Product leadership is a lonely pursuit. We rarely have peers in sales and marketing or finance who understand the product challenges, and we can’t talk to our team because they work for us. There are things we simply can’t share with our team.
Cue the leadership cohort.
We therefore have to manufacture a space for us to share our challenges and learn from others. And when we do have that safe space, it’s pure magic.
There we get to talk about topics that aren’t the usual product topics. Over the years of running leadership cohorts, we have spoken about workplace toxicity, gaslighting, mergers and acquisitions, board presentations, politics and the list goes on. Of course, there are product topics such as operating models, team capability development, AI experimentation, new ways of working, but it’s less the technical concepts and more of the adaptive human conversations that refresh us and give us new perspectives.
Belonging changes what people are willing to say out loud. In a room where you don’t feel judged, you stop editing yourself before you speak. You admit the thing you haven’t told your board. You ask the question you’d never ask in front of your own team, because asking it would look like you don’t have the answer.
That’s when the real learning starts. The moment someone says “I’m dealing with the exact same thing” and you realise you weren’t as alone in it as you thought.
Belonging isn’t just a warm feeling either. Harvard Business Review’s research found that employees who feel they belong are 56% more likely to be high performers and 50% less likely to leave. That’s not a coincidence. It’s what happens when people stop spending energy managing how they’re perceived and start spending it on the actual problem in front of them.
And it’s not just about being surrounded by people. It’s about safety. Research from HR Zone found that half of employees who feel a sense of belonging also feel a strong sense of safety at work, compared to a mere 6% among those who don’t feel they belong. Safety and belonging move together. You can’t manufacture one without the other.
I’ve watched this happen again and again in the cohorts we run. Someone brings a mess of a problem, half-formed and a bit embarrassing, and by the end of the conversation it’s not always solved, but it’s smaller. It’s shared. And a shared problem is a different weight to carry than a private one.
That’s the thing about safety. It’s not about comfort. It’s about being able to think out loud with people who won’t use it against you. Once that trust is there, the conversations go somewhere a solo Slack search or a polished panel talk never will.
If you’re leading product on your own, without a room like this, it’s worth building one. Even a small one.
