The Quiet Leader's Secret Weapon — Visual Thinking That Moves Teams Without Noise

Have you ever walked out of a meeting with the clearest picture of the answer, but you just couldn’t get the other people on the same page? You had the context, you’ve done the thinking, but the room was moving too fast. There were too many opinions, and the real answer got lost in the noise. Welcome to the introverted leader. It’s a podcast helping introverted leaders embrace your own quiet strengths so you can get promoted and start earning what you deserve. On Greg Weinger, I have over 25 years of leadership experience, and yes, I am an introvert. My guest today is Christoph Steinlenner. He’s a product coach and a visual thinking expert based out of Berlin. Christoph began his career in web design, and then moved into experience design, and he’s spent years in leadership roles navigating complex high-stakes transformations. He has his own personal methodology called the map method. It helps leaders use visual artifacts to align teams, surface assumptions, and lead truly productive discussions with clarity and quiet authority. I think this conversation will resonate pretty deeply for anyone who does their best thinking before the meeting and not in the middle of the fray. In this episode, you’ll learn, one, how to use visual mapping to clarify your own thinking before you ever walk into the room. Number two, how a shared artifact de-personalizes conflict and shifts the group dynamic so the discussion becomes about the idea and not the people, and what to do when a meeting goes sideways. A simple technique to slow things down and bring the room back without needing to be the loudest voice. All right, let’s get into it. All right, Christoph, welcome to the show. Hi, Greg. Nice to be here. Good. So I always start off by asking, do you consider yourself an introvert or an extrovert? I’m not entirely sure if I would consider myself a complete introvert. I need to recharge my batteries after many social interactions. At the same time, by profession, I love to facilitate workshops. I love to give talks and for sure, I need other people to reflect ideas. So yeah, I don’t know where I’m exactly at the spectrum, but I think I can relate to a lot of topics which are dear to your heart. Well, it sounds like I know for a fact that we have a lot in common. We’re in the same profession in product management, leadership in product management, leading other product leaders. I had to build up to it. I had to gradually take on more challenging situations to a point where I gained comfort every step of the way. And I think similar to you now, I look back, I’m pretty comfortable doing all of these things. How was that journey for you? Was it similar or different? I would say kind of similar. So it’s a little bit like winding how I ended up at now product coaching. So I’m not even in an active operating role, but I’m coaching and advising other people on all topics, product management, being in these roles, oftentimes in times of major changes, transformations, I was always thrown into the special projects. And then you talk to a lot of people and get in the middle of interesting situations, I would say. And through that, I think I learned a lot how to get people around the table, how to think deeper, and also how to discuss ideas a little bit deeper. And I think that’s also leading to the topic which we talk more about the visual thinking topic. You’re doing this at a very high level. You’re working with Marty Kagan. He’s one of the most influential thinkers in the field of product management. I know Marty and the SVPG partners, but we are not directly affiliated. But the product coaching world is small. We know each other and are supporting each other to spread the good word. I’ve been in some of these chaotic situations that you’re describing transformations. There’s a lot of fear, uncertainty. People are looking for direction. And so it sounds like your skill set was forged in these kinds of highly stressful situations. Yeah, exactly. I think that coming from a visual discipline as design, it was maybe in the beginning, a skill to step back into for myself when it was crazy around me. So I started to visualize for myself. So for example, I was working around five years ago and was an educational tech company. And I had to rally around like 10 teams without a clear like leadership role there. So I was like in a senior role, but those teams weren’t reporting to me or anything like that. And I had to go through a complicated topic around licensing, subscription models and things like that. So a lot of teams got touched. And in the beginning, it was like crazy. I went into like meeting after meeting. And I was coming out with more questions than answers. And naturally, I started to map out the things, put everything in a journey map in a service blueprint and build like a really big board. And while as by accident, I started to share this. So I came into this meeting and be like, I draw this thing and am I correct with this? Do you think that is like how it actually works? And through that, I discovered that when we talk together about these artifacts, it was really helpful to be like on the same base and talk about a thing instead of like talking at each other or oftentimes against each other. So tell me a little bit more about the details of this. What were some of the moments around this this kind of mapping process? Yeah, so I think it starts as exactly as you say with this, like taking the time by yourself to sort through your thoughts, that you get already a clarity about like what you actually mean. And some people do that by writing. And some people do that by visualizing or like their multiple things. And also you can combine that