Nova: Simons, you're a product leader with over 15 years in tech. You've seen it a hundred times, I'm sure: a project has a brilliant technical foundation, a clear roadmap, a talented team... and yet, it completely stalls or misses the mark. It's one of the most frustrating paradoxes in our industry.

Simons: Oh, absolutely, Nova. It's the ghost in the machine. You can have every line of code be perfect, every metric on the dashboard green, but the human element is always the variable you can't fully predict or control. It's where the real complexity lies.

Nova: Exactly! We're told to focus on the 'what' and the 'how,' but what if the real key to success, the secret to mastering that human element, lies in a place most tech leaders would never think to look: a rulebook for graphic designers?

Simons: That's a provocative idea. I'm listening.

Nova: That's what we're exploring today, using Michael Janda's fantastic book, 'Burn Your Portfolio.' It sounds like it's for creatives, but its lessons are pure leadership gold. We're going to extract his hard-won wisdom and translate it for the world of tech. Today we'll dive deep into this from two perspectives. First, we'll explore why true leadership means killing the 'lone genius' myth and embracing radical collaboration.

Simons: A topic near and dear to my heart.

Nova: And then, we'll discuss a crucial mindset shift: realizing you're not just in the product business, you're in the service business.

Simons: Okay, now you've really got my attention. That one cuts deep for anyone in product. Let's do it.

Nova: Alright, let's jump right in. Our first big idea from Janda is this powerful counter-narrative to the myth of the 'lone genius.' In the design world, there's this romantic image of the brilliant artist who toils away in isolation and emerges with a masterpiece. Janda argues that in a professional setting, that's a recipe for disaster.

Simons: I can already see the parallels.

Nova: Let me paint a picture for you, based on the kind of scenarios Janda describes. Imagine a star designer at an agency. Let's call him Alex. Alex is incredibly talented, wins awards, and is the fastest designer on the team. But he works in a total silo. He gets a project brief and immediately plugs in his headphones. He ignores the copywriter's questions about the layout, he dismisses the account manager's gentle reminders about the client's tight budget, and he completely bypasses any internal review.

Simons: He thinks he knows best.

Nova: Precisely. He then schedules a meeting and presents his 'perfect' design directly to the client. But the client is confused. The headlines the copywriter wrote don't fit in the spaces Alex designed. The features he spent weeks animating are way over budget. The project is a mess. It's late, it's expensive, and it doesn't solve the client's problem. And Alex? He blames the 'clueless client' and the 'uninspired copywriter' for not 'getting' his vision.

Simons: Wow, that story is painfully familiar. You just described, almost perfectly, what the tech world calls the '10x engineer' or sometimes, the 'visionary' Product Manager who operates in a vacuum. It's the brilliant coder who writes incredibly complex, 'elegant' code that no one else on the team can understand or maintain. Or the PM who disappears for two weeks and comes back with a 40-page product spec that they hand down like a commandment, without ever consulting the engineering lead on feasibility.

Nova: And the result is the same, right?

Simons: Exactly the same. You get a technically 'brilliant' but practically useless solution. The team is demoralized because they weren't included, and the final product doesn't actually meet the user's needs because the 'genius' didn't bother to collaborate with the people who actually talk to users.

Nova: So what's the antidote? Janda's solution is so simple but so profound. He says you have to build a culture around the word 'We,' not 'I.' He talks about the discipline of teamwork. As a leader, what does that discipline look like in the middle of a fast-paced, two-week sprint cycle?

Simons: It's about creating rituals of collaboration. It's not enough to just put people in a room and hope for the best. It's the daily stand-up meeting, where the goal isn't just to report your status, but to actively ask, 'Is anyone blocked? How can we, as a team, solve that blocker today?' It's the sprint retrospective, where you have to build enough psychological safety for an engineer to say, 'This process is broken and it's slowing us down,' without any fear of blame.

Nova: So the leader's job shifts.

Simons: Massively. As a leader, your job isn't to have the best idea in the room. Your job is to create an environment where the best idea can emerge, be challenged, be improved, and ultimately be owned by everyone. You move from being a soloist to being the conductor of an orchestra. You're there to make sure everyone is playing in harmony and that the final piece of music is more beautiful than anything one person could have created alone.

Nova: I love that framing. 'Conductor of talent.' It completely changes the goal of leadership from personal glory to collective success.

