The Drama Triangle vs. The Empowerment Dynamic

Within product teams, between product teams, and with stakeholders, there can be conflict. In the 1960’s, an American psychiatrist named Stephen Karpman mapped out three roles that people play in conflict. He created a model that illustrates destructive interaction, and called it the Drama Triangle. (Karpman loved the dramatic arts, and found these archetypes to be roles we play, or masks we put on, in conflict scenarios.)

The Hero

The Hero (also called the Rescuer) wants to save the day. But the action is often a quick fix that makes the problem go away, not a long-term solution. The Hero is motivated by wanting to be right. And this can result in acceptance and praise from others, but their heroics are limited in effectiveness and don’t address the underlying issues. Often a Hero might jump into the middle before knowing all of the facts, so a true solution wouldn’t be possible.

The Villain

The Villain (also called the Persecutor) wants to place blame. They want to figure out who is at fault and throw them under the bus. Occasionally they blame themselves, but more often they point the finger at someone else. Many times the blame goes to an undefined “they”, in the form of blaming “management” or “engineering”. When you are speaking with a Villian, it can often feel like gossip.

The Victim

The Victim is driven by fear. They pursue personal safety and security above all else. Victims can list many reasons why they are the real victim of a person, circumstance, or condition. “I was never trained on that”, “There’s not enough time”, “Nobody is helping”, “I’m not allowed to talk to customers”, etc. The Victim operates from a place of powerlessness and helplessness. Victims will seek help, creating a Hero to save the day, who often perpetuates the Victim's negative feelings and leaves the situation broadly unchanged.

Note: In this model, Victims are acting the part, they are not actually powerless/being abused. But accusing someone else of “playing the victim” and gaslighting them is a classic Villain move!

In 2009, a way to distrupt these interactions was published. David Emerald created The Empowerment Dynamic (TED*) which stops the reactive nature of the Drama Triangle and empowers new roles.

VICTIM > CREATOR

Victims stop thinking “poor me” and become Creators. Victims are reactive - focusing on scarcity, considering themselves powerless, and not seeing choices. Creators, however, claim their own power in a situation and focus on possibilities. Creators take responsibility and look for what they can do to alter a situation.

VILLIAN > CHALLENGER

The Villain stops blaming and becomes the Challenger. Where the Villain points finger about the present situation, Challengers bring new perspectives to others through positive pressure in a way that creates a breakthrough. The Challenger inspires and motivates, a kind of teacher who points the Creators opportunities for growth.

HERO > CoACH

The Hero stops trying to save the day and becomes the Coach. The Coach is a support role, helping others create the lives they want and evoking transformation. Heroes take over and micromanage. Coaches facilitate and encourage. A Coach leaves the power with the Creator, not taking it for themselves.

Shifting to the empowered roles instead of the sabotaging ones has to be a conscious move, but one that can be implemented within a team that has good trust and psychological safety. Conflict and tension will always be present to some degree, but we can better manage it and our reactions to it.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Present The Drama Triangle and Empowerment Dynamic to your team. Use this 3 minute video to help illustrate. Talk to your team about what roles they most often play, and in which scenarios. One person might always choose the same role, or they may play different roles based on the people or circumstances involved. How can your team support each other when they see the drama roles surfacing?

Signaling Decisiveness

As a product leader, you’re often navigating a space where formal authority doesn’t exist. Your influence is built through relationships and the respect you earn from your team, stakeholders, and peers. In this dynamic, how you carry yourself—what Sylvia Ann Hewlett describes as "gravitas" in Executive Presence 2.0—plays a significant role in how others perceive and respond to you.

Hewlett breaks gravitas into four essential components:

1. Projecting intellectual horsepower.

2. Displaying confidence and credibility.

3. Signaling decisiveness.

4. Maintaining grace under fire.

I’ve explored the topic of projecting intellect and expertise before, but we’ll focus on a less-discussed aspect of executive presence: decisiveness.

Decisiveness in Product Management

As product managers, we make decisions daily—about priorities, feature trade-offs, user experiments, and future research. These decisions shape the product’s trajectory and, in turn, the success of the business. To confidently communicate these choices to stakeholders, we must have self-assurance not only in our judgment but also in our ability to make those decisions quickly and effectively.

