully out of work mode yet, so I was furiously thinking about how the experience made me feel, and about the importance of product onboarding.

I’ve rarely worked on onboarding features. Of course I’ve had to onboard customers, but I’ve never been on a dedicated onboarding team or worked deeply with sales on what it means to integrate the sales and onboarding experience from a product standpoint. In fact, I’ve worked in really big organizations where there’s an entire onboarding team that sits separately from the core experience team.

This experience made me feel silly for not considering how problematic that gap was.

So, let me tell you about the first 30 minutes of our stay.

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We pulled up to the hotel in our rental car and were told, “Leave everything here. We’ll take care of the car and bags.” Immediately, we were given cold towels to wipe down in the 85-degree heat after our five-hour flight. From there, we were ushered to the front desk, where our paperwork, with our name, was sitting right in front of us, ready to review. We were offered a drink from an ice cooler: Mexican beer, water, or Pedialyte if you were already suffering from dehydration1. After checking in, we were escorted to a golf cart and driven immediately to have tacos by the pool.

Following lunch, our waiter phoned the front desk, ordered us a golf cart and escorted us to our room, where our bags, snacks and a welcome note were already waiting. On top of the room being delightful in and of itself, of course.

We met no less than six people during this whole excursion. I couldn’t tell you a single name. I couldn’t tell you anyone’s role, or exactly how we got from point A to point B. All I can say is I felt completely coddled, in complete luxury, and urged to unplug immediately in a way I never had before on vacation. And because of that first magical experience, my trust was locked for the week.

There were mishaps2 along our stay: a drink that took too long, a reservation unsecured, a golf cart that never came to pick us up. But no mishap was big enough to upset me, because I kept coming back to that beautiful welcome experience and the way they made me feel the moment I landed on their property.

At Hampton, we take care in placing our founders in intimate Core groups that are hand-picked just for them. I couldn’t help but draw the comparison: what does it take to make someone feel incredibly taken care of, coddled, special, seen, and worth it? It made me think back to all the other products I’ve built, predominantly software experiences, and just how important the first touch points are. It’s where you build trust. It’s where you build a buffer of grace for when things go wrong, as they always will. And it’s where you give your customer the first chance to honestly answer the question: was this worth it?

After the first 30 minutes, before we’d seen the rest of the hotel or spent a single night there, after flying five hours and taking time off work, my husband and I looked at one another and said with absolute certainty: this was 100% worth it.

It’s made me really shift how I think about product onboarding. In the case of what you’re building, it could be the first 5 minutes, or 10.

What are those initial touch points? Where are the moments of delight? Maybe they’re highly custom, maybe they’re highly seamless. Whatever they are, those first minutes are when you solidify a relationship that will be hard to break, if you do it right.

A few things I’m borrowing from the hotel experience and bringing wherever I go when building products in the future:

Customer first and center.

As the customer, put me at the center of everything you’re doing. Consider where I just came from, how much I spent, and the costs I took on to get here. Tell me that you see me, that you know me, that you know exactly what I need. In this case: give me a cold, wet towel for my face after a five-hour flight. When it comes to paying for new software, maybe I’m switching from another provider, and it’s a lot of work to move everything over. Call it like it is. Either tell me it’s hard, or walk me through the parts that are going to be hard, so I don’t feel alone in that journey.

See me, hold my hand and make the first moments using your product glorious. I’ll be all yours from there.

Set the right expectations.

Tell me what I’m going to get, when, and how it’s all going to happen. Then, and this part is important: be correct. This is one of the things I harp on most. People don’t mind waiting, as long as they know what to expect and that that expectation holds. If my room is going to be ready in 20 minutes, it better be ready in 20 minutes. One of my favorite ways to do this in software is a progress bar. Think about ordering on DoorDash. As long as you can see where your driver is, you’re not nearly as upset if it takes longer than quoted. If you have no idea when the food is coming, you sit in purgatory, stewing in hanger and frustration.

People just need to know they’re being taken care of, and that they can trust what they’re being told.

“Yes and” the hell out of your customers.

The customer isn’t always right, but in those first 30 minutes, give them a yes, always. Figure out a way to tell me how to get what I need, and be expansive about it. If I’m told no in the first 30 minutes, or told something incorrect, I’ve lost trust immediately. So tell me yes, and if it’s not a yes, figure out how to get there. If I start using a brand new product and want to do something that isn’t possible, don’t just tell me I can’t. Invite me to explain why it matters. Invite me to talk to someone.

Let me see that what I just bought is expansive and exciting, and that the team is working to serve me, if not now, then in the future.

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Here’s the thing:

You don’t need luxury to make someone feel taken care of.

You do need to decide that the first 30 minutes matter more than almost anything else you’ll build. Most teams pour their energy into the middle, the features, the roadmap, and leave the front door as an afterthought. But the front door is where trust is won, and where the grace is secured.

So if you’re a product builder like myself, ask yourself: What does my customer do in the first 30 minutes? Are they an afterthought, or are they the cold towel and the golf cart that chauffeurs me around?

Get those minutes right and your customers will forgive the drink that runs late. Get them wrong and no amount of polish later will undo it.

About 15 years ago, I walked into my college guidance counselor’s office. I had two options on the table and I was just weeks away from graduation. One was a local offer in the town I grew up in outside Chicago. I could save on rent and get some experience at an advertising agency. The other was a riskier option: to pack up and move to New York City, work for AOL, and see if I could make it in the Big Apple.

My counselor’s POV, “Hey, one year in New York is like five years anywhere else.”

I was sold.

In guidance counselor years, I’m a 75-year-old New Yorker ;-) In regular people years, this month marks 15 years of making it in New York. For the layman, it’s not that big of a milestone. But for a New Yorker, someone who’s been here, you get what that tenure really means. Choosing to live in New York is exciting, easy even. Choosing to stay in New York is a negotiation. Unless you’re ultra wealthy, you’re choosing a life of intense, basic level needs trade-offs and sacrifices. Incredible restaurants for an apartment with no dishwasher, front row to the best entertainment anywhere for the price of a small vacation, the best job opportunities a city can offer with an incredibly high tax rate. You know. You’ve seen it on TikTok.

I can’t I’m a New York or Nowhere person. I’ve wavered, intensely, especially during the pandemic. But I’ve chosen to fall in love with New York again and again.

“There are roughly three New Yorks.

There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable.

Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night.

Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.

...Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. ”

- E.B. White

Cheers to 15 passionate years in New York. It’s taken me a solid 15 years to say this but no better time than the present: Go Knicks 🏀 🔵 🏀

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Things I Stacked

I didn’t find the time to write a ton this month because I’ve been multi tasking working, coaching and growing a human1. I did manage to pull these thoughts together about self-promotion. You should totally do it.

Culture Clicks

When I wasn’t forced to watch NBA playoffs, I binged season 3 of Euphoria 👩🏻‍🎤and I have a lot to say on the topic. TL;DR it was for me. If you’re not watching the BTS clips at the end, you’re missing out. Between his roast and Funny AF, Kevin Hart is having a moment and a love affair with Netflix. I’m dying to see any of the finalists on the show!

Lonnie’s finally opened in my neighborhood and the burger is…maybe the best in town? My favorite ice cream shop is in Park Slope🍦. Between the facade that looks like it belongs in a Long Island strip mall, the archival candy wall with throwbacks like Chupa Chups, and the cereal mix in bar, it’s one of the most inventive underrated ice cream locations in the city.

Substack clicks

I’m Jori Bell, VP of Core at Hampton and a coach for Product Leaders. Learn more about my coaching practice here.

