Nova: Simons, as a product leader, you live in a world of limited resources and infinite demands. So here’s a question: are you the architect of your team's focus, or just a firefighter battling the latest urgent request? What if the single most important resource you manage isn't your team's time, but their attention?

Simons: That's a question that hits close to home, Nova. It’s the central tension of the job. You can feel incredibly busy, running from meeting to meeting, but at the end of the week, you look back and wonder, "Did we actually move the needle on what matters?" The distinction between activity and progress is everything.

Nova: Exactly. And that's the core idea we're exploring today, inspired by Shelmina Babai Abji's book, "Show Your Worth." Now, this book was written as a guide for women aspiring to leadership, but its principles are so powerful and universal that we're translating them into a leadership blueprint for anyone, especially in a strategic field like tech.

Simons: I love that. Great frameworks are industry and gender agnostic. They just work.

Nova: They just work. So today we'll dive deep into this from two perspectives. First, we'll explore the architecture of attention—how to shift from being busy to being truly productive. Then, we'll discuss how to debug your own leadership 'operating system' to create irreplaceable value.

Simons: Architecture and debugging. You're speaking my language. I'm ready.

Nova: Alright, let's start with that first idea, 'Intentional Attention.' The book argues that in our distraction-filled world, attention is more valuable than time. And to bring this to life, there's a fantastic story about the author, Shelmina, when she first moved into sales at IBM.

Simons: Okay, I'm listening.

Nova: So, picture this: Shelmina is new to the sales team. She's ambitious, energetic, and she wants to prove herself. She identifies over 50 potential deals and creates what she calls a "Personal Success Plan," listing all 50 as "must-wins." She's working crazy hours, her task list is endless, but she's not actually closing anything. She's just… busy.

Simons: I know that feeling. It's like being on a hamster wheel. You're running as fast as you can, but the scenery never changes.

Nova: Precisely. So she has a review with her sales leader, a man named Keith. And Keith looks at her plan and her exhaustion and says something that changes her entire career. He says, "Working more hours isn’t the answer; it’s about priorities." He tells her about his own early days, how he chased every single deal and ended up frustrated and failing. He advised her to stop, breathe, and qualify every single one of those 50 deals.

Simons: So, to separate the signal from the noise.

Nova: Exactly. He asked her to figure out the real probability of winning each one. So Shelmina does the hard work. She analyzes everything and ruthlessly cuts her list of 50 "must-wins" down to just 15. She focuses all her attention there. And within three months, she starts winning. Six months after starting the job, she's so successful she buys the house she'd been dreaming of for her daughter.

Simons: That story is so resonant. In product, we call this 'the tyranny of the trivial.' We have a backlog of hundreds of 'good' ideas from customers, from sales, from engineering. The real job, the hard job, is finding the 15 that are 'must-wins' for the business. It’s not about the volume of features you ship; it's about the impact they create.

Nova: And the book says the key is learning to say 'no.' Keith told Shelmina, 'If you don’t say no to what doesn’t deserve your attention, you won’t be able to say yes to what does.' How does that play out in a tech environment, Simons? Saying 'no' to demanding stakeholders can be politically… tricky.

Simons: Tricky is an understatement. It can feel like a career-limiting move if you handle it wrong. But the lesson from that story is crucial. You can't just say 'no.' You have to show your work. Shelmina's 'Personal Success Plan' is the equivalent of a Product Manager's data-backed roadmap. When a stakeholder comes with a request that isn't a priority, you don't just say 'no.' You say, 'That's an interesting idea. Here are the 15 things we've identified as critical for hitting our company's goals this quarter. Can you help me understand how your request delivers more value than one of these?'

Nova: You're making them part of the prioritization process.

Simons: Right. You're not just saying 'no,' you're reinforcing the 'yes.' You're showing them the architecture you've built. It shifts the conversation from personal opinion to shared strategy. That's how you protect your team's attention and earn respect, not just likes. The book puts it perfectly: "Aspire to be respected—not to be liked."

Nova: I love that. It’s a powerful mindset shift for any leader.