We’ve all experienced the pitfalls of indecision. When we delay making a choice, the situation often forces a default outcome upon us—typically not the one we’d have chosen. Avoiding this requires mastering the ability to make swift, informed decisions.

Gaining Confidence Through Information

One key to fast, confident decision-making is having access to trusted information that you can quickly digest and apply. Everyone processes information differently, so finding your ideal method for gathering insights is critical.

Some ways to gather the necessary information to confidently decide your product’s next steps:

1. Qualitative User Feedback – Mine your existing user feedback or lean on your UX team’s insights. Understanding the real-life experiences of your users is vital to making informed choices.

2. Internal or Quantitative Data – Build a strong intuition around user behavior by analyzing the numbers. Metrics often reveal truths that anecdotes can’t.

3. Experience with the Product – Use your own product like a customer would. Understanding the user experience firsthand gives you an invaluable perspective.

4. External Market Trends – Keep an eye on competitors, industry shifts, and broader consumer patterns. This will help you predict what’s coming and position your product accordingly.

5. Financial Modeling – Work with your finance or business partners to evaluate how various decisions might impact the bottom line. Long-term success often hinges on understanding the financial ripple effects of today’s choices.

6. Prototyping – Create mockups, sandboxes, or prototypes. Experimenting with different solutions can help you see how they perform in practice and make more informed choices.

While it’s impossible to cover all of these areas for every decision, pulling information from a few can lead to a decision that’s "good enough" to move forward.

The Role of Intuition and Circumstance

Of course, decision-making isn’t purely an intellectual exercise. As product managers, we juggle competing priorities, unpredictable constraints, stakeholder politics, and shifting business goals. Sometimes, our choices are influenced by factors beyond the data—like gut feeling or external pressures.

Even so, when you’re grounded in reliable information, you can navigate those complex variables with greater confidence. Decisiveness becomes less about bold assertions and more about informed, thoughtful action.

Leading with Influence, Not Authority

At the core of product management is the need to lead through influence. You don’t have the luxury of positional power; your authority comes from the expertise and trust you cultivate. Decisiveness is a key part of that influence. When your team and stakeholders see you making informed, timely decisions, it builds confidence in your leadership.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Discuss with your team how they typically make decisions, or how they might feel forced to make decisions. Of the methods discussed above, which ones are applicable to their learning style, the product, and the business. What other ways might they collect information to make better informed and quicker decisions?

Bonus: Learn about the framework of one-way door and two-way door decisions. Jeff Bezos explains the philosophy in this video.

Using Games at Work

Games in a professional setting can bring in new mindsets or help tackle problems from a different perspective. Games within a product team are especially beneficial, as they both develop and capitalize on the psychological safety present.

A game is a structured form of play, usually undertaken for entertainment, fun, or educational purposes. Games can be physical (like sports), mental (like puzzles), or a combination of both (like board games or video games). They typically involve:

1. Rules: Clearly defined guidelines that dictate how the game is played and what players can or cannot do.

2. Objectives: Specific goals or outcomes that players aim to achieve.

3. Competition: Often includes competition between players or against the game itself.

4. Interactivity: Requires active participation from players, often involving decision-making and strategy.

5. Environment: A defined setting or context in which the game takes place.

6. Outcomes: Usually has a clear end condition or way to determine winners or losers.

In a professional setting, those elements are still present but morph a little. Using the work of academics like Johan Roos, Bart Victor, Michael Schrage, etc. who have written about the power of games in solving more challenging organizational problems, you might characterize a game as having:

• Purposeful Design: The game is designed with specific objectives in mind, such as improving teamwork, fostering innovation, or addressing specific organizational challenges.

• Rules and Structure: The game operates within a defined set of rules and a structured environment that guides participants' actions and interactions.

• Simulated Reality: The game creates a simulated environment that mirrors real-world challenges and scenarios, allowing participants to experiment and learn in a controlled setting.

• Engagement and Interaction: The game encourages active participation, collaboration, and interaction among players, promoting a deeper understanding of complex issues.

• Reflection and Learning: The game provides opportunities for reflection and learning, enabling participants to draw insights and apply them to their professional roles.

We play games all the time at work. Pretending is a game. Pretending to have more rules or structure than you normally do creates a game. “Run-throughs” of a presentation are literally pretending the event is happening, but it isn’t. Similarly, time-boxing is pretending there is a deadline when there isn’t.