Mid-year review season is around the corner. And if you’re anything like the busy people I know, you might find yourself staring at a self-review form and think: where did the last six months go?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: if you haven’t been making your work visible all along, it’s going to be really hard to make it visible now. Your manager isn’t going to remember that thing you shipped in February. Your skip-level definitely isn’t. And the peer feedback you’re hoping will carry you? Those coworkers are just as swamped trying to remember their own work.

Back in June, I wrote a post about how to become indispensable in your first 6 months. Tip #5 was “brag about yourself.” But here’s the thing: while most of us are terrible at this, this might be one of the most important things you can do.

We do the work. We ship the thing. We solve the hairy problem no one else wanted to touch. And then we sit quietly and hope someone notices. Maybe our manager will call it out. Maybe a coworker will give us a shout in the team channel. Maybe the work will just…speak for itself?

It won’t.

The people who succeed, the ones who get the resources, the promotions, the opportunities, are the ones who make their work known. And before you roll your eyes, hear me out. Because I know what you’re picturing. The person who takes credit in meetings. The one who cc’s leadership on every minor win. The LinkedIn humble-braggers. The people who make you cringe.

That’s not what I’m talking about.

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Reframe the whole thing

I’ve been coaching product leaders for a while now, and the number one thing I hear when I bring up self-promotion is some version of: “I don’t want to be that person.”

Neither do I. And you don’t have to be.

Here’s the reframe: self-promotion isn’t about broadcasting. It’s about bringing people along for the journey.

I wrote about this during my own onboarding at Hampton. In Bringing people along for the (onboarding) ride, I shared how I started making my learning visible: weekly diaries, Loom voiceovers, sharing half-baked hypotheses in All Hands. It wasn’t self-promotion in the traditional sense. It was inviting others into my process. But the effect was the same: people knew what I was working on, they could see my thinking develop, and trust built faster because of it.

That’s the version of self-promotion I’m here for.

Why you can’t afford to skip this (especially right now)

If you’re lucky, your coworkers or your manager will recognize your contributions. But you cannot rely on them. Everyone is busy. Everyone is overwhelmed. Your manager has 8 other people on their team and a million things competing for their attention.

It’s not their job to track your impact. It’s yours.

I know that feels uncomfortable. Especially if you’re someone who was raised to believe that good work gets rewarded on its own. I was that person too. And then I watched people who were doing less impactful work get more visibility, more resources, and more opportunities because they knew how to talk about what they were doing.

This isn’t about being loud. It’s about being intentional. And if mid-cycle is staring you in the face and you haven’t been doing this, consider this your wake-up call. You can’t go back and make the last six months more visible. But you can start right now, today, and build the muscle so that by the time end-of-year reviews roll around, you’re not scrambling.

3 things to start doing before your review

I wrote 5 Ways to Make Your Internal Messaging Land last summer, and a lot of those principles apply here. But let me get specific about self-promotion:

1. Go multimedia.

Different people absorb information differently. Some people live in Slack. Some read every email. Some are Loom people. Some only hear things in meetings.

So don’t just mention your win once, in one channel, and call it a day. Share the customer impact in your team standup. Drop a Loom walking through the demo. Write a short Slack post with the headline and a link to the deeper context.

This isn’t being annoying. This is being thorough. I said it before and I’ll say it again: saying something once is just as bad as not saying it at all.

2. Tell the story from your customer’s perspective.

Nobody wants to hear “I shipped feature X.” They want to hear what changed for the humans you’re building for.

One of my coaching clients launched an AI powered product less than 6 months into a new role. When I pushed him to talk about it more, we didn’t lead with the feature. We led with the support agents who were getting 2 hours of their day back. We led with the customer stories. The impact and the outcomes.

When you root your self-promotion in the customer, it doesn’t feel like bragging. It feels like caring about the work. And its productive.

3. Bring people into your world.

Demos aren’t just for stakeholders. Coaching sessions aren’t just for your direct reports. When you invite others to see what you’re building, to sit in on a customer call, to watch a prototype in action, you’re making your work visible and you’re being generous.

I’ve found that the best self-promotion doesn’t feel like promotion at all. It feels like an invitation. Come see this cool thing. Let me show you what we learned. Here’s what our customers are telling us.

That’s the authentic version of showing what you’re doing.

4. Start a hype folder.

This one is for you, not for anyone else. Create a running doc, a folder on your desktop, a note on your phone, whatever works. Every time something good happens, drop it in there. A customer quote. A metric that moved. A Slack message from a teammate thanking you. A launch that went smoothly. A problem you caught before it became a fire.

Don’t wait until review season to try to reconstruct six months of work from memory. That’s how you end up underselling yourself. Your hype folder is your insurance policy against forgetting your own impact. And when mid-cycle does arrive, you’ll open that doc and think: oh right, I actually did a lot. That feeling? That’s the whole point.

I have clients who’ve been keeping a hype folder for years now. The ones who do it tell me the same thing: it changed how they show up in reviews, in 1:1s, even in how they think about their own career. It’s hard to feel like an imposter when you’ve got receipts.

Use the voice that’s yours

I want to be really clear: I’m not prescribing one way to do this. Some of you are natural storytellers. Some of you are better writers. Some of you come alive on camera. Some of you are quiet leaders who’d rather let a well-crafted doc do the talking.

All of those work. The key is being authentic - whatever that looks like to you. The goal isn’t to become someone you’re not. It’s to stop hiding the work you’re already doing.

Because right now, someone on your team is doing half the work you’re doing and getting twice the recognition. And the only difference? They’re talking about it.

Start talking about it. Mid-cycle reviews are coming whether you’re ready or not. Make sure people know what you did. And more importantly, build the habit so you never have to scramble again.

I’m Jori Bell, VP of Core at Hampton. I’m also a Coach for Product Leaders. If you’re navigating self-promotion, feedback season, or figuring out how to make your work more visible, drop me a note, I’d love to connect.

Life Purpose

I’m not sure why I was thinking about life purpose last week. Maybe coming off a Hampton retreat with founders who went all in on something, I started to wonder what I would go all in on. And I realized going all in might be tied to something you feel so strongly about, that it has to be your life’s purpose.

I sat with that for a while because I don’t really identify as someone who has a life’s purpose. I’ve always been very passionate and entrepreneurial, but less driven by a singular cause. And, for a long time I felt like maybe something was wrong with that.

Over the past few years, I’ve come to feel unburdened by it. Instead of chasing a static purpose, I started paying attention to how things feel energetically when I’m engaged, whether that’s work, relationships, or hobbies. Less about the singular goal and more about how I feel while I’m going about my day.

That’s been a much better compass for me.

There was a meme going around for a while after Alysa Liu’s Olympic win: about how hard it is to compete with people who are having more fun1. It was everywhere and eventually overused, but it lands so hard for me.

I'm less energized by a singular thing and more by having fun in whatever I'm doing. For me that's intense creativity, deep collaboration, building from scratch, curating my favorite things and pulling others towards their greatest potential.

Those feelings make whatever I’m doing feel worth my time.

When I focus on the feeling, the energy, I feel untethered from needing a title, salary, company, or industry to prop me up and sustain me.

With that, I’m curious: Do you have a life’s purpose? Do you feel better off or burdened by it?

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Things I Stacked

I wrote about attending my first Hampton member retreat and I continued to go “all in” on Substack, saying goodbye to Squarespace for good2. Product Coaching is front and center on my page, but hey, that’s why I started this thing anyway.

Loved this piece by - I echo a lot of this same advice to clients and friends.

