😶🌫️My Mood Board: March 2024
A visual way to anchor my mood and actions at work
Do you want to drive intentionality into your actions at work? Have reminders of what’s important and not just urgent? Match your mood and actions to the business and team needs? Create a totem to avoid your negative emotions by default?
You should create a mood board for your work life. It only takes about one hour to create and when you print it out, it will be an ongoing reminder of how you want to show up.
👋Hi there! It’s Adam here with my third annual Spring Mood Board. After reflecting for an hour to create visuals for how I want to show up, what’s stressing me, and what’s most important as a product maker and leader, here’s what I got:
As is tradition, I’ll share this week a few thoughts on my creation process.
How To Show Up as a Leader
I added three pictures to remind me how I want to embrace intentional leadership this spring:
At a recent leadership training, I participated in an activity to engrave a metal washer to serve as a totem bracelet. I was asked to choose a short word that encapsulated what was needed from me as a leader. Given the urgency and ambiguity of the Era of AI and the changing Microsoft culture expectations of rapid progress and initiative to capture said new era, I chose the word DRIVE. We are close to celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the founding of the larger organization that I work in, and I wanted something that captured a “It’s still day one” atmosphere and avoided the morass of an act-only-once-there-is-concensus environment.
In addition, I crossed the 1-year anniversary of my role as a VP with an expanded multi-disciplinary scope. This has put into relief how much more my job is to create the conditions for success and growth of my leadership team. This mental shift to focus first on “Do my folks have what they need to succeed?” instead of “Is the product going to be successful?” is represented by the sandbox graphic on my mood board. It reminds me of my role as a builder of environments, defining good boundaries within which my team can deliver (and play).
Last and not least, it’s a common refrain that senior roles are "experienced in the fishbowl,” with many people who barely know me watching my actions, styles, and tone. Even as drive, initiative, and intensity are what the times call for, the fishbowl graphic is a reminder of the impact that my style can have on the tone, tenure, and culture not just of my team but the wider organization.
Reminder on Path to Happiness
I brought this graphic back from my first mood board, created just after my sabbatical two years ago. I talk about the principles on here in my Field Guide to Happiness and it’s heavily influenced by Dr. Santos’ class on the Psychology of Happiness.
It’s a lot easier to practice these on sabbatical or vacation, when work isn’t as consuming of mental attention. And yet, that’s the point of the mood board - to have these reminders that you can practice enough self-care every day to have the drip-drip-drip of a recharge as well.
Product Making Ethos
How I show up as a product maker this spring is dictated by urgent business and market needs right now more so than podcasts and books on product making theory.
First, there is a large amount of storytelling work in my product life. There is a need to radically simplify the complex, frame emerging strategies, and generate excitement on non-consensus ideas. The fairy tale book represents my role as both a good storyteller myself and a bar raiser for it among others.
Second, I have more clarity now on how my team can contribute to the company’s larger AI strategy - and it’s very much being part of a broader vision instead of defining our own product-level strategy. This had required me to act differently, for instance the decisions of who I put on what project and how I frame success, and I wanted to remind myself of that with the “puzzle piece” graphic.
Third, as I expand my role into more “product adjacent” projects like community events & customer success channels, I need to export the most core tenet of modern product making: Lead with outcomes over output. Define the goal & success bar first, start with Why, and only then figure out the work to be done. Prioritize impact thinking over execution thinking. I talk about this more in my post on what the VP job is really like.
Calmness
Meet my infinite well of patience:
For various reasons, I find myself stretching to find the patience I need to thrive - maybe it’s because since the start of the year, there has been more need than normal to drive tricky agreements, deal with disappointment, and handle resource contention. It’s my job to raise the bar and make the changes that inspire growth, but I added this well to my mood board to remind me just how powerful the ability to find patience is during stressful times.
It’s highly related to the only object that has been on all three of my mood boards: my motto for how I want to show up at work.
Do = Act, not think or talk.
Hard Things = We do what’s difficult so our customers don’t have to.
In A Calm Way = Patience, attention, focus, and optimism.
With Me = We are in this together.
My Story Arc over the Years
Now that this is a Spring tradition, I have three years to look back on:
2022:
2023:
2024:
I’ve noticed a few things:
My first board - 2022 - was right after sabbatical and it was entirely self-generated and not a response to external events. I was at a peak of self-awareness and self-intentionality, but a valley in being curious about what the market needed from our products.
My second mood board - 2023 - was at the very beginning of an industry-wide paradigm shift. A period of stability had just ended. There is a “keep calm, carry on” vibe to the whole thing that you find when you must lead without knowing what’s coming or where you are going.
This year I noticed how much external stressors dominated what I wanted to put on the board. More stability and clarity, but also increased fear of failure. It made me reflect on if I’m being reactive and “on defense” - a good self-reflection I uncovered because of the exercise.
Over the years, I’ve used a mix of Canva, Microsoft Designer, and DALL-E to create my mood boards. If you create one yourself, share it with me!