Confessions of a Creative Leader

Monica Joy Krol, Creative & On Purpose!
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A short, unedited audio supplement to my weekly newsletter on substack! creativeleaderconfessions.substack.com

  1. 2d ago

    Confession: I'm a Working Mom Who Never Feels Enough

    Heads up: This one is very vulnerable. It’s worth a listen if you’re a working parent, or if you lead, manage, or facilitate working parents and want to understand their world outside of work. It’s cathartic, it’s unrehearsed, and there are tears and some explicit language. When I told my friends on a walk what I’d written in my journal, they said I needed to share it. So here it is. Raw vulnerability is part of creative leadership, and this feels like the most aligned thing I could put out this week. If you feel seen and/or if there is a working parent that needs to here this, please share. For months now, I’ve had a constant feeling that I’m not doing enough. Anyone who knows me would call that nonsense. People literally ask “how do you do it all, Monica?” because I make it look easy, and that’s a blessing and a curse. When you make it look easy, nobody offers to help. And I’m too busy doing it to think about asking. Nobody can talk me out of this feeling, and that’s the point. The healing has to come from me. So I flipped the usual gratitude exercise. I write about what I’m thankful for in the people around me all the time, but I never write a thank you to myself. This episode is what I wrote in my journal, told out loud: a thank-you from my boys to me. It’s not advice-seeking, and it’s not pity-seeking. It’s also not a comment on my husband, who does a lot too, just different things. It’s me giving myself permission to feel enough for one day. Thank You, Mom Thank you for waking me at 5 in the morningso I make it to the bathroom.Thank you for washing the sheetson the nights it didn’t work.Thank you for wiping down that bathroom flooralmost every single day. Thank you for a good breakfast,even when I don’t want to eat it.Thank you for standing at the counter and talking with meso we can connect,while you unload the dishwasher,start another load of laundry,and write the grocery list so the fridge stays full.And thank you for the job that pays for all of it. Thank you for packing the lunches,checking the bags,asking if my homework is done.All before 7 a.m. Thank you for making me practice piano in the morningso after school I can just play.Thank you for making sure I showerso I’m not stinky and don’t get picked on.Thank you for clean clothes. Thank you for walking me to the bus.I’m still young,and even when I act strong,having you there matters.Thank you for getting yourself dressed and ready first,so you can give me 100% of you.Thank you for walking me thereeven though it cuts into your workday. Thank you for keeping your phone closein case I get sick or hurt,so you’re the first calland the first one to come get me.Thank you for reading the school emailsin the middle of your day. Thank you for being ruthlessly efficient at work,for picking the highest-impact thingsand skipping the busywork,so you don’t bring work home with you.Thank you for skipping a real lunch breakso you can leave early,meet me at the bus,and be there at dinner,cooking while you help me with homeworkor listen to me talk about my hard day. Thank you for Pasta Mondays and Taco Tuesdays.Thank you for meals we can all mostly agree on,even when they’re not what you’d pick.You’re just making sure we get fed. Thank you for driving us to piano, robotics, and soccer,activities you might never have chosen for us.Thank you for spending those eveningsin a library or a coffee shop,reading a book,doing more work,or recording this podcast,so you get a sliver of time that’s yours.Thank you for choosing that over volunteering like the other parents.I know that’s a hard decision.And thank you for carrying the guilt about it. Thank you for picking us upand making sure we have time for a snack, a show,and a chance to decompress,when all you want is to go to bed.Thank you for making sure you get to eat dinner too. Thank you for family dinners on the nights that aren’t chaos,even when we complain.Because what you’ve told usis that time with your kids matters.Thank you for letting us stay upwhen you’re desperate for sleep.And thank you for the nights you tell Dadyou need to go to bed,and you take care of your own needs.Thank you for going to bed earlyso you can get up and do it all again. Thank you for the time you spend on your phonethat isn’t scrolling Instagram.It’s playdates.It’s checking our days offso you can schedule time off to be with us.It’s researching fun things we can do as a family.Thank you for being a working parentso we can afford those experiences. Thank you for the two-page checklistyou write for Grandma, Grandpa, and Dadevery time you travel for work,so nobody misses a beat while you’re gone.Thank you for taking the early flights and the late flightsso you’re away less.Thank you for the nights you land after a long travel dayand still get up at 5 anyway.Thank you for being honest with uswhen you’re tired, depleted, or having a hard day.Because then we know you’re human,and that you need help too. Thank you for any sacrifices you made to be here for us,even the ones that may have cost you a promotion.Thank you for getting up at 4 a.m.so you can take care of yourself before we’re awake.Thank you for the times you get to volunteer at school,and the days you take off work to be with us.And thank you for telling us,even when we don’t want to hear it,that you feel bad you can’t be the parentwho signs up for everything. Thank you, Mom. On some level,thank you for not feeling like enough,because it drives you to do so much.And thank you for the days you really don’t want to do itand do it anyway,because you know you can’t say hell no to your kids. * The empathy piece for leaders. If you manage or facilitate working parents, this is a peek at what happens between 5 a.m. and the moment they open Slack, the subtle part of being a parent that they can’t shut off during the workday, and how their day remains ruthlessly busy when they leave. It’s a lot, and most of it is invisible. * Permission, both directions. If you’re a parent who doesn’t feel like enough, you have permission to feel that. And I have permission to feel enough right now. I gave it to myself while recording this. I don’t know if I’ll ever do a Part Two on what it’s like to thank myself for the workday version, but the thought is there. If this landed, send it to the working parent in your life, or to the manager who needs to hear it. And I’d love to know: what would your thank you list say? Get full access to Confessions of a Creative Leader at creativeleaderconfessions.substack.com/subscribe

