The Innovative Mindset

By Linda Zhang

In The Innovative Mindset, an audio course from Scribd Coach, former product manager and startup expert Linda Zhang shares how you can develop a mindset of innovation to solve problems in novel, effective ways. Drawing on her experience working in tech and independently as an entrepreneur, Zhang explains how you can turn thoughts into insights, how to rewrite the internal software of your brain, how to search for the right problem, and more. She also shares exercises along the way so you can begin putting what you’ve learned into practice.

If we want to maximize our potential over the course of our careers, we need to know how to roll with the punches and develop new solutions that work. Zhang offers an excellent roadmap for tackling such a task.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribd Coach
• Release date: Jun 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781094444901

Linda Zhang

Linda Zhang is a former big tech product manager, consultant, and founder of Product Lessons, a newsletter where she shares what she’s learned in her career, unfiltered. A Harvard alum, Zhang rapidly rose through the ranks of product management and received an offer from Instagram before choosing to do her own thing. To learn more about Zhang and her work, visit her website, ProductLessons.xyz.

Book preview

The Innovative Mindset

THE INNOVATIVE MINDSET

LINDA ZHANG

SCRIBD COACH

Copyright © 2022 by Linda Zhang

All rights reserved

ISBN: 9781094444901

First e-book edition: June 2022

Scribd, Inc.

San Francisco, California

Scribd.com

For more, visit www.scribd.com and follow @Scribd on Twitter and Facebook.

About Scribd Coach

This ebook is brought to you by Scribd Coach, a new imprint from Scribd dedicated to short-form, inclusive, and insightful personal and professional growth courses written by recognized experts.

Each Scribd Coach course is available in audiobook format or as an ebook transcribed from the audio course — like the book you’re about to read. If you’re interested in the audio edition of this course, or if you’d like to read more personal growth content from Scribd Coach, check out the Scribd Coach imprint page. 

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Introduction

Hello and welcome to The Innovative Mindset, a course from Scribd Coach. My name is Linda Zhang.

If you’re like many people in the world, you get up every day and set out to solve the everyday problems you encounter, whether they be personal or professional. Think about it. At home, you’re dealing with financial issues, relationship problems, and everything in between. At work, you’re expected to solve problems both big and small on a daily basis. As they all start to pile up, it can be more than overwhelming.

That’s the reason I decided to create this course. My hope is that you will be able to use the tools I’ve gleaned from my time in different industries seeing good and bad examples of how problems are solved. At the end of this course, my objective is to transform you into a truly innovative thinker.

It all starts with the question: How do you develop an innovative mindset? Is it even possible or is it something you’re just born with? Fortunately, you can learn to access your innovative mind with a few adjustments to your thought process. In this course we will go through the steps necessary to consistently access your insightful nature so you can skillfully problem-solve and develop products that service the needs of your consumers.

Our first unit will be all about how to turn thoughts into insights and turn those insights into innovations. In the second unit, we’ll discuss how to rewrite our own software so we can begin to think differently. Our third unit will explain the importance of searching for the right problem and outlining the three steps we’ll need for a more innovative mindset. Our fourth and final unit will go over the five timeless lessons I gleaned from studying the rise of Amazon, and how that can influence your own decisions.

Before we jump in, let me share some information about who I am and how I’ve acquired the information in this course. I grew up in Canada and got my degree from Harvard University. Throughout my career, I was promoted to group product manager at a $12 million start up called Faire in less than