Games allow different scenarios to be tested - whether in a true simulated reality game or just in a tabletop exercise. We also ask ourselves questions that prompt this kind of thinking: “How would we build this if budget wasn’t a factor?”; “If we could go after any market, where would we go?”; “If you were in charge here, what decision would you make?”

And of course a game allows a structured analysis or post-mortem that might not be available or would be too complex in the real work. The learnings through a game can be just as valuable as the real-world scenario. Many strategy games and simulations we use today have their origin in the military sphere. The defense sector uses strategy games and simulations to train hundreds of thousands of their troops.

By incorporating these elements, games in a professional setting can serve as effective tools for solving challenging organizational problems, fostering innovation, and enhancing overall performance.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

How can your product team incorporate play into their processes and solutioning? Start by auditing what you see at work - where are games already taking place? Then brainstorm how to expand that and apply it to your product team.

Hosting a Successful Meeting

Product teams host countless meetings, both in and out of the Agile ceremonies. There are workshops, brainstorming sessions, stakeholder read-outs, initiative discussions, user feedback sessions, and many more. Product leaders bring people together to share ideas and create results. Being able to host an effective meeting is a skill any product manager should be adept at.

Purpose
The most important part of a meeting is knowing why you are there. Every gathering should have a crystal-clear purpose, more than the general category of meeting. For example, “one-on-one” is not a purpose.

Effective naming of the meeting can be one way to communicate its purpose. By naming the gathering on the invitation and repeating the name in reminder emails, you create a sense of belonging before anyone enters the (virtual) room. Names can create social contracts. The best names help us understand our role at the event and help us to understand that we’re a part of something.

Even small nuances in naming are noticeable and important: Update is different than discussion; Workshop is more structured than brainstorm; Catch-up is more casual than one-on-one.

Think through your naming – how can you convey the most information, have the attendees feel not only that they belong but that they are true participants in the purpose.

Attendees
Priya Parker, in The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, states: “Thoughtful, considered exclusion is vital to any gathering.” 

Think through who will help fulfill and forward the purpose, and who will not. Who are you inviting out of obligation? Different organizations have different cultural norms around meeting attendees - learn your organization’s unwritten (or written) rules here, but also be willing to stretch them make it work for your gathering. My current organization is a consensus organization that loves to share information, so often invites will get forwarded to additional attendees. For more structured or meaningful gatherings, it might be a good idea to turn off this feature in Outlook or put a note in the invite to not do so.

Format
The attendees should be prepared for the format of the meeting. Are you sharing materials in advance that they need to read / prepare comments on? Should they come prepared to engage or will they be mostly listening and then walking away with homework? Are multiple people hosting or presenting materials?

Think through the before, during, and after. Will you need tools like whiteboards if in person, or a prepped Miro template if virtual? Do you want to do a poll or survey during the meeting? How will you follow up on any ideas or action items after the meeting?

During the Meeting
Priya Parker is adamant to resist the urge to start your meeting with logistics or reminders. Instead launch in a way that sets the tone for the rest of your time together. If this is a team that meets often or a meeting that occurs at a regular cadence, consider creating a ritual that sets the stage. This is why radio shows and podcasts have theme songs - it alerts listeners that the content is starting and cues them to listen more attentively. (For one of my recurring meetings, this is as simple as sharing a Miro board link in the chat. As soon as I do that, the chitchat ceases and we are down to business.)

Involve participants in the meeting by asking for help. When you help contribute to something, you feel a part of it - so even though we are afraid to burden folks by asking for help, this can be beneficial for all involved. The asks can be very low stakes - ask someone to record the meeting, or share a link, or pass out sticky notes if you are in person. These micro-moments help move us toward belonging.

Throughout the meeting, promote debate and meaningful interactions. Look for a healthy tension as people discuss ideas. If you shy away from difficult topics, you might not arrive at the best solution, or let all diverse perspectives be heard. Parker says, “Good controversy can make a gathering mattering more,” and it can certainly make it more memorable.

Ending
Just as you begin intentionally, end intentionally. What can a deliberate conclusion look like? One way is to simply plan enough time for attendees to reflect on the meeting and what happened.

