Most product leaders think their job is to have answers. It’s not.

Your real job is to ask better questions: the kind that unlock ideas your team hasn’t thought of yet.

You’ll hear some version of ‘test your ideas’ from entrepreneurs, scientists, and product leaders alike.

It can come in many forms:

• Mark Zuckerberg, “Move fast and break things.”
• Thomas Edison: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
• Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence): “Good managers have a bias for action.”
• Jeff Bezos: “I believe you can make good decisions without having all the information if you’re willing to communicate what you know, listen to others, and iterate.”
• Eric Ries (Lean Startup methodology): “Build, measure, learn.”
• Einstein: “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing… Never lose a holy curiosity.”

Different voices. Same principle: You move faster when you’re testing, not guessing.

That mindset shows up in a few consistent behaviors:

• Not thinking you need to have all the answers in the beginning
• Moving forward, even through uncertainty
• Staying open to testing, not assuming you know what’s next

Becoming a breakthrough leader often means that decisions need to be made faster than is comfortable, and with less data than you wish you had.

The higher up you rise in your career, the less information you will have to make your decisions.

So, what do the best leaders do in that situation?

Ask better questions.

If you’re leading a product team, testable thinking means you start with questions instead of prescribing actions your team must take.

You’ve probably seen this play out:

You’re in a product review, the data is messy, leadership wants answers, and you feel like you need to walk out of that room with a definitive plan.

So you make the call and give your team detailed specifications to execute.

When I first started leading, I thought that was my job.

Figure it out and hand my team the plan.

I swallowed up all the uncertainty and spoon-fed step by step what needed to be done.

I was effective. We got things done.

But, I was also the bottleneck.

Speed was limited by my brain, not the team’s potential.

And, my team’s impact was limited to what I was able to figure out ahead of time.

Things changed for the better when I started talking about what we needed to accomplish and what we were trying to figure out, together.

People could then bring their whole selves to the challenge at hand.

When you shift to asking better questions:

• suddenly your engineering team starts proposing solutions you never would have thought of,
• and your product insights become richer

because the whole team is thinking, not just executing.

Ask This Before You Build Be explicit and ask, “How are we going to measure if this worked or not?” For example: Before your next sprint planning, try asking: “What’s the one metric that would tell us if this feature actually solves the user problem we think it does?” Then build the measurement into the sprint itself. That’s how you shift to designing for outcomes, not just deliverables. Next time you see a backlog item like: Instead of: “Improve user onboarding” Ask: “What’s preventing new users from reaching their first success moment? How will we know when we’ve removed that friction? How will we validate this with real users?” Or consider another example: Instead of: “Make it faster” Ask: “What specific user action feels slow right now, and what % improvement would be necessary to change their perception?” Use this tight feedback loop to build the things that answer the question, not just what feels next.

The Groundwork that Matters

You can’t ask better questions if your team doesn’t feel safe answering them.

To make sure that your team feels comfortable with this approach, there are a few factors that are important:

• Psychological safety If all new ideas are shot down, teammates are mocked for asking questions, or one know-it-all in the room snickers when someone proposes an approach that is different from “what we always do,” then your desire to introduce testable thinking will fall flat. Be practical and pragmatic in how and when to shift your team toward this model.
• Tolerance for making mistakes We have all seen leaders who talk about wanting to run tests, but are angry when the test fails and hold the team unreasonably accountable. Don’t be that leader! Celebrate the learning, not just the wins.
• Focus on learning Of course, starting with a question and testable thinking is only half of the solution. You need to come full circle and make sure that each iteration, you are learning from what you tested. Build in reflection time to address “What did we learn and how does it change our next question?”

Key Takeaways

✅ You don’t need to have all the answers. But you do need to ask better questions.

Your team will move faster when they’re solving problems, not just waiting for instructions.

✅ Don’t just build features. Run experiments.

Turn vague ideas into testable hypotheses and make sure they actually solve real problems.

✅ Psychological safety makes testable thinking possible.

If your team doesn’t feel safe saying “I’m not sure,” you won’t get to the truth.

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Up Next

The best product leaders don’t lean on titles.

They lead through clarity, conviction, and collaboration.

Next week, I’ll share a skill that helps you gain influence even when you don’t have the final say.

It’s called Natural Authority.

It’s not about being the loudest voice.

It’s about aligning people with purpose and moving forward together.

Until then,

Andrea

Andrea Michalek - @ThatAndreaM ​Say hi 👋 on Twitter, Bluesky, or LinkedIn​ ☎️ Book a 1:1 call with me​

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