Treat executives like customers

As product managers, one of our best sets of skills is curiosity and empathy and trying to understand our users. But the moment that we're talking to an executive or to a stakeholder, we forget those skills and we begin to think about our ideas, getting that approval, whatever it might be, the incentive that we are driving. If we can take some of those skills of building great products and think about our executive as our key user here, then we can have a much, much more productive conversation. One of the most disastrous things you can do is going into a meeting just looking for approval. Instead, if what you go in with is, how can I learn? How can I strengthen this plan? How can I use the domain expertise, the context, the experience that this person brings to the table and imbue that into my product work? The executive will like you better because they will feel like you have actually built product alongside them, but you will also end up with a better product.