Part of leaving the meeting space, especially for longer gatherings or workshops, is prepping to reenter the world. Ideally you made a new space, and it will feel like a departure to leave it. So how can we connect this gathering to the day-to-day? How can a part of this event or these learnings stay with attendees? Parker states: “Part of preparing guests for reentry is helping them find a thread to connect the world of the gathering to the world outside.”

After the meeting, be sure to follow up on any action items and distribute artifacts that were created. Depending on the meeting, these actions could happen once, soon after conclusion, or multiple times over the course of days or weeks.

The only way to improve your meeting hosting / leading skills is to practice. Luckily, product teams provide many opportunities to do just that. Trainings and reflection activities can also help bolster this skill. See below for a stand-up activity that does just that.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

In preparation, have your team review Priya Parker’s blog, or even better, read her book: The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

Ask the team to reflect on intentional and meaningful gatherings they have been a part of, whether virtually, hybrid, or in-person. Look for similarities of these events, and what can be learned or replicated. How can they take these elements back to their own meetings?

Supporting Introverts on Product Teams

Extroversion is praised within American (and similar) society. People who speak the most, process thoughts out loud, or are very social often get a lot of attention, and it is typically positive. They often appear more confident or assertive. Extroversion can be a proxy for competency.

But it wasn’t always this way. In Susan Cain’s book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking,” she traces the history of valuing extroversion to the changing society of the industrial revolution. American values shifted when we moved from distributed agricultural communities and migrated into larger metropolitan areas. As members of small, close-knit communities centered around farming and family, society placed value on inward traits like work ethic, integrity, and kindness. But the new industrial cities created more anonymous environments, and the ability to stand out or have your individual ideas heard became more important. Extroversion was realized as a positive trait. (Susan Cain also has an excellent TED Talk on the power of introversion.)

Introversion and extroversion may be opposites, but most people fall somewhere on the spectrum between them. The exact middle would be defined as an ambivert, a true balance of either end. Introversion or extroversion also may depend on a person’s environment or familiarity with a group.

Regardless, the goal of a product team is to empower all members of the team to actively contribute. We are also always looking for team members bringing a variety opinions and outlooks, and having a diverse team in terms of personalities is beneficial. Having introverts on the team can balance the more outspoken personalities. Introverts can also bring a level of thoughtful deliberation and depth of perspective, where extroverts may be quicker to act.

However, just having diverse personalities on the team is not enough - you must accommodate everyone’s communication styles to encourage their participation. In addition to psychological safety, there are other ways to create a more inclusive experience for all personalities, especially in our meeting-centric business environment. Generally these accommodations lead to more thorough and thoughtful discussions and decision-making.

• Collaboration Tools - I am a huge proponent of Miro, but any collaborative virtual space can do the trick if it provides real-time commenting in multiple modes. Polling during a meeting can also be helpful here.

• Collective Brainstorm prior to discussion - Many of my stand-up prompts follow a similar format of asking a question of the team, providing an opportunity to answer individually (usually through stickies on a board) and then coming back together to discuss. Even if all ideas don’t get discussed, they are usually all read, and will be recorded in meeting artifacts.

• Agendas! - Letting meeting attendees know what topics will be discussed or what decisions will be made provide those people who need a longer deliberation time to do so prior to the meeting starting.

• Asynchronous “meetings” - Beginning a dedicated discussion thread via Teams or Slack allows team members to answer once they are confident, or to decide on the correct wording before sharing.

• What else? Brainstorm more accommodations with your team through the stand-up exercise below.

And, perhaps one of the best considerations of all personalities is simply making space for them. Paying attention to the different needs and preferences of everyone - and valuing those individual differences - creates a culture of respect and acceptance within the team. That leads to better team health, and happier team members - regardless of personality.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Ask your team to take an introversion/extroversion quiz to see where they might fall on the scale. I had my team use this one from TED.

In our stand-up, we discussed results by polling based on the quiz result. Then, they answered the question of their own accord, placing a dot on a spectrum of where they felt they landed between extrovert and introvert both in their professional life and their personal life. Discussing how these roles flipped for folks between the two environments was very interesting.

We ended with a brainstorm and discussion prompted by the question “How can we better accommodate team members along all points on the scale in meetings / ceremonies / work streams?” The goal is to incorporate those ideas into our product team meetings.