The way to take responsibility
Don’t demand authority.
Eagerly take responsibility.
Relentlessly give credit.
- Seth Godin, on The quickest way to get things done and make change
A few months ago, I reached the point in my job as Product Manager when I became the go-to person if anything related to the product broke. All the complaints came to me. I felt constantly under the gun for things beyond my control.
This was very hard to take. I was constantly caught off guard. To be clear, the product generally works tremendously well. But minor things always come up. I felt like a deer caught in headlights whenever someone raised an issue. Because I cared so much, I took every complaint personally. Not that I felt that I was being insulted per se, but I felt personal grief (as a colleague once said) over the product’s every minor failing. It was very difficult to bear.
At one point, I considered distancing myself and trying to learn to not care. If I cared less, it would be easier to swallow, easier to let things roll off my back. Easier to not feel my stomach clench up every time someone came by to tell me some aspect of the product wasn’t working.
I also got defensive. Totally natural response. Emotionally, in my head, the first reaction was to defend myself. But I didn’t even build this thing! I didn’t know this was going on. (Then I felt guilty - how could I not have known this was going on.) This is not even my customer. (But it is my product.) I can’t even fix any of it. Someone else has to go into the code and fix it. Why isn’t that person being blamed.
Then came the hardest part. I needed to take all of this frustration that was being thrown at me, and I had to swallow it and filter as much of it as possible (which will not be enough), and I had to turn around to the engineer and ask in cheerful spirits if he would please fix this bug, it’s important to our customer.
(In really difficult cases, I had to work through the engineer’s protests and persuade her that this was a good investment of her time.)
Good times.
It was only in the last couple of weeks that it dawned on me that my dad’s job as manager must be like that. All the time. This is the crux of management. You are responsible for everything, even though you don’t actually do anything. But if you want this role, you must take responsibility, regardless of whether or not you think it’s your fault. It is always going to be your fault. So take responsibility. Take it willingly, take it eagerly.
As for feeling like you have no control, that is not an acceptable response. The way to earn authority is to exercise it before it is bestowed upon you. Take responsibility first, act with authority, get things done. Eventually if you keep doing this and do it well, official authority will follow. But by that time, it won’t matter to you. You won’t need official authority to get things done.
And when the bug is finally fixed by the engineer, give away the credit. Give away all of it. That, too, is an act of authority. That, too, is part of the responsibility.
(How’s that for working in public.)
Failing successfully
Since starting, I have gone through cycles of feeling like I’m doing well and feeling like I’m failing. From the outside, it probably looks like things are constantly challenging but generally improving. The stages are probably not noticeable at all, or at least nowhere near as pronounced as how I experience them. Internally, it’s helpful to identify where I am in the cycle to maintain perspective. If I’m at a low point, it’s useful to know I will probably not stay there forever. It’s also useful to know that a lot of the stages are defined by changes in my own expectations rather than external factors.
1. Doing well
The good part. I expect myself to be able to do certain things in my role at my level of experience. And I do them well. I am meeting my expectations. Things are under control. To quote Paul Graham, the spinal cord has the situation under control.
2. Failing
Then at some point, I receive external feedback. Why are you not doing X? Why did you not think through Y? Or something breaks and I wonder why didn’t I anticipate that, this is under my purview, I should have known better. I tell myself, feedback is good, don’t get defensive, listen to feedback, keep an open mind, listen! But critical feedback is never easy to stomach.
3. Feeling like I’m failing
So I feel like I’m failing, and it generally sucks. I start to identify all the other things that I should be doing that I’m not doing or not doing well enough. I actually feel like I’m failing at everything, even though I know it’s not true. I become the world’s worst boss of myself.
4. Being prepared to suck
At some point, I realize the self criticism is not helpful. It is also tiring. I realize what is perhaps the most important thing of all - the bar has been raised. I am not actually failing. I am merely failing relative to a much higher bar. I have earned the right to fail against a higher bar, and that’s a good thing. I start digesting the feedback. I accept that I am going to be underperforming relative to this higher bar for awhile. I become prepared to suck. I lean into that awful feeling instead of running away from it.