Nova: And you know, that sense of shared ownership and collective success is almost impossible if the team doesn't understand who they're truly serving. This brings us to the second, and maybe even more radical, idea from Janda's book: you're not selling design, or code, or products. You are selling a service.

Simons: Hmm. This is a mindset shift I talk about a lot. It's the difference between a junior and a senior professional in any field, but especially in product.

Nova: Well, Janda gives a classic example. He tells a story about a client who kept giving frustratingly vague feedback on a website design. The only thing they could say was, "It needs more pop!" The junior designers on the team were tearing their hair out. They tried making the colors brighter, the fonts bigger, adding flashy animations. Nothing worked. The client just kept saying, "No, that's not it. More pop!"

Simons: The ultimate nightmare feedback. I've gotten the tech equivalent: "Just make it more intuitive."

Nova: Right! So finally, the senior creative director steps in. He sits down with the client, ignores the design on the screen for a moment, and asks a simple question: "When you say you want more 'pop,' what business result are you hoping to see? What do you want to happen after a user sees this 'pop'?" And the client, after a moment's thought, says, "I want the phone to ring more. We need more sales leads."

Simons: Ah, the lightbulb moment.

Nova: A giant one! Suddenly, the problem wasn't 'add more pop' anymore. The problem was 'increase lead generation.' The entire focus of the team shifted. The solution wasn't a random design change; it was a much clearer, more prominent 'Contact Us' button, a simplified contact form that was easier to fill out, and a phone number displayed at the top of every page. They solved the business problem, not the 'pop' problem.

Simons: That is the absolute, 100-percent core of great product management. We get feature requests all day long that are the exact equivalent of 'make it pop.' The sales team says, 'We need a new dashboard.' The marketing team says, 'We need to add a social sharing button on this page.' A senior executive says, 'Our competitor has this feature, so we need it too.'

Nova: Those sound like solutions, not problems.

Simons: Exactly. A junior PM hears 'build a dashboard' and immediately starts writing up the requirements. A senior PM hears 'build a dashboard' and asks, 'That's interesting, tell me more. What questions are you trying to answer that you can't answer now? What decisions will you make with the information on this dashboard?' You have to be a detective and uncover the real job-to-be-done. Are they asking for a dashboard because they feel out of the loop? Or because they need to prove their team's value to their boss? The 'dashboard' is just their proposed solution; your job is to find the real problem.

Nova: Janda says that this process of digging deeper builds immense trust with a client. How do you build that same trust with, say, a skeptical engineering team or a demanding executive who just wants you to build their idea?

Simons: By showing your work and framing it collaboratively. You never just say 'no.' That creates a battle of opinions. Instead, you say, 'I love the energy behind that idea. My only concern is that our data shows users aren't engaging with that part of the app, so building a big feature there might not have the impact we want. What if we ran a small, one-week A/B test to see if users would even click on a button for this feature? That way, we can get real data to know if we should invest the whole team's time.'

Nova: So you're not rejecting their idea, you're offering to help them validate it.

Simons: Precisely. You shift the conversation from a power struggle to a collaborative search for the truth. You are providing the service of de-risking their idea, of protecting the team's time, and of grounding the roadmap in actual strategy instead of guesswork. You become a partner, not an order-taker.

Nova: This is all so clarifying. So, to bring it all together, the big leadership lessons we can pull from a book for designers, 'Burn Your Portfolio,' and apply directly to tech are really twofold. First, internally, you have to kill the lone genius myth and lead with 'we,' not 'I,' to build a truly collaborative team.

Simons: Where the leader is the conductor, not the soloist.

Nova: Exactly. And second, externally, with clients and stakeholders, you have to remember you're in the service business. Your job is to be a detective—to solve their underlying business problems, not just to build their feature requests.

Simons: It's a powerful reframe that changes everything about how you approach your work. It elevates your role from execution to strategy.

Nova: So, for everyone listening today, especially those in product or any kind of leadership role, what's one small thing they can do this week to put these ideas into practice?

Simons: I have a simple but incredibly effective challenge. In your very next stakeholder meeting, the next time someone gives you a solution—a feature request, a demand for a new report, anything—just pause. Take a breath, and ask them one simple, non-confrontational question: "What problem would that solve for you?" And then just listen.

Nova: Don't try to solve it right away.

Simons: Don't solve. Just listen. I promise you, the quality and the entire dynamic of that conversation will change instantly. You'll stop being an order-taker and start being a strategic partner. And that, more than any technical skill or roadmap, is what real leadership is all about.