From Reactive to Creative: Ken Norton on the Inner Work of Product Leadership

Ken Norton, who spent 14 years at Google working on products such as Docs, Calendar and Maps, now coaches product leaders full time. He describes executive coaching as a creative partnership in which the definition of success belongs to the client. He brings no agenda, coaches the whole person rather than only their work, and relies mostly on listening, curiosity and intuition. He compares the process to jazz improvisation, where you follow wherever there is meaning for that individual.

He came to it through his own coach, who helped him see that the most fulfilling moments of his career were helping people change and grow. His time at Google Ventures working with founders showed him the limits of advice. Telling people what worked at Google was like cotton candy: everyone felt good, yet nothing had changed weeks later. What worked at Google, he jokes, might not have worked even at Google.

His clients are mostly senior product leaders such as CPOs, VPs of product, directors at large tech companies, and some CEOs. They often arrive at a crossroads, like becoming a CPO for the first time or moving from a big company to a startup, with the sense that what got them here won't get them there. They are introspective and surrounded by good mentors, but realize that the next step requires internal work.

Norton uses the example of teaching his 16-year-old to drive. As a child, cars just go places; later it looks easy; then, behind the wheel, you face mirrors, signs and stripes you never understood. Everyone offers pithy advice and frameworks, like the 10 and 2 hand position, but the real issue is that you haven't adapted to the complexity of the world around you.

The world of driving has not changed, he says, but your place in it has, and that requires developing what developmental psychologists call self-complexity. Skills matter, but at this level you have already mastered them. The shift required is how your inner self makes meaning and responds to the demands around you, which he describes as a full reboot of the internal operating system. In product, he adds, there are not even rules of the road.

He also uses a video game analogy. Early in a career you learn the rules, rack up points and unlock levels. Then you are promoted into a level where the rules are not black and white, feedback arrives long after the action, and everyone looks at you as the game's designer. For some leaders that comes with a real cost to happiness, health or marriage, an existential crisis or burnout, and a sense of stuckness.

Norton says this distinction is old and keeps surfacing under different names: above versus below the line at Conscious Leadership Group, daring versus armored leadership from Brene Brown, and playing to win versus not to lose. He uses the Leadership Circle's terms, creative versus reactive. Reactive means responding to the world from fear, seeing problems and threats, wanting to be right or liked. Creative means responding from openness, curiosity, purpose and growth.

People typically ask whether the creative mode is effective and how to get there. On the first, Norton cites management scientists Bob Anderson and Bill Adams, whose research found creative leadership positively correlated with every dimension of success, including leadership capability, revenue and profitability. Reactive leadership correlated negatively. Yet about 75% of leaders operate primarily reactively, because the how is hard: it means redesigning the beliefs and assumptions that drive your reactions.

Fear and anxiety are the clue that you are in a reactive posture, and Norton notes that brains evolved this way for good reason. He describes three postures: complying, where you want to be approved and loved; protecting, where you retreat into being right and into your own head; and controlling, where you want to win and dominate. Most people lean on more than one, and he stresses that this is not about putting anyone in a box.

Norton says his own default was complying. Early in his product career he had no authority and no one knew what his job was, so he sought approval, listened to everyone and made people feel heard. It worked well until he gave away so much power that purpose, decisiveness and execution suffered. When people told him to push back, the only model he had was the autocratic leader, whom he didn't want to become.

The answer was not to stop caring but to point that empathy toward purpose and vision. He let go of needing to be liked in the room and redefined it as admiration over time: he wanted people to say a decade later that they would work with him again in a heartbeat. He admits it sounds simple, comparing it to a summit-of-Everest summary, and says the work lies in uncovering underlying beliefs such as "I'm not tough enough to be a CEO".

Tools like 360-degree assessments and a coach's questions help people see which connections they have made don't need to be made. Seeing the new approach work, and feeling happier and less drained by it, gives a dopamine hit that counters the belief that it won't work. Lenny adds that his own coach helped him see he could reach his goals through his strengths rather than forcing himself into another archetype.

Norton describes his career as "flying too close to the sun". He would love managing a small team, the team would grow, he'd feel too senior and miss the "real" work, and he'd retreat to something smaller. Coaching helped him unpack what he enjoyed: connecting with people and helping them grow. That explained why he loved managing five people and hated managing 35, since there was no time left for that connection.

He says this is the essence of reactive versus creative: letting the world set expectations and trying to meet them, versus tapping into your sense of purpose and vision and using it to navigate. He tells Lenny that the focus on skills and frameworks is limiting because this is inner work. It's empowering because it is all you, and harder for the same reason. A sign of the shift is goals moving from external, such as wanting to be VP because that is the next step, to internal, such as wanting more creativity.