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What to do if you don't love your job

✨ Hey there this is a free edition of next play’s newsletter, where we share under-the-radar opportunities to help you figure out what’s next in your journey. Join our private Slack community here an…

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4 months ago · 30 likes · 1 comment

Revisiting this classic piece from Harvard Business Review, Who’s Got The Monkey - and even brought a plush monkey to a meeting to drive the point home.

Culture Clicks

🍕 Important Pizza Updates: Il Leone dropped down from Maine and is serving perfect Neapolitan pies in Park Slope. Prince Street Pizza opened up in my Brooklyn neighborhood and according to my husband its not nearly as good as our favorite local spots (immediate local: Alvo, localish; F&F & Baby Luc’s). On the Manhattan front, it’s important to report that Roberta’s Pizza opened a location next to Penn Station3 with a rooftop, a solid option for pre-Madison Square Garden events. Lastly on the food front, I went to Vato but will return for the churro. Holy cow.

I had wonderful meetings at Conwell Coffee Hall, a scene from the roaring 20’s NYC in FiDi, and The Hotel Chelsea, yes that hotel in Chelsea. Perfect spots to linger for awhile in iconic NYC settings.

🎭Years ago I watched a heartfelt special on HBO that is now making waves on Broadway. I’m dying to see Daniel Radcliffe in: Every Brilliant Thing. I’m enjoying ’s book 📕 Famesick. That woman gets a lot hurled at her so I’m endlessly curious to hear what it was like when she shot to fame in the 2010’s. 📺Rewatching Girls for 2nd time as a companion piece doesn’t hurt. I’m also enjoying the Jon Hamm press tour and second season of Friends and Neighbors. Is now the time watch Mad Men?

Have you ever bought something and wondered I can’t believe I lived [insert absurd amount of time] without this? These affordable loungers are the latest of the kind in my household.

Substack clicks

I’m Jori Bell, VP of Core at Hampton and a coach for Product Leaders. Learn more about my coaching practice here.

I just got back from a Hampton Foundations retreat, a space designed for Hampton members in their first year of membership. 45 founders from around the world descended on Austin, Texas to connect in person and do all the stuff you can’t do over Zoom. All the IRL hubbub and all. I participated as a member (#dogfooding), rubbing shoulders with successful, kind and brilliant founders.

I love this stuff. I’ve attended retreats, I’ve helped run retreats, and I’m a bit of a junkie for it. Yoga, self development, professional development, I’m in. So many of my favorite retreat experiences start the same way: with a thing that cracks the container open and lets us connect deeply, quickly. I call it, very scientifically, the “say the thing” exercise. Every great retreat leader has that opening bit that hooks attendees in and gets them to say the hard thing that attendees are carrying in. After sitting in many rooms with strangers and saying the thing, I’ve gotten good at it. I’ve actually come to revere the opening exercise as the required tension breaker that helps everyone lower their guard.

What is saying the thing?

Saying the thing is that unspoken, maybe unarticulated tension you feel walking into a new, sacred space where you’re meant to connect or transform. It’s the big thing sitting inside you that’s usually quite heavy.

At the Hampton retreat, we ended the opening day by saying the thing we were most afraid of, and I had the “privilege” of going first. I got to tell 45 successful founders I was scared they wouldn’t find I had value to add since I wasn’t a founder like them 😳. Around the circle we went, all of us speaking the ugly fears we’d been carrying. Once we all went, we collectively exhaled and released the tension together.

When you say the scary thing right out the gate, you surrender, sink in, and presence becomes possible.

It’s got me thinking about saying the thing more generally. It’s “easier,” maybe, to say the thing when you’ve committed to growth and transformation with time and money, like on a retreat. But when the stakes are lower, often, it can be so much harder to be direct. Like when your partner doesn’t show up for you in the way you needed in a given moment. Or when your boss undermines some of the decisions you made for the team. When you feel dismissed or excluded by a friend.

In all of these scenarios, saying the thing can be a lot harder. But the cost of not saying it is usually higher. And worse, it compounds over time.

If we all committed to saying the thing in everyday conversations, aka directness, how much quicker could we get to collaboration, creativity, and connection?

Walking away from the magic of a retreat I’m thinking about the 3 key ways I practice saying the thing. I’m sharing them here too to encourage you to cut to the chase, quicker as soon as this week. That’s my challenge to you:

1. Articulate it by writing it down.

   1. Before you say the thing out loud, get it out of your head and onto the page. The thing you're avoiding is almost always hazier in your mind. Writing it down forces sharpness. You find out what you actually mean, what you actually want, and often, what you're actually scared of. I've written about the magic of writing it down before. Organizing disorganized feelings is usually 70% of the work.

2. Keep it personal.

   1. Say what’s true for you. Not what’s wrong with someone else or what someone else thinks. The most powerful version of saying the thing starts with “I.” I’m frustrated. I’m scared. I want something different. I noticed I shut down in that meeting. When you keep it personal, you sidestep the defensiveness and you give the other person something real.

3. Use bottom line communication.

   1. This came directly from our retreat leader, Angela Parker, and I loved the branding she gave brevity. Lead with the headline. Most of us bury the actual message under so much cushioning that the other person never hears it. Bottom line communication means the first sentence out of your mouth is the point. “I’m hurt.” “I disagree with the direction.” The context, the nuance, even the softening can come after.

I left Austin thinking about how rare it is to be in a room where everyone agrees to drop the armor at the same time. Most of life isn’t that room.

So, to use bottom line communication, pick the thing this week you’re been evading. Write it down. Keep it personal. Lead with the headline.

And then say the thing to whoever needs to hear it.

Hi - I’m Jori and I’m a Product Coach. If you’re Product Leader or on a Product team looking for support - drop me a note.

I’ve spent 15+ years building consumer products at companies like Spotify, Audible, SoundCloud, AOL, and Rolling Stone, shipping things used by millions, leading cross-functional teams, combating imposter syndrome as a non-technical PM, and learning (the hard way) what actually makes products and teams work. After that, I went independent: coaching product leaders, serving on the Cornell Tech faculty teaching product management, and building community through Coaching Corner and the Product Leader Breakfast in NYC. Today, I’m VP of Core at Hampton, where I run the peer group experience for founders and lead the moderator community that coaches those groups.

About Product Therapy.

Product Therapy is where I write about all of it: product management, leadership, career decisions, and how it all spills into the rest of life. I mix practical product thinking with personal reflection. Recent topics include staying relevant as a product leader in the AI era, how product works differently in big tech vs. startups, and what I’ve learned from coaching other PMs through career transitions. I also share monthly updates on what I’m building, reading, and thinking about.

Hear me talk about product

• How to Succeed as a Non-Technical PM: my Product School talk on overcoming imposter syndrome as a non-technical product manager

• Networking Your Way - Women in Product: my takes on networking in the virtual world and an always-on approach to career development

• Supra Podcast: a conversation on product leadership and the path from PM to coach

Product Coaching

I coach product leaders one-on-one.

Most of my clients are senior product leaders and execs navigating things like influencing without authority, building executive presence, or working through imposter-y feelings. If you’re smart, motivated, and looking for someone who’s been in your seat, we’ll probably be a good fit.

I bring a mix of coaching and advising. While some coaches strictly ask questions, I’ll also share my point of view when it’s useful, drawn from 15+ years in product leadership. You get a thinking partner, not just a sounding board.

What we typically work on

• Building executive presence and influence without authority

• Navigating imposter syndrome (especially for non-technical PMs)

• Sharpening strategy, prioritization, and decision-making

• Stepping into a new leadership role or company

• Working through team dynamics and stakeholder challenges

• Preparing for your next career move

Are you a good it?

