Nobody on my team tells me the truth
Three roles a team slides into without meaning to. Find your default, then rewrite the conversation you have been avoiding.
A product team runs on trust in each other's input and each other's decisions, and teams that have it surface problems early while they are still cheap to fix. Building that is hard, because people afraid of judgment keep what they think to themselves.
Some of it is not a conscious choice. Stephen Karpman mapped the dynamic in the 1960s as the Drama Triangle: victim, persecutor, rescuer. Someone avoiding honest feedback often becomes an unwitting rescuer, and someone nobody ever seriously critiques can end up feeling like a victim, a dynamic running on assumption rather than on anything said out loud.
Rescuing is the sharpest failure mode. Avoiding a hard conversation to spare someone's feelings is usually the opposite of kindness: making your own discomfort someone else's problem and calling it consideration. It strips their autonomy instead of protecting it, and breeds the resentment you were trying to prevent.
What you get
- The three roles, with why rescuing is the one to watch
- A role audit for finding your own default with a recent instance of each
- A three-prompt rewrite for a conversation you have been avoiding
- The line between clarity and bluntness, and why the model becomes a weapon if you point it outward
Where should we send it?
One email with the worksheet. You can unsubscribe from anything else in one click.
On its way
Check your inbox. If it has not landed in a minute or two, look in promotions or spam, and add sam@startuppatterns.com to your contacts so the rest arrive.
Adapted from the Mindfulness chapter of The Mindful Product Company by Sam McAfee.