Norton admits coaching is not right for everyone. Someone who just wants the tutorial may be irritated by a coach asking what matters to them about the game. Mentoring is more about telling you the right way, coaching assumes there may be none, and the lines blur, with good managers coaching as needed. This is partly why he works with senior executives, who have already learned how to do the job.

For people who can't find or afford a coach, Norton says anyone can call themselves a coach, so there is a wide range of price points, and he challenges people to look first. A coach doesn't need to have done your job, and may even be better without having done it, since they won't slip into giving advice. Coaching, he says, can come from managers who put on a "coach hat", from mentors who ask questions, and from self-coaching with coach-style questions when you feel an emotion.

He suggests doing values work yourself, asking what your values really are. His recommended resources are Brene Brown's Dare to Lead, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman and Kaley Warner Klemp, Bob Anderson and Bill Adams's Mastering Leadership, and Robert Kegan's Immunity to Change. The Anderson and Adams book describes five levels of leadership, with reactive second and creative third, followed by integral and unitive.

Asked about the common blind spots of product people, Norton says that for senior executives nearly all challenges come down to people rather than product. The hard parts are persuading others, getting groups to work together, handling difficult personalities and articulating a vision. Many product people are confronted with this without having treated it as a skill to develop.

He finds the role exciting because product managers are leaders from day one. They have no formal authority, which he calls the hardest form of leadership, so they practice its hard parts early and are better prepared if they later become someone's boss. He says this is the art versus the science of product: communication and collaboration matter as much as techniques such as managing a backlog.

If you would attend a training on a technical dashboard analysis, he says, you should also go to training on difficult conversations or storytelling. Lenny notes that the thing that's hard is probably the thing you should do. Norton agrees that when something feels squishy and doesn't fit a three-step rule, that is a sign it will really matter, and a chance to grow your inner complexity.

Norton says that almost everyone feels doubt at some point, and that psychologists prefer the term imposter phenomenon since it isn't a dysfunction. He admits to feeling it during the interview, as an inner voice told him he was not a trained psychologist. Product leaders may feel it more because the job is cross-functional and ill-defined, so at the edge of it you will never be as good as the engineer or designer you work with. Just realizing that others share it brings solidarity.

He then warns against dismissing or weaponizing the idea, particularly for women, people of color and especially women of color, who face real external bias and microaggressions. Telling someone it is just their imposter syndrome shifts the burden to the person and overlooks systemic issues. Leaders, he says, have a special obligation to look at what signals people are getting and what their role is in the environment, and he points to an HBR article titled "Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome".

On the inner side, he describes the inner critic as a board member with good intentions who has taken the chairperson's seat. You can notice it, ask it to step aside, befriend it or give it a new job. Lenny gives his critic a name, and Norton mentions parts work from Richard Schwartz's Internal Family Systems, where clients name their parts. He jokes about "Larry Loser". He also notes that second-guessing often comes from beliefs about what a real leader must look like and from comparing yourself to others.

To choose a coach, Norton says fit matters most and it either clicks or it doesn't, so it's fine to say no without giving reasons. Good coaches offer a free session, in which he actually coaches the person so they can see what it is like. Preferences about gender, background or age can legitimately matter, and the relationship needs trust and authenticity.

He suggests asking what coaching means to each candidate, since styles range from structured week-by-week programs to pure coaching where you bring the agenda, and from touchy-feely to drill sergeant. Places to look include the International Coaching Federation, matchmaking services like BetterUp and Torch, and Scale's list of top coaches for product leaders, where Norton won the product leaders category. He also advises asking admired leaders whom they recommend.

On his 10X versus 10% idea, Norton says we sometimes think too small. Breakthroughs require the ability to try and fail, and in his view the issue is cultural as well as mindset. He points to the coronavirus vaccine as a big swing with no guarantee, and says leaders must create an environment where people bring bold ideas rather than ramping them down to something safe. Kodak, he notes, invented the digital camera, but its environment didn't let those people step up to the plate.

How much to put into big bets depends on the context. Research labs and seed investors build portfolios expecting most to fail, but most teams have real customers and can't bet everything. He mentions Google's old 70-20-10 split between core, adjacent and crazy bets and suggests applying it fractally at team level, such as letting one engineer per sprint try something that may not work.

On hiring product managers, a topic he first wrote about in 2005, he says the process has swung too far toward structured, rehearsed interviews, like SAT prep. Companies can end up not learning whether the candidate can show up, inspire engineers and designers, and agree on what the job is. Candidates should interview the employer too, and in the lightning round he suggests asking how the company defines a product team, and how a recently shipped thing came to be.