    Confession: I'm a Working Mom Who Never Feels Enough

  2. Sep 13

    Life at the Speed of Play - Conclusion

    We finished the book club today, y’all. After almost two months in Life at the Speed of Play by Mark Pincus, we landed on the conclusion — “How Ambitious Are You?” — and it’s a short chapter, but it hit different than the rest of the book. It’s more direct, less framework, more gut-check. So this one’s less me paraphrasing and more me reading it straight to you and telling you where it landed. What you’ll learn: * The gap between instinct and idea is where founders lose. Pincus’s core claim is that your instinct is probably right, but your idea is probably wrong — and the founders who win are the ones with the intellectual honesty to kill their B-plus ideas instead of falling in love with them. That distinction is one I’m sitting with hard right now while I build Momentum. I believe in the instinct behind it completely. Whether the current shape of the idea is the right one is a separate question, and this chapter is basically daring me to ask it. * Conviction changes your odds, and corporate red tape is a real variable. He argues the same founders don’t succeed by luck — they’ve got conviction on both instinct and idea, and once they know they’re right, nothing stops them. I’ll be honest: building inside a company that’s deeply entrenched in enterprise product launches makes “nothing stops them” a lot harder to pull off than it sounds on paper. It was oddly comforting to hear that when you truly have the right product, you can do a lot of things wrong and still succeed — because some of what’s slowing me down right now genuinely isn’t the product. * Build to learn, not to be right. One thread that kept surfacing for me was how much this connects to building with AI specifically — you don’t learn by reading about the idea, you learn by shipping it and watching what comes back. I was in an Uber from LaGuardia to SoHo last week talking to Claude the entire ride, drafting a PRD for something completely unrelated to my day job, because the instinct wouldn’t wait for me to get back to my desk. That’s the “shots on goal” mentality this chapter is describing, whether or not I framed it that way at the time. * Burn your resume and go narrow. The book closes with permission to take risks, follow your curiosities, and get hands-on with the best people building in your space before going off to do it yourself — and the idea that going narrow and small is actually how you find the edges worth innovating on. I spent Thursday in a Guides meetup with my fellow AJ&Smart-certified facilitators, where Jonathan Courtney led us through a self-development workshop on exactly this — what we already know we want, underneath the noise of what we think we should want. * The real question isn’t “is the idea good,” it’s “what do you want to build today.” That’s the line the book actually ends on, and it’s the one I keep coming back to. Not as a hypothetical — as something I owe myself an honest answer to. Up next: I’m heading back to more off-the-cuff episodes for a bit, and I’m seriously considering a paid book club round using Nudge to dig into decision-making. Official word on that in a week or two. Get full access to Confessions of a Creative Leader at creativeleaderconfessions.substack.com/subscribe

    Life at the Speed of Play - Conclusion

  3. Sep 6

    Life at the Speed of Play - Part 8: Landing on New Planets

    Hey y’all! We’re almost through Life at the Speed of Play by Mark Pincus, this time on Chapter 8, Landing on New Planets. This one is about what happens when you try to build on a platform that doesn’t have any rules yet, whether that’s AI, robotics, or whatever comes next, and it landed right in the middle of me actually wrestling with some of this at work. What you’ll learn: * The core problem this chapter tackles: Pincus’s whole “Proven Better New” framework depends on having something proven to build from, so what do you do on a new platform where nothing is proven yet? His answer is what he calls fuzzy proven, borrowing mechanics that worked somewhere else and hoping they translate * Why getting native to a new platform means becoming a hobbyist and a hacker, playing with the technology long before it’s practical, and why he says you should give yourself permission to be too early since being early beats being late almost every time * What he calls your curious edges, the places where your personal interests intersect with emerging technology, and how that landed for me since nearly two years of reading and sharing frameworks like The Coaching Habit and The One Thing on this podcast is now directly shaping how I’m designing the AI product I work on * Why increasing your surface area matters so much, whether that’s Reed Hoffman building his network years before the payoff, or something smaller like the West Michigan product community I built myself, or running a lightning demos exercise with your team to see how companies outside your industry solve similar problems * His idea that every platform shift produces two waves of products, the obvious first wave everyone predicts, and a second wave of things nobody can imagine until they’re actually living on the new planet We’re one chapter away from finishing this book, so next week is the conclusion. I’ll also have some real talk in that episode about a shift I’m making with the podcast and Substack cadence, including moving the back catalog of episodes behind a paywall in the next couple of weeks, so if you’ve been meaning to catch up on earlier chapters, now’s the time. Get full access to Confessions of a Creative Leader at creativeleaderconfessions.substack.com/subscribe