freely. For me, it was like oftentimes just like putting on a couple of of stickies, what I already know, and get like a story through that, because oftentimes we’re just expressing it, you get more clarification, because you’re forced to get clear. As long as we stay in our heads, it’s like we fill in the gray areas automatically, our brain jumped over these things. And I think especially people who are good with like, I don’t know, cooking in their own brain a little bit, it helps a lot to like express this somehow and sit with it. So just putting it out there and going through that is already I think the first step, which is for a lot of people, quite helpful. And you’re talking about just for your own clarification to clarify your own thoughts? Yes, exactly. So that for me, usually the first step, especially if you like not used to map a lot and things like that, of course, it gets over time, it develops them a muscle, I’m now doing it a lot like on the spot. When I work with people, I do this in my coaching, that’s one of the core techniques I use that I work together with my coaches on a visual artifact. But of course, that’s like using years of training. But with this artifact, so if you set a little bit with it, if you clarify your thoughts, then you can go out and can ask people for their perspective. So I think that’s another introvert, like trade that you’re not good at selling, right? You’re probably you’re not the first new standing in front of the room and be like, oh, yeah, here’s my super cool model. And just believe me, please. A lot of people are struggling with that. And I think it’s a good thing because what you want to get is like starting a discussion and getting like where you are missing something or we got something wrong. And so getting this perspective out and then also pointing out like the assumptions and risks. And I’m right now talking a little bit like about a method I developed or a thinking model, I call it a method. And the third step is actually to point out the assumptions and the risks to clarify what you don’t know as a group, what is maybe a little bit unclear and think especially in product work, but also in other disciplines, getting clear about like where is a risk, where is an assumption is a key step. This is great. And I quibble with you slightly. So yes, introverts are not naturally good at classic selling, but you do run into introverted salespeople. That’s kind of a separate topic. But the way that we do this in product management, it’s usually by building consensus and getting buy-in and ownership. And this process you’re describing, it seems like an excellent method for doing that. Totally true. And I think when I work with teams, the biggest problem is not that they are disagreeing fundamentally, just that they don’t know that they’re not on the same page. They’re running into different directions. And by working together on one picture and aligning around one artifact, it has on one hand, it helps to get together to this one picture. And on the other thing is like you suddenly start to talk about the artifact instead about fighting each other. Because it’s really easy. I say something sitting on a table and somebody has a different opinion, and we are in a conflict, even if we don’t want to be in a conflict. And if you externalize your thinking, it’s way easier to then fight about like the picture on the wall about the model instead of fighting each other. It sounds like it’s depersonalizing the argument. If it’s on the wall, it’s externalized. The thing over there, it’s no longer me. Maybe give some distance. Yeah, totally. And with that, it also helps then to not go on one hand into rabbit hole discussions. I think everybody of us knows that you’re going to a meeting. The outcome of the meeting is like, let’s have another meeting. This helps to then focus on this whole thing. And then they’re like, okay, what is like a risk? What do we need to test next? What do we have to find out? And then we make a small plan, say like, okay, what do we have to do? We do that. And then we can get back together, evaluate together, reflect together. And instead of just being into a like, okay, what’s the next step? And we can walk our thoughts through multiple stages with this artifact. So we have something we can bring, we come back to it. People can sit alone with it again. I’m curious, you know, these things can be on stickies, but what kind of technologies or techniques do you use to make it persist and live on and carry forward? Yeah, so I try to keep it as simple as possible. We have all this whiteboard tools. I don’t have like a hard preference for any. I think what’s important about that, they stay moldable, that you’re not going into, okay, let’s make a nice post out of that and put it into the wall and probably never look at it again. But it’s really a working tool. And at some points, you’re scraping even everything or part of it and redo things to keep this muscle up to rethink specific things and so on. So for me, it’s not building the big picture and understanding everything. It’s a working tool for your current discussion. Got it. So each discussion might have its own little map to keep it focused and develop. Or even multiple, especially what I do, for example, make coaching when we talk about strategy, we usually have KPI tree, a customer journey, some models, how we think the business works, and so on. It’s really multiple perspectives, maybe on the same thing that helps us to keep this quite complex stuff in our visual here context. And we can go deeper into it, jump out of it. That’s really helpful. I’m wondering if we could come up or share a simple example of a map or a map discussion with the audience to make this a little bit more concrete. Yeah, then