Clients who get the most out of coaching tend to be thoughtful, motivated, and active between sessions. They come with prioritized topics and are willing to do the work in between.

If this sounds like what you’re looking for, I’d love to hear from you. Fill out the form below and I’ll get back to you within 48 hours. If we’re not the right fit, I’m happy to recommend a few coaches who might be.

Contact me here

Not sure yet? Start by reading some of my writing. That’s usually the best way to see if we’d click.

A theme that came up across almost every coaching conversation I had this past month was the elements of the Drama Triangle.

My coach first introduced it to me last year and it’s one of the most powerful frameworks and mindset shifts I’ve made in awhile. It also extends well beyond my work life.

The Drama Triangle maps three roles we cycle through in conflict: Victim, Persecutor, and Rescuer, each one keeping us stuck and the drama alive. I could keep explaining it but watching this 3 minute video is much more comprehensive and enjoyable.

The role that hit closest to home for me was Victim.

Growing up, I thought resilience meant weathering whatever happened to me and making it through. Aka surviving. What I didn’t realize until the past few years is that there’s a flip side, and its not just something that’s more productive, it feels a lot better too. It’s called Creator Mode.

Creator mode = instead of things happening to me, I’m actively creating circumstances, solutions, and the world I want for myself.

Having this framework in my toolkit, I can now tell, in real time, when I slip into Victim mode: with my tone, my language, my demeanor, my spirit.

Victim mode has a particular weight to it. Creator mode is lighter.

Here’s why: building something is easier than resisting something.

It’s like swimming with the wave instead of against it.

I wish I had this framework years ago.

Recently I’ve been shuffling it around to clients and colleagues.

And maybe, this is landing at a good time for you too.

Happy Creating!

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Things I Stacked

I shared some more BTS about how I’m using AI to more smarter and how I create and coach others to build the conditions for success

And I loved this piece by about how to measure qualitative product feedback in a creative, quantitative way.

Elena's Growth Scoop

How I built a new composite qualitative metric - The Lovable Score

Growth teams love metrics they can screenshot in a dashboard…

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6 months ago · 95 likes · 12 comments · Elena Verna

Culture Clicks

Barreled through 📺 Company Retreat and absolutely sobbed at the end. Heartwarming, courageous and perfect, no notes. I’m rejoicing since there’s now a ✐ Midi Crossword in the NYT Games app. I’m always amazed at how many people are playing the main Crossword on my commute to work. I finally tried 🥯 Apollo Bagels and yes the hype is real. The sourdough bagels do hit differently. I’ve been keeping it simple with the Tomato and CC and omg, it’s fantastic. 🌯 Sahadi’s Industry City makes such good make to order food and they’ve got music, outdoor space, fun and vibes! NYers, this is your yearly reminder to go have an Industry City day. 👚 I haven’t taken this zip up off since I bought it, and its on sale, you’re welcome. 🔖 And a harrowing tale, the new way relationships to end… 🎶 Everyone’s1 talking about new Tom Misch and Jack Harlow and James Blake and with Harry Styles new album, it really feels like moody boy spring is blooming.

Substack clicks

I’m Jori Bell, VP of Core at Hampton and a coach for Product Leaders. Learn more about my coaching practice here.

Last year, I listened to Rachel Lockett on Podcast. It’s an episode that I still think about, a lot.

She talked about what she calls your “gifts,” the things you’re naturally good at, and how when people operate from their gifts, they have more energy. She coaches people to aim for spending 80% of their time in their gifts. Eighty percent. 👀

And she made a fantastic point that stuck with me: it’s no one else’s job to help you live in your gifts.

• My first reaction was: that sounds aggressive.

• My second reaction was: what a challenge, I wanna live in the 80%!

• My third reaction was: wait, do I even know what my gifts are? And are they the same as what I think of as my superpowers?

But the more I sat with it, the more I realized Rachel is actually conflating two different things. She uses "gifts" to describe both the things you're really good at and the things that give you energy. And I think that's a critical distinction she glosses over. Because being good at something and being energized by something are not the same thing. They overlap sometimes - hopefully they do! But sometimes they don’t. And when they don't overlap, things can easily break down.

Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you enjoy doing it. And if you don’t enjoy doing it, it’s really hard to sustain, even if you’re excellent at it.

Disclaimer: I recognize this is a privileged outlook. Not everyone gets to optimize for joy. But, the work of identifying your superpowers and distinguishing them from your flow state is actually really important information to hold.

Because when things go sideways, you need the language to understand why. Does this sit within my superpowers? Or does it sit within my flow state? Or neither?

I figured this out almost by accident.

February 6, 2023

When I left corporate, I did a lot of internal work as I started my coaching journey. I got really clear on the things I was good at and learned to articulate them. I also got clear on the things I enjoyed so much that they kept me in my, flow state. I personally define my flow state as something I could work on to no end because I’m just having so much fun doing it. This happened last month for me.

You don’t know what time it is.

You’re not watching the clock.

You’re just in it.

But there was a specific day that made all of this click.

I was in the middle of a rough chapter. And on February 7, 2023, I had a day that felt distinctly different from the days around it. Because I was struggling so much, I was able to pick my head up and say, whoa that this day was different.1

So I got curious. What was different about today?

I started to pull it apart.

• I got a really good workout in that morning.

• I got a ton of fresh air.

• I went to lunch with someone in person and we ended up talking about a creative idea.

• I went home and stayed up late brainstorming the creative idea, something I was really lacking and needing in my life at the time. I was texting friends, doing research, sketching it out, just because I was having so much fun.

And I was like: this is my flow state. I’m in deep discovery mode.

How do I orient my life so that I’m in deep discovery mode more often? How do I create circumstances where this happens?

But I also realized something else. The workout, the fresh air, the in-person connection, the creative conversation: those weren’t the flow state itself. Those were the conditions that made the flow state possible.

Three things, not one

Here’s where I’ve landed on. There are three distinct things:

Superpowers. These are the things you’re objectively good at. The skills people come to you for. For me, that’s facilitation, leadership, communication, operations, product thinking. These are real, demonstrated strengths. But being good at something doesn’t mean it energizes you. I love to lead. I hate operations.

Conditions. These are the environmental and lifestyle inputs that prime you for your best work. They’re not the work itself. They’re what sets the stage for great work to happen. For me on that February day, it was physical movement, fresh air, in-person human connection, and a creative conversation. When those conditions are present, I’m a different person. Days I wake up early and workout put me on a path to greatness, always.

Flow state. This is the thing you enjoy so deeply that time disappears. It’s where your energy is exponential. For me, it’s deep discovery mode: brainstorming, ideating, researching something new, going down a rabbit hole because you’re genuinely excited about where it leads. It’s not just something I’m good at. It’s something I could do forever. This was the weekend I really discovered Claude Cowork. Also any time I’m mixing music..stream me.

How to figure out yours

Knowing these three things are different is step one.

Actually identifying them for yourself is step two.

Here’s how I’d approach discovering each one:

Finding your superpowers. Ask five people who know you well: what do you come to me for? What am I better at than most people? Write down what you hear. You’ll start to see patterns. The important thing is to notice how you feel about each one. Some will make you light up when you read them. Others will make you think, “yeah, I’m good at that, but I kind of hate doing it.” That gap is the whole point. Circle the ones that drain you. Those are superpowers.

Finding your conditions. This one requires paying attention to your best days. Think about the last time you had a day where everything just clicked. Now work backwards. What happened before the work? Did you exercise that morning? Did you have an in-person conversation? Did you sleep well? Were you outside? Did you eat a real meal? Start tracking this. For a week or two, at the end of every good day, jot down what the conditions were. You’ll start to see your pattern. Mine became clear on February 7, 2023, but only because I was paying attention to the contrast.