    Life at the Speed of Play - Part 8: Landing on New Planets

  4. Aug 30

    Life at the Speed of Play - Chapter 7: F**k Scale

    Hey y’all! Full transparency: this was one of those weeks. I barely carved out the time to hit record, so today’s episode is short and unpolished, even by my “raw and unedited” standards. But Chapter 7 of Life at the Speed of Play couldn’t have landed at a better moment, because it’s all about keeping your product or service actually good while you’re growing your team. What you’ll learn: * Why “scale” so often becomes the excuse for letting quality slide, and why Pincus is basically telling you not to let that happen * The real tension between growing a team and protecting the thing that made your product or service worth using in the first place * A little bit of me practicing what I preach (poorly, this week) by showing up imperfect instead of skipping the episode entirely * Why this chapter hit different for me right now, as I’m building out product innovation work and thinking constantly about how to keep quality intact as things scale * A quick ask: I want you to help pick the next book we read together Next week I want your vote on what we read next. Drop it in the comments or send me a DM, I’d genuinely love to know what’s on your shelf. Get full access to Confessions of a Creative Leader at creativeleaderconfessions.substack.com/subscribe

    Life at the Speed of Play - Chapter 7: F**k Scale

  5. Aug 23

    Life at the Speed of Play - Chapter 6: Bold Beats

    We’re on Chapter 6 of our Life at the Speed of Play read-along, and this one’s about Bold Beats, Mark Pincus’s term for the fast, high-impact moves that sit between two traps most product teams fall into: endless tinkering on small “mouse nut” features, or getting swallowed by a massive “boil the ocean” project that takes years and never quite launches. This chapter hit close to home, since I’ve lived both traps, and I ended up applying it directly in a stakeholder meeting the same day I read it. What you’ll learn: * A bold beat is fast, isolated, and disposable by design. Quick to build, test, and kill, with a narrow enough scope that it can’t drag your whole roadmap down with it. Pincus calls them “controlled adrenaline shots” for a product. * Pincus is specific about what counts as a win: at least 25% of users have to try it, and it needs to move a key metric by 10% or more, but the real signal is when it lights up your community and generates what he bluntly calls an OMFG moment. * The best bold beats graduate into what he calls golden mechanics: proven, reusable building blocks you can build again and again. Streaks, leaderboards, expansion packs, crafting, gifting, quests. * I’m taking this straight to my team. I want to carve out an hour where we do lightning demos of apps and games that use gamification well, map what we find back to these mechanics, and then just play around with an existing proven game to loosen up our thinking before we try to apply any of it to our own product. * The most honest thread of the episode: I’m burnt out from how much of my day is spent talking to Claude, and the idea of getting a room of actual humans together to be a little silly and brainstorm play mechanics felt like exactly the antidote. It made me think of Catherine Price’s The Power of Fun and her idea that real fun lives at the intersection of playfulness, connection, and flow. I got a small dose of that on bumper cars with my family this week, and I want more of it built into how I work, not just how I relax. Next week we’re closing in on the end of the book with Chapter 7, F**k Scale. Get full access to Confessions of a Creative Leader at creativeleaderconfessions.substack.com/subscribe

