David R. Longnecker

The gap between what’s possible and what’s actually achieved often comes down to one critical factor: mindset.

I’ve spent the past few years working with several product teams across our enterprise—some thriving on challenges, others paralyzed by the possibility of failure. What’s fascinating isn’t just the performance difference, but how profoundly a leader’s approach can transform even the most entrenched fixed mindset environments.

Research confirms what I’ve observed firsthand: when individuals and teams embrace a growth mindset—the belief that abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—they show greater resilience, innovation, and overall performance (Harvard Business School, 2022).

Growth vs. Fixed: The Mindset Divide in Product Teams

The concept of growth mindset, pioneered by psychologist Carol Dweck in her groundbreaking research at Stanford University, fundamentally shapes how we approach challenges, feedback, and the success of others. Dweck’s research, which has sold over 800,000 copies of her book “Mindset” since 2006, demonstrates that our beliefs about whether abilities are fixed or developable significantly impact our performance and resilience (Harvard Business Review, 2014).

In product development—where failure, iteration, and continuous learning are essential—your team’s mindset becomes your competitive advantage or your greatest limitation. Research shows that individuals with a growth mindset are more likely to thrive during challenges and continue improving, while those with fixed mindsets may avoid challenges altogether (Farnam Street, 2021).

What happens when you, as a growth-oriented leader, inherit or must collaborate with a predominantly fixed mindset team? This tension creates unique challenges that require both strategic adaptation and unwavering authenticity.

Recognizing Fixed Mindset Patterns in Your Team

Before you can lead transformation, you need to recognize the signs of fixed mindset thinking in your product organization.

Defensive Response to Feedback

• “That customer doesn’t understand what we’re trying to build” rather than “What can we learn from this feedback?”

The fixed mindset interprets critique as personal judgment rather than valuable information. Product reviews become anxiety-inducing rather than valuable learning opportunities.

Risk Avoidance and Fear of Failure

• “Let’s just stick with what we know works” instead of “What experiments could help us find a better approach?”

Teams with fixed mindsets gravitate toward safer features and incremental improvements rather than bold innovations that might fail. The Microsoft research on innovation indicates this pattern alone can reduce breakthrough innovation by up to 37% compared to growth mindset teams.

Documentation as Blame Protection

• “I need to document that I warned against this approach” rather than “Let’s document what we learn from this trial.”

Fixed mindset teams often create excessive documentation—not to share knowledge, but to establish blame boundaries. This defensive documentation becomes a productivity tax, with teams spending up to 20% more time creating artifacts designed to protect rather than inform.

Status-Based Decision Making

• “The VP wants it this way” instead of “What does the evidence suggest is best?”

Fixed mindset environments tend to defer to hierarchy rather than reason, even when contradicting data or user needs. The person with the highest title wins arguments, not the person with the best evidence.

The Authentic Leader’s Dilemma

As a leader who embraces a growth mindset, you face a challenging paradox when working with fixed mindset teams. Your authentic self values experimentation, craves understanding, embraces failure, and seeks feedback—-approaches that may actively threaten team members operating from a fixed mindset.

The crucial question becomes: How do you maintain your authentic leadership style while creating psychological safety for team members who view the world through a fundamentally different lens?

The answer isn’t about changing who you are, but rather about applying the growth mindset principles to your leadership approach itself. You must be willing to learn, adapt, and grow your toolkit while staying true to your core values.

Adaptation Strategies for Growth-Oriented Leaders

Build Safety Before Challenging Assumptions

When entering a fixed mindset environment, resist the urge to immediately challenge existing assumptions or push for rapid innovation. Research from Google’s Project Aristotle—a comprehensive study of 180 teams across the company—found that psychological safety is the foundation for all high-performing teams, but it’s particularly crucial when mindset transformation is your goal (Think with Google, 2023).

Start with low-risk wins where team members can experience the benefits of a growth approach without feeling their identity is threatened. For example, run small experiments in areas where failure has minimal consequences but success would be meaningful.

Translate Between Mindset Languages

Growth and fixed mindsets essentially speak different languages. What you intend as encouraging (“This is hard, but I know we can figure it out with effort”) may be heard as threatening (“This is hard, and my capabilities are being questioned”).

Develop the ability to translate your growth-oriented goals into language that resonates with fixed mindset team members:

• Instead of: “Let’s try this bold new approach and see what we learn.”
• Try: “We’ve identified an opportunity to improve on our existing success by exploring an extension to our proven approach.”

Notice that both statements advocate for the same action, but the second frames it in terms that feel safer to those with fixed mindsets.

Model Vulnerability Strategically

Your authentic growth mindset naturally embraces vulnerability—admitting what you don’t know, sharing your failures, and demonstrating your own learning process. However, in fixed mindset environments, too much vulnerability too quickly can undermine your credibility as a leader.

Start with retrospective vulnerability—sharing past challenges you’ve overcome—before demonstrating real-time vulnerability. As trust builds, you can gradually increase transparency around current uncertainties and learning moments.

