I was sitting in a discovery session for a deal that, on paper, we had to do.
A big partner, one already financing a meaningful chunk of our team’s work : wanted us to integrate with a new product of theirs. They’d spent a lot of money buying the capability into their stack. From our side, the awkward part: we already had something similar of our own. Different audience, different mechanics, but close enough that the proposal didn’t feel like it was solving a fresh problem. It felt like it was crowding one we already had.
The Room
Spreadsheets. A deck with three options : a light-touch version, a manual middle-ground, and a full integration that would need multiple teams and a year we didn’t have. Different analysts walking us through their slices. Lots of nodding. Lots of “yes, but”.
The kind of meeting where everyone is technically aligned and nobody is actually moving.
The Question
Then one of the senior PMs asked something I hadn’t heard framed quite that way before.
She said, more or less: at this point in time, what’s your gut on this excited, meh, or concerned?
Three words. Three buckets.
For most people in the room I think it slid right past. For me, something clicked. It was so simple it was almost embarrassing to find it useful. Easy to remember. Honest. It gave you somewhere to put a feeling that you’d otherwise just carry around as a vague tightness in your chest.
You don’t need to articulate the strategy. You don’t need to win the argument. You just check in with yourself: which of those three am I right now?
The Trap I Almost Walked Into
I left that meeting thinking, alright, I’m going to use this. And I almost made the mistake I always make with new ideas.
The trap goes like this: I’m going to read the book. I’m going to take the course. I’m going to set aside six months, close the tabs, lock in, and grind it out alone.
That’s great. It also doesn’t really work.
Know-How vs Knowledge
Because in this very moment, there is someone slightly ahead of you on the same path. And when you walk a stretch of it with them, even ten minutes of it, you pick up something a course can’t give you.
We call it know-how. It’s not just knowledge. It’s the way they hold the question. The framing they reach for when things get murky. The instinct of where to push and where to let go.
You see it sharply in engineering. Pair with someone of roughly the same ability and you will almost certainly walk away with something you didn’t have when you sat down. And that stays true even if you’ve worked with the same person every day for ten years.
Why It Stuck
That senior PM didn’t teach me anything I couldn’t have read in a book. But she did it in the room, in the moment, on a deal I cared about, in three words.
That’s the difference. That’s the thing I want to keep being available for, and to keep offering to others.