Building a Culture of Safety with Alla Weinberg

Show Notes

Does company culture really play a role in building awesome products? Do the behaviors we learned in grade school set us up for success in the business world? Alla Weinberg, CEO of Spoke & Wheel, joins the Product Outsiders this episode as they lean into these very questions and more.

Listen in for an intriguing discussion around the importance of psychological safety in the workplace as Alla shares insights from her book A Culture of Safety: Building Environments for People to Think, Collaborate, and Innovate.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Will Sansbury: Welcome to Product Outsiders, a podcast for unconventional product people.

In a world awash in MBAs and fancy suits, we’re the people standing on the outside, our sleeves rolled up, ready to get some stuff done. Coming from many different backgrounds, we may not be exactly what you picture when you hear the term “product manager,” but we’re passionate about solving problems for real people in ways that create real value, building great collaborative teams, and making incredible products together.

We are the Product Outsiders

Today, we’re joined by Alla Weinberg, CEO of Spoke & Wheel, a team training and culture design company and author of one of my favorite new reads her book, A Culture of Safety: Building Environments for People to Think, Collaborate, and Innovate, which is published by Sense and Respond Press.

So Alla, welcome.

[00:01:07] Alla Weinberg: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:08] Will Sansbury: So I’m Will Sansbury. I’m a product management leader for a supply chain company.

[00:01:13] Tammy Bulson: And I’m Tammy Bulson. I’m an Agile practitioner.

[00:01:16] Will Sansbury: For those people who listen to our podcast frequently, Amber can’t be with us today, but Tammy and I are holding down the fort with Alla’s help.

Alla, you and I have known each other for a number of years. I think we both stumbled into that magical early days of Twitter when it was this beautiful, supportive design community. I don’t think it’s that very often anymore, unfortunately.

[00:01:35] Alla Weinberg: Early design Twitter!

[00:01:37] Will Sansbury: I’d love to hear, just share with our listeners, kind of where you come from. What’s your journey?

[00:01:42] Alla Weinberg: My journey has been a bit of a twisty one. I think that’s everyone’s life journey. I started out in academia because honestly, I was scared to go into the workforce. I think early on, I was aware and had a feeling that many, especially the corporate culture wasn’t safe in some ways. I didn’t have the words there, but I felt always trepidatious to even get out into the work world.

So I stayed in academia for as long as I could, but eventually I had graduated, and I had to go out into the world. And I started out in the early days as a designer and a UX designer—back then it was called information architect—and, I have worked for 15 years in product design and service design, and working with product managers building great products. Over the course of that time, I also got interested in coaching and learning how to really help people grow, through the experience I had with a coach myself, and got training and started and have spent close to a decade now, coaching design leaders and product leaders on how to lead creative teams and create environments where people can experiment and collaborate and really do great work together.