Changemakers: Interview with Alex Budak
Alex Budak is a social entrepreneur, faculty member at Berkeley Haas, and author of Becoming a Changemaker. At UC Berkeley, he created and teaches the course “Becoming a Changemaker” and serves as Executive Director of the Berkeley Haas Global Access Program and a Faculty Director for Berkeley Executive Education programs. Before joining Berkeley, he co-founded StartSomeGood.com.
A graduate of UCLA and Georgetown University, Alex loves travel adventures (39 countries and counting), rooting for the underdog, and spending time with his two favorite changemakers: his wife, Rebecca, and their toddler son.
Professor Budak, we’re so excited to interview you here at Product Teacher! Tell us a bit about your book Becoming a Changemaker.
Thanks so much for having me! Becoming a Changemaker is an actionable, inclusive guide to leading positive change at any level. It's a research-backed guide to developing the mindsets and skills needed to navigate, shape, and lead positive change, no matter your background, interests, or level of experience.
It’s a dream come true to be putting this book into the world, and it’s the result of years of work teaching changemaking at Berkeley, supporting changemakers from all walks of life through coaching, speaking, mentoring, and conducting original research on what the most successful changemakers have in common.
Your book is based on the class you teach at UC Berkeley. What motivated you to teach changemakers on campus?
Simply put, this is the class I wish I could have taken when I was in college / grad school. I feel so fortunate to have followed a changemaker career (with lots of ups and downs along the way) and through all of these experiences I’ve learned a ton about what it takes to actually catalyze positive change in various forms. But for aspiring changemakers like me, I couldn’t find a definitive path, or an essential guide for what it takes to actually become a changemaker. So instead I decided to create it!
Teaching is the greatest joy and privilege. I often am so lit up from the energy and excitement in the classroom that I can’t sleep the night after I’ve taught. It’s just the best. And I’ve tried to capture the magic of my changemaker classroom in this new book.
Every product manager must influence without authority; they’re in charge of leading cross-functional teams to success, yet they have no formal authority over them. In other words, product managers are designated changemakers. What does it mean to have a changemaker mindset, and how do we cultivate this mindset as PMs?
In conducting research on the Changemaker Index – a longitudinal study that measures how individuals develop as changemakers over time – I’ve found that one of the key traits changemakers have in common is their ability to influence without authority. (You can take it for yourself here if you are curious!)
You’ve framed it up in exactly the right way here – PMs have to get so many different people from different teams and roles all aligned and moving ahead. Yet they usually can’t rely on a formal title or authority to do so!
But when you look at the trends shaping the business and tech world today – from hybrid work to distributed teams to asynchronous work – these all increasingly lend themselves to influence as the mechanism for change.
A crucial part of the changemaker mindset – beyond being able to influence – is also a belief that a better future is possible, and that we can help make it so. This is another trait that I believe PMs and changemakers have in common. A vision for the way things can be, and a belief that our collective work can push us forward.
I’m inspired by the words of poet Amanda Gorman. She ends her poem, “The Hill We Climb,” with the most poetic description of a changemaker mindset that I’ve ever heard:
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.
If you could dispel a couple of myths about leadership, which myths would those be?
Firstly, that humility is a weakness. I see it as an incredible strength. Sometimes executives that I teach this to are skeptical. But fortunately, the data are on my side. Amy Ou, David Waldman, and Suzanne Peterson conducted a terrific study titled “Do Humble CEOs Matter? An Examination of CEO Humility and Firm Outcomes.” The answer to this question of whether humility matters is a resounding “yes!” Humility as a CEO is correlated with less employee turnover, higher employee satisfaction, more diverse management teams, and even a company’s bottom-line performance.
How can you apply this in your own PM work? The next time that you get praise for work that you did, consider how you can share this praise with those on your team rather than accepting it for yourself (even if you, indeed, deserve a lot of this praise). Notice how others respond when you do.
Secondly, the best leaders are the best talkers. I believe it’s the opposite – that the best leaders are the best listeners. There’s a lot of pressure as a first time leader to feel like you have to have all of the answers. But actually a big part of leadership is empowering those around you to be at their best. Active listening, and asking powerful questions, are ways to engage your team in change efforts with you. And best of all, you can take the pressure off of trying to know everything – instead focus on finding new connections across everything you are hearing and asking questions that elicit those fresh ideas and perspectives. This is so crucial for PMs who are engaging so many different people in change efforts. By listening more than you speak, you’ll be able to better understand how people in different roles and functions think, and then find connections and commonality to drive the collective team forward together.
How can you apply this in your own PM work? At your next 1-1 with a colleague, record (with permission, of course!) your conversation and then go back and listen afterward and measure how much you spoke compared with how much the other person spoke. Similarly if you lead a team, do the same thing for a team meeting and measure how equally-distributed speaking time is (also a helpful way to address potential bias).