let’s do that. Okay. All right. So here’s an example of what we’re talking about. Miro is this whiteboarding tool. It’s very easy to use, really quick to use stickies. It’s a whiteboarding equivalent tool, which Christoph is sharing here on the screen now. Exactly. So yeah, that’s a super simple tool. Just you can put stickies on there and write in it and things like that. And also multiple people can work on there. And this, for example, is a using a timer app to take the time. So there’s user steps from opening a timer app. So this is in the context of a tea timer app and having a fresh cup of tea. For example, you have, you watched a couple of users doing what they’re currently doing. And then you start to ideate around that. Okay, how can we integrate this into our timer app? That’s an artificial example, of course. But imagine a meeting without this is somebody will talk about, okay, what are they doing with the bag? And where did they get the bag and things like that? And just by putting that down, you can have, okay, is this important right now? So do we write a sticky for it or don’t we write a sticky for it? And especially if you, for example, as a leader, prepared this, you already containing a little bit of discussion because you made already decisions here, which you lead the group through and the group then can start to be questioning you on the specifics. So along this visual artifact, it’s helpful to structure the discussion. Yeah, because I might be in your meeting and I’m always wanting to talk about tea reviews and we need a feature to leave reviews on tea and what about that. And you can gently say, well, this isn’t, how is that supporting the main steps here? Yeah, exactly. Then you can start to be like a K on what part of the channel we concentrate. Let’s say you’re in our example here, we’re dealing with people who may be opinionated and you need to align. How could an artifact help in a situation where you’re dealing with people who are really more removed from the guts of what you’re looking at? I’m thinking you’re in the product side and you’re going to marketing or even to sales people and you need to persuade them, we’ve got this great new tea timer app and here’s why it’s important. Yeah. So for sure, what we just seeing right now is probably not the right artifact for this discussion because it’s way too detailed, but it can help you even to prepare this meeting, but pay what are the important moments here and tease this out. For example, we have this moment where we say, okay, you have this tea chooser, which is a really unique thing. And we think, or we saw in our customer tests that this is something people really love. And with that, you can start the marketing discussion, for example, with like, okay, look at this. So people opening the app and that’s the first thing they see. That’s the first thing. And you can, you already have like a story because it’s already like coming out just of this artifact. And you don’t talk about like all the other things. Got it. So you’re crafting a different kind of map for each of these conversations or creating a subset of the content to frame the discussion here. It super depends, of course, on the situation. So if I’m close with my marketing body and I’m just being like, oh, we are like thinking about the three features, what do you think would more fit into the current story, then you can pull up like your messy map and be, okay, can I walk you quickly through that? But if I’m going like in a high level meeting and have to convince the marketing department, this one thing we are currently building is the most important thing. And they really need to push like their budget behind that. Of course, I won’t go there with messiness, but it helps me to prepare. It helps me to like find before a story, maybe map already out the story again. So before doing like PowerPoint slides or something else, using the artifacts I already have from my other discussions and find like, okay, what are the really important things that you can just like look at this and meditate about that? Yeah, thanks so much for sharing the example visually. It seems like your natural inclination is to map to go visual. And you mentioned that people might write something like that. I think a lot of people are more verbal. I think earlier on, I used to write more, I would write more detailed and put a lot of effort in it. People don’t always read that. People don’t always read. So that that’s one of the limitations there. But what I came to rely on more was like creating really short bullet points like outlines, preparing in that way and coming in a discussion, which I think is similar for mapping. I really like the mapping idea too, because you’re engaging a different part of your brain when you’re doing something visual and potentially engaging more of your breath. Yeah, I’m also with you totally on writing. I love writing and I write a lot by myself and I love like processes as the pure FAQ and things like that. We know maybe some listeners maybe know from the Amazon context to write like a press release and really use this as a document to think through things. But in my experience, most organizations are not ready to do this. Most organizations struggle. Most people struggle to read more than two pages before a meeting or within a meeting. It’s really strange for them. And that’s like just how it is. And at the same time, I’m also not saying, okay, they are no power points and there are no bullet points and so on. Because of course, I won’t go into a board meeting with a totally messy map. And of course, that’s not the right format. There I need to be clear, I need to have a short point, need to have exactly together what the decision is about, what the options