The art of influence: The single most important skill left that AI can’t replace | Jessica Fain
In a Nutshell
Jessica Fain teaches product managers to master influence by empathizing with executives' chaotic "strobe light" calendars, aligning pitches to their goals/OKRs (e.g., "What is the board pushing you on?"), and entering meetings to learn rather than seek approval—using tactics like starting with 30-second context, curious questions ("That's interesting—what led you to believe that?"), Minto Pyramid structure (recommendation first), and presenting 3 options with the preferred "Goldilocks" in the middle. Build trust by killing bad ideas, acting like a CPO with domain expertise, red-teaming proposals, and shrinking changes into low-risk experiments; leverage chief of staffs/EAs for intel and AI tools to simulate exec feedback. In the AI era, influence becomes irreplaceable as execution automates—prioritize strategy clarity, user empathy for novel insights, buy-in for prioritization/distribution, and onboarding AI agents with company context/guardrails.
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As product managers, one of our best sets of skills is curiosity and empathy and trying to understand our users. But the moment that we're talking to an executive, we forget those skills and those talents. > It's your fault if the leaders didn't buy into your ideas. People completely misunderstand how executives make decisions. What is going on in the heads? I describe an executive's calendar as a strobe light going off. You wake up at 8:00 a.m., you've already got a huge list of urgent things going on. They have not had the time, the energy, the wherewithal to center your problems. > What are their goals? What are they trying to do? How are they measured? Connect the thing you're pitching them with that success. There's ways for us to ask much more interesting questions of our executives. Tell me what the board is pushing you on. Execs want to be successful, too. They want to be good at their jobs. Sometimes you have the best idea and they just don't bite. One of the biggest things you can do to build trust is kill things. Deprioritize things. If you're thinking about how do you be more senior, how do you show up in a way that is in a leadership mindset, you get paid to be a domain expert, your executive is looking for you to be the deepest person in the room. Bringing your expertise to bear is absolutely crucial. You have to act like a CPO.
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