Product managers have to drive change across many vectors. They have to convince users to change their behaviors, and they have to drive innovation and transformation within their own companies. What are some of the most common reasons for why change efforts fail? As product managers, what can we do to mitigate these pitfalls or prevent them upfront?
I’m a big believer in planning for resilience. There’s a saying in the startup world that projects take twice as long as we initially expect and cost twice as much as we initially budget for. If you create a plan without any room for slack, then when these cost and timing disasters inevitably happen, that reality is going to be devastating. I think it’s really important to take time up front to identify some of the places where the project could slip up – and then to proactively plan for that occurrence. It’s always easier to strategize before it’s an emergency situation than when you are right in the middle of it.
How can you apply this in your own PM work? Take time upfront to identify 3-5 likely roadblocks and how you can overcome them before you get started.
I think PMs would also do well to focus on communicating – and doing even more communication than they think is enough. Francis Flinn and Chelsea Lide have conducted some compelling research which shows that there is a steeper downside to under-communicating than over-communicating. A number of changemaker PMs I’ve worked with felt like they simply had to articulate the vision once – and do it super, super well of course – and that would be enough. But it takes repetition – again and again – so that people feel bought into the vision and deeply understand it. When in doubt, err on the side of over communicating.
How can you apply this in your own PM work? Each week identify a key message or theme that you want to get out to your colleagues. Make sure you find a way to communicate it each day that week in a new and fresh way, whether through a slack message, in a team meeting, or an email.
Do you have a template or a framework that people can use to plan and drive change?
Yes, absolutely! Change can feel really overwhelming – especially if it’s your first time leading it, or if you’re taking on a project that scares you a bit (if so, this is good)! If you feel this way, let me first say: you are not alone! In working with thousands of changemakers all around the world, I’ve heard this from even the most accomplished changemakers. We all struggle with moving from idea into action and with knowing how to take those crucial first steps to catalyze positive change.
To address this pain point that literally every changemaker I know feels at some time, I created the Changemaker Canvas. It’s a tool to help you transform your vision for positive change into manageable, concrete steps and actionable activities to help you make your idea an impactful reality. It helps you deeply examine all sides of a problem, take a systems lens to your change effort, and even helps you engage others in your change effort in a strategic and thoughtful way.
Professor Alex Budak’s Changemaker Canvas
Take a look, give it a try, and please let me know how you use it in your own work!
You write a lot in the book about the role failure plays in leading change and how we as changemakers can start redefining our relationship to setbacks. How can we shift into this mindset for ourselves and our teams?
For teams I lead, at every weekly meeting during our check-in we ask every teammate to answer two questions:
What was their “win of the week,” the thing they did that helped move us closer to our collective goals.
What was their “failure of the week,” and what did they learn from it.
This second question does two things. Firstly, it normalizes failure because it’s something that each of us are expected to not just experience but to also talk openly about. Secondly, it reinforces the culture on the team that we want people to fail because it means that we are pushing ourselves and our team forward. Now of course we don’t love failures that are things like not responding to a super important customer email. But we build in the “what did you learn from it” component to help shift us from fearing failure to embracing it as a catalyst for our individual and collective growth.
A key change that we seek to drive at Product Teacher is to create a more inclusive and diverse product management ecosystem. Part of that objective means identifying role models and yielding the spotlight to people from underrepresented backgrounds and perspectives. Who are some great changemakers and leaders from underrepresented backgrounds that you’d like to highlight, and what are some ways that our readers can opt in to support their work?
That’s so, so important! I’m a huge believer that you can’t be what you can’t see and so my book is filled with case studies of changemakers from all roles, sectors and backgrounds. More than 50% of the cases are of changemakers of color, and we explore first-hand in the book how they each create change in vastly many different contexts and conditions from startups to big corporations to social ventures. A couple of my favorite changemakers whom I write about in the book and I encourage you to check out and support include:
Laura Weidman Powers, Co-Founder of Code2040
Scott Shigeoka, speaker, storyteller, and author of SEEK
Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative
Gwen Yi Wong, Founder of Tribeless
One of the best parts of the book was getting to know these incredible changemakers and I hope that the book does justice to their stories and their impact.
Throughout this interview, an underlying theme we’ve touched on is that anyone can be an effective changemaker. As a final call to action for our readers, what’s the best way for readers to reach out to you and stay on top of what you’re doing?
That’s right! Inclusion is the beating heart of my course and of this book. I believe that each and every one of us can be a changemaker, and I can’t wait to hear how you use the tools and ideas from the book to lead positive change from where you are!
I love hearing from changemakers so please reach out to me and connect on:
Thank you so much for this insightful and actionable interview!
Readers can order their own copy of Becoming a Changemaker through Amazon.