are and so on. For this, mapping helps to prepare. So for me, it’s mapping is more a work tool. It’s a tool in the toolbox of product managers. It’s not the answer to everything. Do you have any advice for people who are preparing to leave a meeting and it’s going to be higher stakes or it’s potentially more chaotic? Apart from preparation, do you have advice for once you’re in the room and in that situation? Yes. So sometimes it helps. So if you are a participant and not leading the meeting, it helps to start mapping for yourself scribble on a white paper. Sometimes it helps yourself to sort what you hear, to get the clearer picture. If you’re leading a meeting, of course, that also helps. But I was asking about things are more off the rails, like what kinds of things can you do? Yeah. So I think the first thing probably is to build up the empathy, what’s even happening there before you get caught up into your own emotions. And I think introverts are quite good at being a little bit jumping into spectator mode and think, okay, what’s happening in this room? Two people are starting to have this fight because they have a different perspective and just not seeing that they are talking about different things. So going into this mode to go into spectator mode, it’s helping them to see, to hear what you’re understanding. And it helps yourself oftentimes just by repeating what you hear to get another perspective on it. That’s a great suggestion and a really great technique. And one accomplishes the task of convincing the other person that they’re heard or you’re showing that you’re making an attempt to understand them and then being willing and open to correction if you don’t have it right. And then you’re like, okay, now you’ve made a connection and that automatically will kind of lower defensiveness on the other side. And it sounds like you’re pointing out there are benefits to you also, like you’re able maybe to better understand where they’re coming from or just sort through your thoughts about it as you’re doing it. Yes. And it’s slowing down. So that’s another important thing. So that helps to just repeat what you understood your brain can catch up. Oftentimes it’s just misunderstanding. It’s not people are not bad and want to do bad things to you. It’s 99% of the time that there’s just a misunderstanding between people or different perspectives, which is also fine to a knowledge. Yeah. Yeah, I often think it’s a lack from my perspective, it’s a lack of context. I have this other information and, you know, we should have it’s important for this discussion. Let’s talk about it and reconsider in light of this additional context or you have context that I’m missing. Yeah. And that’s exactly why again, I love visual methods. Because you just said it before you have it on a wall, you can point things and when you point at a box, everybody sees what’s around there. It’s not just the one thing you’re pointing at. It’s also around there. So you always drag in context with it without speaking about it without starting again and again the whole same discussion. So you can be like, okay, we discussed this before. It’s this thing, this thing, this thing and everybody sees it. Yes. And it’s super simple to start. My first thing is if people ask how they should start dribble for yourself in a meeting, scribble for yourself when you’re thinking about a topic, just play around with it. And if you get a little bit of a feeling for it, you can bring it more and more with you. It happened to me like that. I mapped, I mapped, I mapped. And by accident, I brought it into meetings and I found, oh, it’s a completely game changer. So that’s what I want to encourage people to do, to just play around with it. That’s great. If people want to learn more about this method and your work, where should they go? Yeah, the easiest way to reach me is LinkedIn. So they can reach me on LinkedIn. I’m sure you put the link into the, can put the link into the show notes. They can also get a free map guide, a really small guide around this technique focused on product development, but probably helpful for everybody. Also write about visual thinking for everybody who wants to even step deeper into this. Reach out, just say hi. I’m always happy to chat about those topics. Yeah, super useful. Thanks so much for sharing all this information and being on the show today, Christoph. Thank you so much, Greg, for having me. All right, let’s take a moment to recap what we covered today. Number one, clarify your thinking visually before the meeting. Don’t just let it all percolate in your head, get it out externally on paper, on stickies, notes, whatever. You’ll find the gaps in your thinking and you’ll come to the meeting much better prepared. Number two, a shared artifact changes the dynamic of the room. When there’s something on the wall, everybody’s looking at together. You stop arguing with each other with your personal conflicts, whatever you’re bringing to it and you focus in on the ideas. This carries everything forward. Number three, when things get really chaotic, you can slow it down by reflecting back what each other is saying. You don’t have to be the fastest talker to have the most impact here. Sometimes the real power move is to pause, step into spectator mode and say, hey, let me make sure I’m understanding you correctly. This one move lowers the temperature, it builds connection and rapport, and it gives your brain the time it needs to really think things through. If this episode resonated with you, the best thing you can do now is to subscribe. I’m here on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or YouTube. I also write a newsletter on Substack. I’m Greg Weinger. Keep leading with quiet confidence and I’ll see you next time.