Finding your flow state. Think about the last time you completely lost track of time doing something. Not Netflix. Not scrolling. Something where you were actively engaged and didn’t want to stop. What were you doing? Were you building something? Solving a puzzle? Teaching someone? Brainstorming? Writing? Now zoom out: what’s the underlying activity? For me, the underlying activity was deep discovery, going from zero to one on an idea. That’s the flow state. Name it. And then ask yourself: how often does my actual job put me in this state? If the answer is rarely, that’s important information.

Now use it

Once you’ve done this work, you have a diagnostic tool. When you’re stuck, when you’re unmotivated, when you’re not performing at the level you know you can, you can figure out which lever is off instead of just grinding harder or blaming yourself.

Ask: Am I in my flow state right now, or am I just executing a superpower? Have I set up the conditions that make flow possible today? When something feels hard, is it because the task is outside my superpowers, or because the conditions aren’t right?

And here’s the real challenge, the one Rachel Lockett planted in my head: what would it look like to spend 80% of your time in your gifts?

I still think that sounds aggressive.

But it reframes the question entirely. It’s not about working harder. It’s about knowing yourself well enough to design your work around the things that give you energy instead of drain it.

And that’s your job, not anyone else’s.

Identify your superpowers. Set your conditions. Chase your flow state.

I’m Jori Bell, VP of Core at Hampton. I’m also a Coach for Product Leaders. If you’re looking for support, drop me a note, I’d love to connect. 🤝

We talk a lot about how AI makes us faster. But, most of what I see out there is theoretical. A lot of people talking about the potential of AI. Not a lot of people showing you what it actually looks like in practice. I’m semi guilty of this, too.

So let’s get tangible.

Over the past month, I delivered two intensive workshops for my team. I have another one coming up. Each one required a custom plan, original materials, facilitation guides, material preparation, and real-time adaptation between days.

I’ve done many of these in my career. They’ve taken extensive planning and support.

This time: I did all of it by myself. And I think I did it really well.

When I stepped back and looked at what made these workshops work, I realized the answer was two very different things.

1. The first is what AI helped me do: how it let me operate at a capacity I didn’t think was possible for one person.

2. The second is what AI could never do for me: the facilitation craft I’ve been building for years that made the actual time in the room productive.

AI CANNOT DO IT ALL. But you do need it to be a better facilitator.

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What AI helped me do

A year ago, running even one well-produced two-day workshop solo would have buried me. Creating materials from scratch, running it, processing everything that happened on day one, and then rebuilding materials for day two, overnight, while still having energy to run it? Daunting stuff.

So here’s how I did it by myself with an AI tech stack.

The Stack: Claude + Granola

I primarily used two tools: Claude and Granola. I also used Wispr to dictate. That’s it.

To give you a sense of what changed, here’s what producing a single two-day workshop used to look like for me:

• Building the agenda and session plan from scratch: 2-3 hours.

• Creating facilitation guides, handouts, and printed materials: another 3-4 hours.

• Synthesizing day one and rebuilding materials for day two: another 2-3 hours, partly because I’d be deciphering sticky notes in other people’s handwriting.

• Then post-workshop summary and action items: another 2-3 hours.

That’s 10-13 hours of logistics work per workshop before you count the time in the room. With my AI stack, each of those steps takes less than an hour including creation and editing.

The whole thing comes in under 4 hours.

That’s 10-13 hours, down to 4 hours.

How I did it

Granola became my starting point. Before I built a single agenda, I used Granola to record the conversations that shaped the vision for each workshop. Using recorded meetings enabled me to connect the dots between disparate conversations, to go back and pull out the threads, and put together a clear vision for each workshop.

Claude became my planning partner. Once I had the vision and the goals, I brought everything into Claude Cowork to produce material output. Claude helped me move at a pace I’ve never experienced. Not because it did the thinking for me, but because it was able to collate all my raw materials and package everything I’d spoken out loud into a clear plan.

Then here’s what would happen every day:

• I used Granola to record every single session.

• Each night, I’d take everything from the day (the Granola recordings, my handwritten notes1, the observations I jotted down) and feed it back into Claude.

• Then I’d create a package: a summary of what happened to adapt materials for the next day.

• Every single morning, I walked into the room with a fresh facilitation guide, updated handouts2, and a plan that reflected what actually happened the day before.

The time reduction was not a marginal improvement. It was a fundamentally different way of operating.

The Bonus: I Got to Participate

Here’s the thing about facilitation: it’s really hard to facilitate AND participate. You’re managing the room, watching the clock, reading body language, adjusting on the fly. There’s very little space left to actually be in it.

This setup changed that for me. Because the logistics were handled so efficiently, I could be more present. I could contribute my own perspective instead of just holding space for everyone else’s.

All in all, I ran two really well-produced, well-run two-day workshops by myself. No co-facilitator, no assistant, no production team. Just me, Claude, Granola, and a printer. And I have a third one on deck.

But here’s the thing.

The tools got me to the room prepared. But they didn’t make me good once I was in it.

That’s something AI could never do…

What AI could never do for me

AI can make a lot of things easier but it can not emulate or teach me how to be a better facilitator.

The craft of facilitation, the actual skill of being in a room with people and holding space is (still) entirely human.

And it took me years to build.

There’s no single thing that made me a better facilitator. It was a collection of experiences that shaped how I do it well.

Teaching at Cornell Tech

A few years ago, I taught product management at Cornell Tech for a year. At the time, I thought I was there to teach students.

[insert cliche lesson] —> Turns out, they taught me just as much.

Standing in front of a room of opinionated graduate students forces you to be clear. You can’t hide behind slides. If your explanation doesn’t land, forty pairs of eyes will tell you immediately. Teaching gave me my foundational facilitation reps. Those reps showed up in every single one of those workshops.

Coaching: Trusting the Container

My coaching practice changed me in ways I didn’t expect. I got into coaching because I loved the work. Not to build a business, but because something about holding space for someone else’s growth lit me up. But the deeper lesson from coaching wasn’t about asking good questions. It was about trust.

In coaching, you learn to trust the container. You’re not there to be smart or impressive or to prove your value. You’re there to serve the person in front of you. And that means getting your ego completely out of the way.

That mindset shift was massive for facilitation. When I stopped needing my clients to validate me, , everything changed. My clients got richer conversations and I saw better outcomes across the board.

Improv: The Secret Weapon

And then there’s improv. I started taking improv classes a couple of years ago and I didn’t expect it to fundamentally rewire how I show up… everywhere.

But it did.

Improv teaches you to listen. Like, actually listen.3 It teaches you to build on what someone says instead of redirecting to your agenda. “Yes, and” is wildly underrated in professional settings. When a participant says something unexpected in a workshop, my improv brain kicks in and I can roll with it. Some of the best moments in these workshops came from unscripted detours that I had the instinct to follow rather than squash.

Improv also taught me to be comfortable with silence. To not rush in and fill every gap. That’s harder than it sounds, trust me.

The Whole Picture

Teaching gave me reps. Coaching taught me to trust the space. Improv gave me confidence. Claude and Granola gave me capacity.

None of these things alone would have been enough. But layered together? They made me the kind of facilitator who could run three two-day workshops in a month and feel like each one was genuinely great.

AI tripled my efficiency. That’s real. But it only mattered because I had spent years building the skills that no tool can replicate: facilitation.

