How to build a team that can “take a punch” | Hilary Gridley (Head of Core Product, Whoop)
Hilary Gridley, Head of Core Product at WHOOP, on building team resilience, AI-accelerated learning, and the behavioral psychology behind high-performance product leadership.
- Gridley’s ‘take a punch’ tactic: instead of defending against criticism, take one small action that counterprograms the narrative you fear others have of you.
- The approach is rooted in CBT’s behavioral activation: act first to feel better, not the reverse; Gridley keeps a personal list of mood-lifting actions for low periods.
- She found out she was pregnant by noticing anomalies in her WHOOP HRV and resting heart rate data before a clinical test.
- WHOOP 5.0 adds a Healthspan feature showing how behavior changes (e.g., 20 more minutes of sleep) alter your biological aging pace in real time.
- Gridley built a GPT that generates LSAT-style logical reasoning questions in PM scenarios so her team can get unlimited practice reps on demand, not just when edge cases arise at work.
- She argues AI tutoring can compress years of entry-level reps into weeks, citing Nigeria studies where AI tutors dramatically accelerated student math and reading progression.
- Her core transparency tactic: weekly Slack rundown to her team of verbatim quotes from senior leaders plus her interpretation of why they said it, to build shared mental models of how executives think.
- WHOOP 5.0 also adds blood pressure insights, ECG, hormonal cycle tracking, 14-day battery life, and a waitlist for in-app comprehensive lab work.
2025-06-15 · Watch on YouTube