Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Becoming a conscious leader: Leading without fear, finding your life’s objective function, and getting better at vision and strategy | John Mark Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash)
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get clear on your objective function and one way that I've gotten clear on is like trying to think about it from future me because like five years from now I'm not gonna give a shit if I made the presentation slightly better but I'm gonna care a lot about what kind of relationship I have with my daughters and like that means that the the next action the next thing I do today and tomorrow those will translate into the relationship with her right. Not to be like more but just again most of us just aren't really tuned into an awareness that our lives will come to an end. We try to pretend like we're gonna live forever and just not think about it and the horror of it is that we succeed right. We mostly manage to just go live our life and eat ice cream and go to work and go on vacation and do what we do. To me an awareness and mindfulness that our lives will come to an end punctuates reality in a way that requires me to rethink my priorities. Today my guest is J.M. Nichols. J.M. has been a product leader at Waymo, DoorDash, and Uber. He's also an engineering manager at Groupon and before that an equity trader at Getco. At Uber he built and launched the very first version of Uber pool and then went on to leave the team responsible for the infrastructure and algorithms powering the economic and logistics brain behind Uber's matching and pricing systems. At DoorDash he was head of product for DoorDash platform at Waymo. He led product for the commercialization of autonomous ride hailing and last mile delivery and he recently returned to Uber to lead product for the mobility team. This conversation is a unique and beautiful mixture of heart skills, soft skills, tactics, and emotions. I won't give away too much about the conversation but this is a powerful one. Tears are shed, stories are shared, and I am confident you'll become a better leader and human having listened to J.M.'s insights and lessons. If you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it on your favorite podcasting app for YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that I bring you J.M. Nichols. J.M. Thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you Lenny. Thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. I really appreciate your dedication to helping product managers improve their craft and up level. There's not a lot of great researchers out there for that. Coaching and development as I'm sure we'll get into is a passion of mine as well. We have a lot of peer interests there. I really appreciate that. I want to start with a phrase that came up again and again when I asked people what to talk to you about from your colleagues. This phrase is conscious leadership. What is conscious leadership? What does this phrase mean? To me leadership is broadly defined as having influence in the world. By that definition, to me everyone is a leader because we all have influence in some way. It's not about whether you're a manager or not. It's like I have influence on my kids or my partner or my community, the world, the way I vote, the way I show up. We all have influence. We're all co-creating influences of each other. That's the leadership piece. The conscious piece then is becoming more aware, waking up. To me it's like learning more about my interior world, what my background is, my biases. We all inherit certain belief systems from our parents or our church or community. A lot of times they go unquestioned and end up in conflict. It's really just about becoming more aware and then taking responsibility for the influence that I have. Taking responsibility for my influence in the world. As you talk about this, something that came up and something that I thought about as I was preparing for this episode is this idea of soft leadership, the power of soft skills and just how important that is in success. There's something there that comes up when I say that. There's the power of soft skills and the importance of those in being successful. Yeah. Theodore Roosevelt speaks awfully and carry a big stick. I've evolved in that department. When I was younger in my career, I thought it was really important that we got to show up to the meeting and have the right slides and be the loudest, rightest voice in the room. That's the way to have influence. There's certainly a place for having leadership in a meeting and presenting a point of view and helping God the narrative. To me, I've evolved more towards sitting back. It's also as I've become a more senior leader. I'm aware that there are power
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