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I’m Jori Bell, VP of Core at Hampton. I’m also a Coach for Product Leaders. If you’re looking for support, drop me a note, I’d love to connect. 🤝

My theme du fortnight started to emerge soon after. I saw this…

And I read this: What You Miss When You’re Always Wearing Headphones. (The writer describes riding a subway train where nearly every passenger is ears covered, tuned out. They argue that we’ve built a culture that encourages us to turn away from the world, and that the refusal to hear what’s around us has become a new form of ignorance. And how they eventually decided to retire their headphones from public life altogether.)

When our second snowstorm hit last month3, I ventured out in the storm like last time, encountering cheerful neighbors eager to make small talk during this collective moment. A jaunt around the block was filled with waves, small talk and friendly niceties that never happen on a normal day. It reminded me of Dog Lady on Halloween. That collective NYC spirit.

It’s left me longing for more collective spirit and I don’t want to have to wait for a big city moment, a snowstorm, a holiday, a marathon, to connect with the people right in front of me.

I realize I’m part of the problem4. I put my own walls up by ensuring I have a podcast or music plugged in, or a phone call to make, while shuffling around the neighborhood or commuting to work. How can I tap into a collective spirit, a smile, a conversation, if I keep myself in my protected little bubble?

So I’ve been experimenting…which, has been uncomfortable: going headphone-less around the block, on the commute, all in an effort to connect with people in smaller ways.

Maybe that discomfort is related to the same fear that led 2% of people to unsubscribe to this newsletter when I wrote with excitement about the speed and human replacement elements of AI.

The pace at which everything is moving is terrifying. But as my friend Craig noted at dinner the other night: embodied presence is irreplaceable.5

Sure, we’re scared of what’s to come, but we don’t do ourselves any favors by blocking ourselves out from the world. It’s completely on us to maintain a collective human spirit.

This is your monthly consideration: go headphone-less on your commute, resist the phone call on your walk, and maintain a sense of quiet first thing in the morning.

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Things I Stacked

I considered optimization and of course, AI, this month.

Culture Clicks

📺 I’ve been wanting pop-up video to come back so I don’t have to be on my phone the entire time I watch Love Story. Reality Check was really of a time. 🎵 This new Toy Tonics album is pure joy. Plus, a delicious Purple Disco Machine takeover, here. 🐶 I’ve never seen Leo get more attention than when wearing this sweater. 🍔 New Trader Joes’ frozen favorite. Still thinking about the burger at Liar Liar and the Boquerones at Eel Bar - both places that have gotten even better on the second visit.

Substack clicks

Happy March. We’re almost there, people who celebrate sprint :-)

I’m Jori Bell, VP of Core at Hampton and a coach for Product Leaders. Learn more about my coaching practice here.

Over the past two weeks, there’s been something in the air.

Was it those Claude ads? Was it that viral X post,“something big is happening,” that everyone shared and then everyone had an opinion on? Was it my founders incentivizing us to use AI more? Was it my coach hijacking our session to start with this topic?1

It was all of the above.

And then some.

I’ve used ChatGPT religiously for over a year. To partner with me on writing. To challenge my strategy. To ideate. To take my dictated voice notes, my written post-its and white-boarding sessions and put them into clean documents.

It’s been an incredible partner to me.

But I’ve never veered into prototyping. The vibe coding of it all. Which is kind of ironic, because as a product person you’d think I’d be an eager beaver to build independently.

What is vibe coding: Most simply put, vibe coding is a way to prototype and build web apps, sites and tools using written prompts. What previously took technical engineering and design skills can be built with written prompts, like “build me a workout app that tracks my reps and sets.” More on this workout app below…

Anyway, this weekend I got into vibe coding.

I started using Claude Cowork, and I kind of can’t stop.

At Hampton, I’ve been working in a very niche problem space for the past eight months, evolving and developing new materials, working with limited data to make decisions and roll out materials to hundreds of customers. And I've been doing this with a mishmash of different tools, as I always have.

This weekend was the first time I realized: “Holy shit, I can do all of this in one single place… if I build it.”

And so I did.

I spent about six hours building a basic front-end app that serves as a visionary prototype. I stayed up late on Friday. I woke up early on Saturday, simply because I was so excited to keep going (and I kept hitting my limits2).

Here are three things I’m realizing as an amateur vibe coder who’s late to the game3:

1. Having a product background gives me a leg up.

I’ve worked in Product for over 15 years. I know the language. I have basic product, design and engineering principles locked in. Therefore, I know how to prompt quickly because I’ve spent years building websites, apps and more. And because I’ve spent years doing this over and over again, it’s all second nature to me - which gives me a lot more language to use when building a front end. It’s a head start, for now.

2. Having the raw material was necessary for me to move as quickly as I did.

I didn’t use Cowork to build raw materials from scratch, although I’m sure people could. I created all the raw materials over the past eight months. What I did was use the raw materials to make what I was building highly interactive. It basically took a ton of static pages and made them dynamic. Cowork quickly learned what I’m trying to do and started using my raw materials to develop on top of what I gave it.

I know this is terribly vague and while I’d love to share screenshots, its not ready for public consumption.

3. My moat is my ability to exploit these tools.

I am notoriously terrible at being new to technology. I don’t like watching YouTube videos. I don’t like reading manuals. The beginning of learning new technology is painful. But what I’m realizing is that my ability and willingness to sit in the pain - to figure things out uncomfortably - will be my moat as a knowledge worker. And my ability to exploit these tools, to move quicker, to do things that I need to do without waiting on anyone else - that’s my competitive advantage.

The tools are available to everyone.

Dare to hop on the learning curve.

What does it all mean?

Who could pretend to know.

What’s obvious to me: people with clarity on their own requirements, what jobs they actually need done, are going to start abandoning all the different software that’s trying to be everything in favor of building the exact thing they need.

Here’s what I mean.

• I’ve been trying to find a workout app that tracks my workouts the way I want. Nothing quite fits. I’ve been using ChatGPT to build workouts from my personal training and physical therapy recommendations, hosting them in my iPhone Notes app, iterating back and forth. What if I just... built my own app that does exactly what I want?

• Same thing with shopping. I’ve been saving things I want to buy in Notes, running them through ChatGPT to figure out what goes with what, and where to find it all at the best price. Again, all this raw material, cobbled across tools. What if I just built an app to do the thing I actually want to do?

• One of the most painful things about starting my coaching business was hobbling together Squarespace and Google Drive and PaperBell and a dozen other tools. i documented the process here. Not one of them did everything. But now I’m sitting here thinking: “Wait, I can just build exactly what I need, with the exact requirements I want.”

What feels non-negotiable after this weekend is introducing yourself to these tools. Not just because they’re fun (they are so fun, though), but because they are going to be the differentiator between you and another knowledge worker.

Rolling up your sleeves and familiarizing yourself with what’s happening right now is going to be necessary.

You can either wait until you have to, or you can read a little post like this and be inspired to start today.

I’m Jori Bell, VP of Core at Hampton. I’m also a Coach for Product Leaders. My coaching practice is full this quarter but if you need coaching recommendations, reach out.

When I reread it, it sounded a little… self righteous? Not overtly. More that I can tell I am trying very hard to convince myself I’m good, un-optimized. But by evening, I was crying about how out of control I actually felt. Ironic really.

I had many more people than normal, close friends and strangers, reach out with things like same and wow, I feel this. The topic drove immediate solidarity. And it made me realize I hit something very sensitive for a lot of people. Self / life optimization… the way we are trying to optimize our lives, often in ways that isolate us or make us unhappy, is not just a me problem. It’s universal.

