How to ask the right questions, project confidence, and win over skeptics | Paige Costello (Asana, Intercom, Intuit)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
You're often the youngest person in the room. What have you learned about how to garner trust and win over skeptics?

**Paige Costello** (0:07)
The thing I would say is bring the insight. Know thy customer, know thy market, know thy competitors, know thy numbers, know thy product.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:15)
I'm curious what you find most holds back new PMs.

**Paige Costello** (0:19)
Your brain is so accustomed to having a scarcity mindset as opposed to creating alternative options or seeing a different path. Effectively, there's this notion of how might the opposite be true.
And the moment I challenged myself and said how might the opposite be true, my shoulders dropped. I felt more relaxed. I was like, oh, yeah, I can do both. It'll be fine.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:45)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Paige Costello. Paige is a product lead at Asana, overseeing teams responsible for the core product experience of Asana. Before Asana, she was director of product at Intercom, and prior to that, she was a group product manager at Intuit, where she spent five and a half years. In our wide-ranging conversation, we dig into strategies for building trust with people who are more experienced than you or older than you. We talk about coaching product managers, including why leading by example is often the most effective strategy. We talk about Asana's product development process and how it's evolved over the years as the company's scaled, plus some of Paige's product and career missteps and what she's learned from those moments. To prep for this interview, I got input from some of Paige's colleagues and former colleagues, and everyone I talked to loved Paige. You'll soon see why. Enjoy this episode with Paige Costello after a short word from our sponsors.
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Paige, welcome to the podcast.

**Paige Costello** (4:06)
Thanks Lenny, great to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:08)
So you don't know this and I didn't tell you this, but I asked a bunch of people that you worked with and maybe currently work with for question suggestions of things to ask you. So this is going to be really fun.

**Paige Costello** (4:19)
Wonderful, now I want to know who you talk to, but we'll find out.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:23)
I'll tell you right now, big thank you to Jackie Bavaro, Yasmin, who was on your team, Anne Montgomery and Steve Morin, who's currently at Asana. And so thank you to all of those folks for giving me a bunch of great question suggestions.