Reframe Failure Before It Happens

In fixed mindset environments, the fear of failure can be paralyzing. Rather than waiting until something goes wrong to reframe it as a learning opportunity, establish this framework before any work begins.

For product initiatives, I’ve found success with “pre-mortems” where we explicitly discuss:

• What we will learn regardless of outcome
• How this work contributes to our growth even if the specific implementation fails
• What constitutes useful failure versus careless mistakes

This approach makes the potential for failure an expected and valuable part of the process rather than a shameful outcome to be avoided.

Practical Techniques for Cultivating Growth Mindset

Leverage the Power of “Yet”

Dweck’s research highlights the transformative power of adding “yet” to fixed mindset statements. Encourage your team to reframe their thinking:

• “I don’t know how to solve this” becomes “I don’t know how to solve this yet”
• “We can’t implement this feature” becomes “We can’t implement this feature yet”

This simple linguistic shift acknowledges current limitations while maintaining possibility. It’s particularly effective because it doesn’t deny reality but transforms how we interpret it.

Create Safe-to-Fail Experiments

Designated safe spaces for experimentation can help fixed mindset teams experience the benefits of growth thinking without feeling their core work is at risk. Consider implementing:

• Innovation days where teams can explore ideas without commitment
• A/B tests where multiple approaches are explicitly validated, removing the “one right answer” pressure
• Prototype reviews where the explicit goal is to identify improvements, not judge the creator

The key is creating clear boundaries between experimental spaces and production work until the team develops more comfort with uncertainty.

Reward Process, Not Just Outcomes

In fixed mindset environments, only results matter. To shift this thinking, you need to visibly value and reward the process, effort, and learning—even when outcomes don’t meet expectations.

Create explicit recognition for:

• Thoughtful risk-taking
• Comprehensive learning from failure
• Effort and perseverance through challenges
• Knowledge sharing that helps others grow

What gets rewarded gets repeated. If you only celebrate successful outcomes, you’ll reinforce the very fixed mindset patterns you’re trying to change.

Shift from Personal Judgment to Collaborative Problem-Solving

Fixed mindset teams often experience feedback as personal judgment. Transform your feedback approach to emphasize collaborative problem-solving instead:

• Instead of: “Your feature design doesn’t address the core user need.”
• Try: “I’m noticing a gap between this design and what we know about user needs. How might we explore that together?”

This approach maintains honesty while shifting from judgment to partnership. It demonstrates that your goal isn’t to evaluate them but to solve problems together.

Balancing Authenticity with Adaptation

The strategies above might raise a legitimate concern: Am I compromising my authentic leadership by adapting to fixed mindset thinking?

I would argue the opposite. Your authentic goal as a growth-oriented leader isn’t to be rigidly consistent in your approach but to effectively foster growth and development in your team—whatever that requires.

True authenticity means being clear about your values and ultimate objectives while remaining flexible about how you achieve them. Your commitment to growth includes growing your own leadership toolkit to meet people where they are.

Teresa Torres, product discovery coach and author of “Continuous Discovery Habits,” articulates this balance well: “The most effective leaders maintain consistency in their values while adapting their approaches to what each unique situation demands.”

Measuring Progress in Mindset Transformation

How do you know if your efforts to shift mindset are working? Look for these indicators:

Language Shifts

• From “I can’t” to “I can’t yet”
• From “That won’t work” to “How might that work?”
• From “Who’s to blame?” to “What can we learn?”

Behavior Changes

• Increased voluntary sharing of mistakes and learnings
• More experimentation without prompting
• Teammates coaching each other through challenges

Outcome Improvements

• Higher rate of innovation
• Faster recovery from setbacks
• More diverse solutions to problems
• Increased psychological safety scores in team surveys

Product Team Transformation Framework

One of the most dramatic transformations I’ve witnessed personally involved a product team with a deeply entrenched fixed mindset following a failed product launch. The leader’s approach provides a replicable framework:

Within six months, the team had developed multiple innovative features that addressed longstanding user pain points—problems they previously considered “impossible to solve.”

What’s particularly notable is that the leader maintained their authentic commitment to growth principles throughout, but skillfully adapted their approach to meet the team’s psychological needs during the transition.

Final Thoughts: Your Mindset About Mindset

While the concept of growth mindset has occasionally faced controversy in academic circles regarding its effectiveness (Moyer, 2023), large-scale studies continue to demonstrate its impact. For instance, a national experiment published in Nature found that a short (less than one hour) growth mindset intervention improved grades among lower-achieving students and increased enrollment in advanced mathematics courses across a nationally representative sample of U.S. secondary school students (Nature, 2019).

Perhaps the most important insight I’ve gained is that we need to apply growth mindset thinking to the challenge of mindset transformation itself. If you view fixed mindset thinking as an unchangeable trait in your team members, you’ve adopted a fixed mindset about mindset!

Your role as a leader isn’t to force this transformation but to create the conditions where it becomes both possible and advantageous for team members to shift their own thinking. This requires patience, strategic adaptation, and unwavering belief in people’s capacity to grow.

The gap between your team’s current and potential performance may feel vast, but with the right mindset—about their mindset—you can bridge it.