Later that evening, my husband pointed me to the latest Ezra Klein episode ft. . Priya wrote The Art of Gathering1 and her episode with Ezra touches on optimizing in the context of gathering and hosting. She spoke about how we wait for the perfect setup, the perfect house, the perfect vibe, the perfectly controlled situation before we let ourselves bring people together. Timely.

Intellectually, I know you don’t need the perfect setup. But recently, and unintentionally, I’ve stopped having people over because my inside space isn’t “right.” I actually love to host. I have a great outdoor space for it. I do not have a great indoor space for it.

I have basically been waiting for my space to be more optimized before I let myself gather people I love. Writing that sentence makes me sad.

Listening to Ezra and Priya talk about this gave me both permission and grief. Permission to stop waiting for optimization. Grief for how long I have been waiting for optimization.

We live in a moment where it is incredibly easy to optimize everything. You can track your sleep. Your calories. Your workouts. Your steps. Your focus. Your mood. You can build a dashboard for your entire existence. And, if I manage enough variables, I will finally get to this frictionless version of life and be happy. As I said in my original post, control breeds control. And control is not the same thing as being alive.

It all brought me back to this night in Savannah, Georgia…

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We only had one night there, so of course I did what I always do. I researched intensely. I picked the top rated restaurant to optimize my meal. And guess what?

It was terrible.

Not subtly disappointing. Comically bad. The atmosphere was weird the second we walked in. The waiter was rude. The couple next to us looked like they were actively breaking up. The whole room felt off. And the food was terrible.

I was devastated. We had one night in Savannah, and this was the meal.

I was fully in my head about wasting the night, being angry at myself for making the wrong choice. Classic me.

Fortunately, my husband played the opposite role in this scenario. He started laughing at the absurdity of the whole thing. He said, “At least we’re getting a story out of this. Which is even better and more long lasting than a good meal.”

He was right.

That night is way more vivid in my memory than the dozens of perfectly nice, perfectly chosen, perfectly forgettable meals I have optimized my way into. Thinking about that night still makes me laugh.

Most of the time, I do pick a great restaurant2. And I couldn’t tell you much about those nights. But I can tell you a lot about the night I got it wrong. And I think a lot about the lesson of that night a lot. When things go wrong, as they often do.

All of these tools and systems and apps leave less and less room for things to go wrong. Yet, things going wrong can kind of be the point.

When I got out of my head with disappointment, I got into the moment to appreciate the absurdity of the restaurant.

I think that’s what un-optimization really is. Letting go of the fantasy that control is the same thing as a good life.

The bad restaurant is the story.

The imperfect house is the coziest.

The thing you did not plan for is the whole point.

Keep calm and un-optimize, people.

I’m Jori Bell, VP of Core at Hampton. I’m also a Coach for Product Leaders. I have one more open coaching spot this season—if that sounds like something you’ve been craving, reach out.

An unoptimized life

A week ago, it snowed for twelve continuous, magnificent, icy, all consuming hours. While the snow plows1 barreled through my tiny neighborhood, I was enthralled with the precipitation. Outside, brave souls suited up to experience snow peaks forming in real time. The busy streets of Brooklyn numbed to a hum as everyone hunkered down around toasty fireplaces and savory crock pots.

The first day of a snowstorm is the best.

Since this magical day, it’s been bone-chilling cold. The kind of cold I was sure to have escaped from2. It’s been “sleep-in-sweats-under-a-blanket-with-the-heat-on” kind of cold. The kind that turns soft snow peaks into hard ice peaks overnight.

Those ice peaks have a secondary effect: they deny New Yorkers their god-given right to jaywalk.

If the snow wasn’t shoveled last week, it froze. Sidewalks narrowed. And suddenly, commuters were forced into “single file lines” like middle school kids.

If you’re anything like me3, not being able to navigate the NYC streets with ease is infuriating.

I choose which subway car to get on because I know which is closest to the exit.

I order my coffee two stops ahead of where I get off so I can quickly scoop it on my way to work.

I’ve got it down to a science.

So, the days I’m shoved into a subway car that’s far from the exit, on the days that the wifi doesn’t work, on the days that the snow forces me into a single-file line….I’m deeply inconvenienced. Maybe irrationally so.

But what if inconvenience is part of the point?

Recently, I stumbled on a piece about cohabitation. It was a compelling article and argument for communal living that most people in their right mind would never agree to. But hidden in the words were nuggets of wisdom:

“Relentless enhancement of experience does not usually bring inner peace. Avoiding minor annoyances becomes addictive, and it can lead to a life perfectly optimized to our preferences, all alone.” - Your Social Muscles Are Wasting Away

I felt…called out. 😳

Because I do a lot of optimizing. I carry an unconscious belief that control brings inner peace. That if I plan well enough, stand where I need to and cross the street before the walk sign comes on, I’ll avoid inconvenience and thus, be calm. And happy.

But control doesn’t bring peace. Control brings control.

A life perfectly optimized to my preferences alone would definitely be smoother. But it would also be smaller and, probably, uninteresting.

The aftermath of this week’s storm - the ice, the cold, the single file lines - was a reminder that I’m not in control. And maybe that’s the point.

Stay frozen out there.

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Things I Stacked

I wrote about focusing on solving real problems and the differences I’ve found in building products in Big Tech vs. Startups.

Culture Clicks

DRAMA is one of those bands that I’ve loved for a long time. I went to one of their shows at Brooklyn Paramount and they are just an absolute bop. They just released a new album. Harry’s coming back soon 🥹.

Industry is back with an edgy vengeance and I couldn’t be happier. I’m using Queer Eye Season for cathartic crying sobbing. And I’m reading Stranger, a cutting divorce story, to rock me to bed every night. Give me emotion, what can I say.

Update: Something from Nothing is getting close to being my “most cooked cookbook” ever. Plus, we’ve made these tacos a few times and, they’re so damn good.

Finally, I want to shout out Smart Wool base layers. Between Chicago and New York this month, I wouldn’t be where I am (still cold, but not as cold) without you. 😘

Substack clicks

I’ve thoroughly been enjoying my Substack feed. It’s giving early Twitter, even early Instagram. Here were some favorites this month…

I’m Jori Bell, VP of Core at Hampton. I’m also a Coach for Product Leaders. I have one more open coaching spot this season—if that sounds like something you’ve been craving, reach out.

Six months ago, I reflected on my early experiences at a startup. This piece is an abstraction of that piece. Broader than the story of one company, there are bigger cultural changes that fundamentally alter how product work gets done when you move from big tech to a startup.

In fact, there are endless differences between the two. Beyond the clichés about speed or scrappiness, there are deeper shifts that are hard to prepare for. It’s one of those things you have to experience first hand.

So here goes: these are five of my lived cultural differences.

This one goes out to to the big tech PMs who are startup curious. And for the product people that made the shift well before me…what’d I miss?

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1. Imperfect customer data forces you to lead with intuition

I highlighted this in my piece from a few months ago, but to no one’s surprise, startups live on imperfect data. Which means product people end up leading much more with intuition, or product sense, than they might be used to.

Pause for the weirdly ambiguous term product sense that gets slapped onto product interviews. To me, product sense = having strong instincts about what matters, paired with a relentless orientation toward solving real problems.

I’ve only worked at one place with the kind of data companies dream about1. The reality is most companies, including big tech companies (which people are shocked to hear!), have far more imperfect data than people assume.

What happens is that a lot of people wait on perfect data. And, it becomes a reason not to move. That waiting is expensive and time consuming.

Right now, I’m working in one of the most subjective data environments imaginable: I’m designing a product centered on a subjective human experience. I own a product that can produce polar opposite reactions depending on who you are. You could argue that’s an ICP problem. And you could argue that humans are an unpredictable, unique species.

