How to shift leadership focus from building to learning

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Hey folks,

The question "What are you building?" comes naturally to leaders. It's familiar, concrete, and feels like the right way to track progress. But I've noticed a shift in how the most successful organizations measure progress and drive innovation.

In this newsletter, I explore why shifting from "What are you building?" to "What are you learning?" transforms how teams work and what they achieve. I'll share practical steps for leaders ready to make this transition and show how this change in focus leads to better outcomes.

Plus, Josh and I are excited to announce a new webinar on aligning product strategy with OKRs for 2025. Whether you're refining your current approach or starting fresh, we'll show you how these frameworks work together to drive meaningful results.

Let's dig in.

- Jeff

P.S. Our international Sense & Respond Learning workshops will continue through the end of this year. Taking place in countries like England, Israel, and Dubai, these hand-on workshops on Lean UX and Product Discovery will offer practical insights to drive innovation and deliver value to your customers. 

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Article: From 'What are you building?' to 'What are you learning?': Shifting leadership focus

Leaders love asking their teams what they're building. It's tangible, measurable, and fits neatly into project plans and roadmaps. However, this focus on output creates a dangerous blind spot around value and innovation.

When leaders fixate on "what are you building," they inadvertently push teams toward delivering features rather than solving customer problems. Teams end up racing to complete predefined task lists instead of exploring whether those tasks actually provide value to customers.

Leaders should ask this instead: "What are you learning?" 

This simple shift fundamentally changes how teams work and what they prioritize. Instead of rushing to build something that may or may not work, teams focus on understanding customer needs, testing assumptions, and validating solutions before making major investments.

Consider two teams working on improving user engagement. The first team, driven by "what are you building," creates an extensive roadmap of new features. They spend months building them, only to find they’ve had minimal impact on user engagement.

The second team, guided by "what are you learning," starts by investigating why users aren't engaging more. They discover through customer interviews that users find certain workflows confusing. This leads them to simplify existing features rather than adding new ones, resulting in immediate improvements in engagement.

Learning is half the battle. The key is connecting learning conversations to action. 

When teams share their learnings, they should always connect them to next steps: "Because we learned X, we're going to do Y." This maintains accountability, provides transparency and rationale for the decision while embracing uncertainty and adaptation.

Making this shift isn't easy. It requires leaders to get comfortable with ambiguity and trust their teams to make decisions based on evidence rather than predetermined plans. It means accepting that some experiments will fail and viewing those failures as valuable learning opportunities rather than wasted resources.

The payoff, however, is substantial. 

Teams will become more innovative, responsive to customer needs, and efficient with resources. They build things that actually matter rather than checking boxes on a feature list. And most importantly, they develop a deeper understanding of their customers that drives sustained success.

Ready to make this shift? Start small. Pick one team or project. Ask about what you’re learning instead of what you’re building. Create space for team members to share insights, not just progress updates, and then let them act on those insights. 

Remember: the goal isn't to eliminate building – it's to ensure we're building the right things for the right reasons.

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