021 What Your Team Actually Needs From You

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One of the strangest things about becoming a manager is that the skills that helped someone succeed before the promotion may not be the skills that matter most afterward.

As PMs, we know the product. As UXers, we understand UX.

We can be organized, capable, technically experienced, and excellent at getting things done.

You become a manager, and your success depends partly on whether another human feels safe enough to tell you they are confused, overwhelmed, stuck, frustrated, or simply having a bad day.

In our conversation with Anita Barraco, User Experience Manager at Goosehead Insurance, we dive into the difficulty of this shift: leadership is not just about directing work. It is about creating the conditions where people can do good work.

This aspect of leadership is vital whether your team is remote, hybrid, or sitting in the hotel cube next to you.

Honestly, this leadership lesson matters even if you are not technically anyone's manager.

Servant Leadership Changes the Manager's Question

Anita uses servant leadership as a framework for managing her teams. At its simplest, servant leadership shifts the manager's attention from:

What do I need these people to do?

to:

What do these people need so they can do their work well?

Anita offered this advice to someone becoming a manager for the first time:

"It's really about getting to know what are the things that your people need to make their life easier so they can do their job." – Anita Barraco

That can mean access to tools, systems, training, or technology.

It can also mean emotional support, clarity, protection from unnecessary organizational noise, or simply knowing someone has their back.

For product and UX leaders, our teams already operate in environments filled with shifting requirements, stakeholder expectations, emerging AI tools, reorganizations, deadlines, and uncertainty about how roles themselves are changing.

As managers, we cannot remove all of that, but a good manager can help make it navigable.

Asking Questions Is a Leadership Behavior

We talk a lot about creating environments where people can ask questions.

I have been in organizations where someone says, "There are no stupid questions," and then reacts dismissively the moment someone asks a basic one.

We have all been there, and we notice that contradiction immediately.

When I am working with a new team, I intentionally ask the basic questions to help me learn.

"What does that acronym mean?"

"Is that a system or a process?"

"Can you explain that again?"

I am not asking basic questions to perform vulnerability. I want to model that questions are something we actually ask here.

If a leader pretends to understand everything, it can cause people to perform certainty.

And teams can make surprisingly expensive mistakes while everyone quietly hopes somebody else understands what is happening.

J connected curiosity to an experience working with developers in India. He was struggling to understand someone who was speaking quickly and passionately. He initially tried to work around the problem rather than admitting it.

Later, someone gave him much simpler advice: tell them you genuinely want to understand and ask them to slow down. The lesson extended well beyond language.

Sometimes leadership means being able to say:

I want to understand you, and I'm not there yet.

Anita pointed out that this requires vulnerability, and vulnerability, used sincerely, can create connection.

Trust Gives Us the Benefit of the Doubt

Trust changes what happens when communication goes wrong.

Without trust, a misunderstood question can sound challenging. Direct feedback can sound hostile, and a request for clarification can feel like criticism.

With trust, we are more likely to give each other the benefit of the doubt. We shouldn't avoid difficult conversations, but creating trust in a team makes open, difficult conversations more possible.

J described curiosity and vulnerability as qualities he values in managers. He also talked about something equally important: appreciation.

"When we go above and beyond, we want it to be noticed." – J Schuh

Recognition is not decoration around the "real" management work.

If someone repeatedly stretches to help a team succeed and nobody acknowledges the effort, that tells them something about what the organization values.

Eventually, disengagement can follow.

Good leaders pay attention before a performance dashboard tells them something is wrong.

Pay Attention to Bids for Connection

One idea I keep returning to from our conversation is what I call bids for connection.

There are moments throughout the day when someone reaches toward another person. Maybe someone stops by your desk while you're in the office or at the coffee machine.

You can send a message that has more weight behind it than the words suggest.

Someone asks whether you have a minute or mentions something that is bothering them.

A manager can make bids for connection too: checking in, walking by someone's desk, asking how their family is doing, or recognizing the effort someone made to come into the office.

These small moments compound.

When trust grows, something interesting happens: the outreach becomes reciprocal.