Regardless of the product, startups just have less data. Especially quantitative data.

So, I’ve leaned far more heavily into qualitative data than I ever did in big tech. I use basic pattern recognition and simple customer interviews to listen for problems rather than solutions. I’m constantly checking myself that I’m not validating my solutions, but rather, listening intently for what I’m not seeing.

Hiding behind perfect data isn’t an option. When you’re at a startup, you have to move forward with what you have. It’s sharpened my instincts. And it’s helped me move quicker, leaner and more confidently than when I had a lot more quantitative data. And honestly, I don’t miss perfect data anymore.

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2. Releases get radically smaller

I’ve always championed building incrementally. As you can imagine, startups take that idea and turn the volume all the way up.

When I first started, I’d present a timeline and my founder Joe would say, “Great. Let’s cut that in half.”

It was jarring. And…I realized there was an opportunity to be descoping more relentlessly. (Always Be Descoping…)

I’ve been lucky to work on teams where we did this kind of precise trimming before, slicing user stories by end-user value. But we made that happen with mature agile practices and a lot of agile coaching.

At a startup, you have to challenge yourself and your team to peel back layer after layer and ask a harder question: what is the slimmest possible v1 that still delivers value? At a startup, there’s a greater expectation that your project has been descoped rigorously.

Being at a startup has been a forcing function for stronger grooming and better sequencing. It also means we don’t get to build most of what we want to build.

That’s not a failure. That’s quite literally the point.

This Johnny Ives quote, one I’ve shared before, plays in my head weekly if not daily. And it’s become a bit of my mantra being at a startup.

Focus isn’t just saying no. It’s passing up on great ideas you’re eager to pursue in favor of the ones that align with your strategy.

3. You build the plane while flying it

Truthfully, this has been one of my hardest shifts.

At big companies, product rollouts are carefully orchestrated. I used to sit on status updates with 10+ attendees walking through massive GTM checklists. Those meetings were comprehensive but heavy.

At a startup, you are building and flying the plane at the same time. Which is, in reality, a massive change management challenge. There aren’t quarters to wait. You’ve got to move, now. I’ve compared it to an overactive operating system that needs constant updates.

Yes we use pilots and experiments but more often we are making changes to a product on a Friday that get rolled out to our customers the following Monday. The speed can be disorienting, chaotic and stressful, to say the least.

When the lifecycles are so short, the most important thing to do is to preserve optionality. I wrote about the concept of two-way doors, ironically, the month I started at Hampton.

One-way doors are irreversible; two-way doors let you try something, then pivot back if needed. One way doors are limiting, two-way doors preserve optionality. And IMO they’re strategic.

When you’re moving fast, two-way doors must be maintained because you have to assume that what you build today may change tomorrow. It’s when trust and intuition reigns supreme. From your customers. From your team. From yourself.

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4. Build what you need, because no one else will

Most blatantly, the luxuries of big tech simply don’t exist at startups. At a startup, you need agency. You need to be the kind of person who sees a gap and feels excited, not resentful, about building what’s missing.

You have to stop talking about doing the thing and actually do the thing.

You don’t have a leveling guide? Make it. You need more support? Create a hiring proposal. You need a policy for a situation that’s never arose before? Time to get drafting.

Living in big tech world felt like riding with the training wheels on. There were processes, teams, people and precedent to help you navigate the trickiest of professional or personal situations. It was equally comforting and limiting.

Flipping that notion on its head, the ways to succeed at a startup aren’t to assume precedent but rather that you’re excited and eager to break ground on something new for the company. It’s a constant game of “what got us here, won’t get us there” mentality. It requires a certain kind of energy and enthusiasm for developing v1 - from products, to people to process.

If that challenge doesn’t excite you, you’ll 100% have an uphill battle transitioning from big tech to a startup.

I often describe my experience at Audible as feeling like a cruise ship. Turning the wheel - creating real change - was an endeavor beyond my solo control. To pile onto that metaphor, Hampton is a speedboat - maybe even a jetski2. Dodging waves, finding smooth water and lots of influence to shift the direction.

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5. Steadiness becomes a way of being, not an environment

If you’re looking for steady and predictable, startups are not the place. That’s traditionally what big companies promised, though even that promise has eroded in recent years with the advent of AI and tech layoffs that have plagued workers over the past few years.

My word of the year is steady.

For me, steady doesn’t mean smooth waters. Nor does it mean numbing myself to chaos. It means expecting change and using it creatively. It means improvising. Recognizing that something I build on Monday may look completely different by Wednesday, and finding energy in that shift rather than fighting it. I’ve called this, the mess you can’t live without.

This way of operating is antithetical to who I thought I was as a builder. To how I thought I liked to work. And how I thought I moved through the world entirely.

To drive the jet ski analogy home, you’ve got to be ready and excited to surf those waves. If that’s something that sounds scary or draining, a startup likely won’t be a fit for you. If you’re excited, energized and even eager to surf, a startup might be the perfect place to grow your product practice. And…

What I’m also realizing is that none of these shifts are really about big tech vs. startups…They’re really about how you react to any kind of shift - in speed, resources, vision, etc. - and how you can adjust your product practice to new environments.

When there’s no perfect data to hide behind, you have to trust your intuition.
When scope can’t sprawl, you have to focus.
When the plane is already in the air, you have to learn while flying3.
When no one hands you the process, you have to build it.
When change is constant, you’ve got to learn to ride the wave.

Startups don’t just change how you build products. They test your tolerance for ambiguity, your relationship to control and your willingness to act with agency.

I didn’t fully understand these differences until I lived them.

Hey startup PMs, what’d I miss?

Drafted while listening to West End Girl: a portrait of a woman navigating ambiguity.4

I’m Jori Bell, VP of Core at Hampton. I’m also a Product Coach for Product Leaders. I have one more open coaching spot this season-if that sounds like something you’ve been craving, reach out.

Last night, I had the privilege of interviewing a prominent Chicago founder at an intimate event for Hampton members in Chicago. I asked this founder, a serial founder, entrepreneur, and long-term builder, about his business beliefs, investment strategy, views on AI, and how he leads as both a founder and a CEO.

When I pushed him on what makes a good idea and the rise of AI theater1, he reflected back one of my great personal philosophies:

Great ideas solve real problems.

my product heart swooned

Back in 2023, I started teaching at Cornell Tech when AI felt shiny and new. Here is where I noticed the early proliferation of AI theater. So many talented students told me they were building “AI for X.” I was, and still am, something of an AI novice. But I was grounded enough in my product principles to recognize a familiar troupe.

AI is not a product.

It’s an enabling technology.

We’ve seen this movie before. “Web3 for Y” and “NFTs for Z” … AI for X is simply the latest iteration of technology theater.

When a company defines itself as “AI for X,” it’s solution first, not problem first.

What this founder echoed, what I’ve been vehemently been preaching and what the best product thinkers consistently reinforce, is that the strongest ideas begin with real, painful, build-a-company worthy problems. Sometimes, often even, AI enables those solutions.

But it is not where you start.

And its absolutely not the point.

If you are trying to build a moat or meaningfully differentiate from what everyone else is doing, stop framing and naming your company through the lens of AI. AI is table stakes. Frankly, if you are not using it in some capacity, that alone is concerning.

Instead, frame and name your company around the real customer problem you are solving.

As recently stacked, the most important differentiator is not working harder or adopting the latest technology. It is working on the right thing. It’s the discipline of ruthlessly auditing where you are spending your time, energy, and attention. And in this case, that audit starts with the problem itself.

Focus first and foremost on solving a worthy problem.

If you can start here, you’re already ahead.