    Life at the Speed of Play - Chapter 6: Bold Beats

  6. Aug 16

    Life at the Speed of Play - Chapter 5: Roadmapping is Your OS

    What Mark Pincus taught me about turning a roadmap from a checkbox into the heartbeat of a team, right as I’m avoiding building one myself. This week in our Life at the Speed of Play read-along, we hit Chapter 5: Roadmapping Is Your OS. It could not have landed at a more inconvenient time. I recently moved into a new role as Senior Director of Product Growth, I’m building a brand new AI-native product from scratch, and right now, I don’t have a roadmap. Pincus would say that’s exactly when you need one the most. What you’ll learn: * Pincus treats roadmapping as the operating system for an entire company, not a status update. His team ran it through what they called Blue Sheets, one meticulously organized document broken into four quadrants: priorities, OKRs, this month’s objectives, and team health. It’s the difference between a roadmap as an artifact you check a box on versus one that actually holds you accountable week over week. * He names a trap I see constantly in product work: teams without big ideas drown in what he calls “mouse nuts,” small, safe features that feel like progress but don’t move the needle. I’ve watched plenty of product managers (myself included, some weeks) retreat to those because they’re easier and less risky than the big swing. * One rule stuck with me: nobody on his team could change their OKRs mid-quarter, even when the gaps got obvious. That forced them to find a new execution path instead of quietly retreating into small, safe features. My honest struggle right now is that my product is so new I can’t even measure client usage yet, so the only thing I can track is how fast or slow we’re moving. I had to reset expectations with my boss that this is taking longer than we thought, not because we’re failing, but because our original timeline was never realistic. * Pincus’s “altitude” framework (5,000 feet is ground-level execution, 25,000 is strategic, 50,000 is big-picture vision) explains why meetings get dizzying. If you don’t name what altitude you’re operating at, half the room is talking tactics while the other half is talking vision, and nobody feels heard. It’s basically a companion piece to the Working Genius series I did a while back, where I talked about how each genius naturally operates at a different altitude. * I did a retrospective with myself this week (new moon, I’m hippy dippy like that) and landed on a “how might we” of my own: how might I start to feel enough. Not enough at work, not enough with my kids this summer, not enough for my sister or my parents. Part of what I’m taking from this chapter is that avoiding the roadmap because things feel uncertain is backwards. Being transparent about what’s actually happening, even when it’s messy, is the thing that helps. Next week we’re on to Chapter 6, Bold Beats, which Pincus frames as how you actually deliver against a roadmap once you’ve built one. p.s. Here’s me on Friday reading my 3rd Program Review document (600 pages if you include the appendix). It’s painful but massively contributes to the quality of AI features. The insight this week. We often want to share the pretty (that’s social media thinking), but communicating the value of the hard and messy is what helps people learn along with you! Get full access to Confessions of a Creative Leader at creativeleaderconfessions.substack.com/subscribe

  7. Aug 9

    Life at the Speed of Play - Chapter 4: Proven - Better - New

    Hey y'all! In this episode we're continuing our book club series on Life at the Speed of Play by Mark Pincus, and we're getting into chapter four: Proven, Better, New. This is honestly one of my favorite frameworks so far, the idea that you don't earn the right to build something new until you've mastered what already works. I'm sharing why I think this shifts the whole "copying is bad" mindset we were all taught, where it runs into trouble, and how I'm already stealing ideas from this chapter for a design sprint I'm running with my team. Get full access to Confessions of a Creative Leader at creativeleaderconfessions.substack.com/subscribe

    Life at the Speed of Play - Chapter 4: Proven - Better - New

  8. Aug 2

    Life at the Speed of Play - Chapter 3: The MVP Trap

    Continuing our summer read-along of Life at the Speed of Play by Mark Pincus, this week’s chapter goes after a term most of us in product have used without question for twenty years: MVP. Pincus’s argument is that the word “viable” is the problem. It’s become an excuse to overinvest before you’ve ever learned anything, when the actual odds that your first version succeeds are close to zero anyway. Confessions of a Creative Leader is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. What you’ll learn: * Pincus’s replacement for MVP: the “minimum idea state” (MIS), just enough of an idea (a text link, a slide, a vibe-coded demo that breaks after ten clicks) to get real directional feedback before you’ve built anything. I connected this to a concept my friend Josh Barker writes about in his book on finding market traction, the “minimum viable solution,” which is the same idea wearing a different name * The “rip-o-matic,” borrowed from how movie trailers convey tone before production starts. This is basically what my team just did two days ago in a Foundation Sprint: a full day identifying the problem and who it’s for, then a second day sketching out competing approaches with a catchy pitch and a doodle, no prototyping, before ever agreeing on what to test * Pincus’s line that stuck with me: “if you’re not embarrassed, you’re not launching early enough.” As someone currently building and launching a product in real time, that one landed * Emmett Shear’s more radical idea, referenced in the chapter: don’t start with an idea at all. Use data to generate the idea instead of using the idea to generate data, because the moment you show someone your idea and ask them to critique it, your ego is already tied to being right. This is close to how Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres has shaped how we actually build at Watermark, just talking to people with no agenda, well before there’s an idea to defend * The shift from MVP to “maximum product launch.” The whole point of testing small and raw is to earn the conviction to go big once you’ve actually found true signal, not before Confessions of a Creative Leader is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Confessions of a Creative Leader at creativeleaderconfessions.substack.com/subscribe

    Life at the Speed of Play - Chapter 3: The MVP Trap
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About

A short, unedited audio supplement to my weekly newsletter on substack! creativeleaderconfessions.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Monica Joy Krol, Creative & On Purpose!
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    85
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Monica Joy Krol
  • Show Website
    Confessions of a Creative Leader