The people you manage start approaching you because experience has taught them that doing so is safe. For me, it's an important measure of leadership.

Not simply: Do I check in with my team?

Also: Does my team feel comfortable checking in with me?

Connection Can't Come at the Expense of Concentration

We need connection. We also need people to leave us alone sometimes.

Product, UX, research, design, development, and strategy all require periods of sustained concentration.

Anita suggested what she calls a power hour:

"Everybody should have a power hour a day." – Anita Barraco

Find a quiet space.

Turn off Teams.

Close chat.

Close email.

Protect enough time to actually think.

When your team sees management modeling that power hour, they help legitimize the behavior.

Years ago, one team J and Anita worked with created a "UX library." Sitting in that library space communicated that someone was doing heads-down work and should not be interrupted casually.

I love that because it turned an invisible need into a visible team practice.

Managers can do the same thing without a special room:

• Create norms around headphones.
• Protect focus blocks on calendars.
• Avoid interpreting an unanswered chat as disengagement.
• Give people permission to step away from the noise.

Leadership involves protecting attention as much as requesting it.

Product Managers Lead Without the Org Chart

This conversation is particularly relevant to product managers because many of us lead people who do not report to us.

In my last several product management roles, nobody on the team formally reported to me.

For product owners and managers, almost everything happens through informal authority.

I need stakeholders to trust that I want their voice in the room.

I need developers to know that asking questions is safe.

I need designers, researchers, business partners, and leaders to believe I am genuinely curious about their perspective.

There is a kind of stakeholder research involved in that work.

• Who are the people around this product?
• What matters to them?
• What are they worried about?
• Where does their experience conflict with someone else's?
• How do we create enough trust that people tell us what we need to hear rather than what they think we want to hear?

Human-centered leadership is not confined to people management.

It is part of good product management.

Proximity Can Help, If We Use It Intentionally

Anita introduced us to the propinquity effect: the tendency for relationships to develop through repeated physical or psychological proximity.

Sit beside someone long enough and small interactions begin accumulating.

Hello in the morning.

Lunch.

A question.

A joke.

J and I sat next to each other years ago, and our desks and walls had metal structures. I offered him a tiny magnetic hook to him to hang his jacket up.

Would this podcast exist without the propinquity effect? Maybe. Maybe not.

That is the strange power of proximity.

Anita intentionally used proximity when a newly introduced UX team needed stronger relationships with developers. She asked to position the teams near one another and created opportunities for them to interact socially.

The goal was not proximity for its own sake.

It was humanization.

People stopped seeing "those UX people" and started seeing people they knew and worked with.

That same principle can be recreated remotely, although it requires more intention.

The mechanism is repeated meaningful contact.

Questions for Reflection

• Do people on your team feel safe admitting they do not understand something?
• What bids for connection might you be overlooking because the day feels too busy?
• What does your team need from you to protect both human connection and uninterrupted thinking?

Key Takeaways

• Servant leadership starts with what people need to succeed, not simply what managers need delivered.
• Leaders create psychological safety by modeling curiosity and vulnerability rather than merely talking about them.
• Trust makes clarification, disagreement, and difficult conversations easier because people can extend the benefit of the doubt.
• Human connection and deep work both need protection. Strong teams deliberately create space for each.
• Product managers can apply human-centered leadership even without formal authority because trust is central to influence.

Final Thoughts

To survive and thrive in these times of constant change in our product and UX roles, we need human-focused, relationship-building success.

Deadlines won't disappear and performance always matters.

Yet, we understand that work gets done through people, and people are not interchangeable units moving through a workflow.

We want to be understood.

We need time to think.

We need enough trust to ask questions.

We need leaders who notice when something has changed.

And sometimes we simply need somebody to say, "I'm here. What do you need?"

The best leaders I have worked with did not make themselves the center of the team. They helped create a team other people wanted to be part of.

Whether you manage twenty people, one person, or nobody at all, this is a form of leadership available to all of us.

What are you doing that makes it easier for the people around you to do their best work?

– Metsy
Co-host, Pixels & Priorities

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Connect on LinkedIn: Metsy Rose | J Schuh | Pixels & Priorities