How to build emotional intelligence in product management - Pippa Topp (CPO, giffgaff)
Pippa Topp, Chief Product Officer at giffgaff, joins Lily and Randy to talk about emotional intelligence in product teams — what it is, how it develops, and why it matters for leadership. The conversation covers recognising defensiveness as an EQ signal, the conscious competence model, applying empathy inward as well as outward, and how to cultivate a culture of reflection across a product org. Pippa also shares her own journey from judgement to over-empathy to finding the balance, and makes the case for self-belief as the foundation of emotional resilience.Chapters
00:00 – Introduction & what is emotional intelligence?
04:39 – How low EQ shows up at work: defensiveness and reactive communication
08:28 – Extending product empathy skills to stakeholders and peers
10:33 – The conscious competence model and coaching people who don't know what they don't know
13:21 – Coaching techniques: life stories, separating facts from narrative
14:58 – Assessment tools and organisational EQ at giffgaff (Insights)
16:33 – Pippa's own EQ journey: from judgement to over-empathy to balance
22:37 – Coaching a junior PM through resistance, self-doubt, and breakthrough
28:40 – Leading through a forced decision: surfacing team emotion to move forward
32:39 – Cultivating EQ culture: group coaching, values-based behaviours, measurement
38:48 – Neurodivergence, self-awareness, and building a feedback culture
44:00 – Can AI support emotional intelligence?
47:41 – Is it okay to cry at work?
51:29 – Self-belief as the foundation of emotional resilience
Key Takeaways
— Defensiveness is a signal. When you feel reactive in a meeting, that's your emotions directing your communication. Building self-awareness creates space between stimulus and response — enough to choose curiosity over reaction.
— Facts vs. narrative. A core coaching habit: separate what actually happened from the story you're telling yourself about it. Most emotional spirals live in the story, not the facts.
— The conscious competence ladder. People who lack emotional intelligence often don't know it. The first job — as a coach or leader — is making unconscious incompetence visible, then moving people toward conscious practice.
— Empathy maps aren't just for customers. Product teams spend significant effort understanding user behaviour but rarely apply the same curiosity to peers and stakeholders. Extending that practice internally builds trust and reduces friction.
— Over-empathy is its own failure mode. Going too far — absorbing everyone's feelings, avoiding accountability, fearing the label of bad leader — is just as problematic as low EQ. Compassion and accountability aren't mutually exclusive.
— Self-belief underlies emotional resilience. When leaders are in tears under pressure, the root cause is often a missing foundation of self-belief. Building that foundation — "I am not my role" — is what allows people to respond rather than react.
— Behaviour-map your values. Abstract values like "curiosity" become measurable when you define what they look like in practice — and what their opposites look like. Teams can observe and reflect on those behaviours rather than trying to quantify something inherently internal.
— Crying at work isn't the issue — dysregulation is. The more useful question is why it's happening. — Emotional responses that come from genuine feeling in context are human. Those that stem from dysregulation — in either direction — signal something worth exploring. Receive SMS online on sms24.me
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