Nova: And that idea of having a clear architecture brings us to our second, and perhaps more personal, concept. If 'Intentional Attention' is about managing your external focus, 'Intentional Value Creation' is about managing your internal programming. The book uses an analogy I think you'll really appreciate, Simons. It's about debugging your own code.

Simons: Okay, now you've really got my attention. Tell me more.

Nova: There's this incredible story about a young, brilliant software engineer Shelmina was mentoring. This engineer was technically fantastic, but in meetings with her boss, she would freeze up. She couldn't speak. She was so frustrated, she broke down, saying she just couldn't do it no matter how hard she tried.

Simons: Hmm, sounds like a classic case of imposter syndrome. We see that a lot in tech.

Nova: Exactly. But Shelmina didn't just give her a pep talk and say 'be more confident.' She used a software analogy. She explained that the engineer's belief system was like a program written in her childhood. She came from a culture where she was taught 'girls are to be seen and not heard.' That single line of code, written years ago, was still running in her professional life, causing this bug.

Simons: So it wasn't a personal failing, it was a software issue.

Nova: That's the reframe! Shelmina told her, "When you become conscious of your program, you can recognize what programming hasn't been serving you and rewrite it." The engineer had this lightbulb moment. She said, "I need to debug the program of thinking that I'm not smart enough." She realized she was the author of her own code.

Simons: Wow. That is a profoundly powerful reframe. It completely depersonalizes the fear. It's not 'I am a failure,' it's 'I have a bug in my code.' That's an incredibly empowering concept for anyone in tech, especially for junior engineers who feel like they're the only one who doesn't get it. It makes the problem solvable.

Nova: And the author calls the ability to do this your 'Power Quotient' or PQ—the ability to consciously choose to run an empowering script instead of a disempowering one. So, as an ENFJ leader, Simons, someone who is described as a 'Protagonist' and naturally wants to lift people up, how could you use that 'debugging' framework to help your team?

Simons: Oh, it changes everything. It transforms the entire dynamic of feedback and coaching. Instead of a manager saying, 'You need more confidence,' which is vague and often unhelpful, you can ask, 'What's the underlying assumption in your code that's causing this output? Let's trace it back together.'

Nova: You turn a performance review into a collaborative debugging session.

Simons: Exactly! It fosters psychological safety, because in software development, bugs are expected. They aren't moral failures. They're just problems to be solved. So if a team member is afraid to speak up, we can explore the 'code' behind it. Is it a line that says 'I'll be punished for being wrong'? Or 'My ideas aren't as good as theirs'? Once you find the bug, you can work together to write a patch.

Nova: What would a patch look like in that context?

Simons: It could be a small, concrete action. For example: 'For the next two weeks, your only goal in our team meeting is to ask one clarifying question. That's it. We're not aiming for a perfect new feature, just a small patch to prove the old code is wrong.' It's about creating a safe 'testing environment' for their new, updated mental software.

Nova: I love that. It makes personal growth feel so much more tangible and less intimidating. So, to bring it all together, we have these two powerful, interconnected ideas from "Show Your Worth." First, architecting our external attention to focus only on the 'must-wins.'

Simons: And second, debugging our internal programming to remove the self-limiting beliefs that stop us from creating our maximum value.

Nova: And they really do feed each other, don't they?

Simons: Absolutely. They're a feedback loop. When you debug your internal fear of saying 'no,' you get much better at architecting your attention. And when you focus on high-value work and you succeed, that success becomes new data that rewrites the old code that says you're not good enough. It's a virtuous cycle.

Nova: A virtuous cycle of intentional leadership. That's a perfect way to put it. So for everyone listening, especially those in leadership roles, here's the challenge from today's conversation.

Simons: I'm ready for it.

Nova: What is one task, one meeting, one 'good idea' that you will intentionally 'deprecate' this week to free up your team's attention for a true 'must-win'?

Simons: And, what's one line of 'buggy code' in your own leadership mindset that you can start to rewrite?

Nova: Simons, this has been an absolutely fantastic and insightful conversation. Thank you so much for helping us translate these ideas.

Simons: The pleasure was all mine, Nova. It's given me a lot to think about for my own 'operating system.'