5. Learning
And this is where the learning can happen, if you choose to accept it. The criticisms, internal and external, are not personal attacks. They are instructions for change. They might not feel great, but if I commit to the work and keep chipping away at it, eventually…
6. Doing well
Eventually, I do well again. The good part returns.
Rinse. Repeat.
Finding the guts to work in public
Working in public. I first came across the idea in Tony Chu’s blog. He talks about opening up the learning process, the creation process by writing publicly about the journey as you go through it. Write vulnerably, gather feedback, expose yourself to interesting ideas.
He linked to a post over at Snarkmarket - the art of working in public. The post is about other (famous) people’s working in public. On BERG’s Matt Webb and The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal:
They both conjure a sense that the piece is almost being written as you read it. It feels like they’re just a [paragraph] or two ahead, and if you picked up the pace, you could catch them—overtake their blinking cursors. It feels slightly chaotic and totally thrilling. They both let you inside their heads.
You see, I’ve been trying to find the guts to work in public. I want to write about product management on this blog. But I am terrified.
I don’t know where to draw the boundaries. I feel like I cannot say too much about what goes into building our product because I don’t want to reveal trade secrets. I feel I shouldn’t write about my coworkers, even though I think extremely highly of them, because it doesn’t seem fair or polite to expose their learning experiences here. (I am also still getting used to the idea that some of you, dear coworkers, read this thing. Hello! I am flattered that you bother to read.)
I feel that I cannot write about when things go wrong. I feel I cannot write about when I’ve screwed up or have fallen below the mark. I cannot write about all the times I am totally making up my job as I go along. I cannot write about the moments when I face severe decision fatigue and struggle to stay objective and positive and helpful. Or the days when I do all that and I am still asked why I didn’t do better, and then I just want to hide under a rock. Except I can’t. Because someone else is pinging me with an issue.
But that is where it is all fascinating. Where I most need to take a magnifying glass to the problem and study and learn.
I want to reveal things to you and to myself, because I want to think more critically, more clearly, more originally. I want to ramble about things I still don’t understand, about the gaps in my knowledge, about the things I’m only vaguely aware that I should pay more attention to. So I can figure it out. I want a record of when I didn’t know.
I want to work in public because a lot of this work is utterly and endlessly interesting to me.
There you have it, the struggle. I’ve been trying to blog more to find the guts to work in public, but all you get are posts about everything else. Some of it is better than I expected, even as I go after volume over quality. But I am still trying to crack the heart of it.
I want to talk about product management.
The Snarkmarket post describes the sensation of reading weeknotes by CEO Matt Webb of the design firm BERG:
For the span of a few thousand words, you are riding shotgun as co-CEO of BERG.
There is often an extra office chair stationed right by my desk. I have taken to calling it “my office hours chair”. There is almost always someone - a PEM, an engineer - sitting in that chair asking me a question, a problem, a thing I need to make a decision on, a thing I need to commandeer resources for so I can say yes to, a thing I need to find a reasonable way to say no to.
If I could figure out how to work in public, this blog would put you, dear reader, in that chair. Imagine that blog.
How to work in public and reveal nothing. That is the question. That is the art.
Meanwhile, I’m going to cross industry boundaries and go read some weeknotes over at BERG.
Connecting online to offline
For these two weeks back home, I’ve scheduled lots of meals (when one is in Singapore, one eats) to catch up with friends. These are typically with Singaporean friends I’ve known since my school days. This is the first time that most of these meals are with people whom I’ve gotten to know in the past year. A couple of you I’ve only met once in person. One of you I have never met in person. We have only had a very long Skype call.
I suppose our circles have evolved. I have taken more introductions since b school and since joining the startup community. The more introductions you take, the more you want to do, the more you receive. A virtuous cycle.
I have been fortunate enough to meet most of you through very good email introductions. The first degree friends who did the introductions knew why we should get to know each other. There is context, there is some kind of essential common ground. There is something valuable that could be exchanged. That something valuable is most often each person’s perspective (on startups, on bondbreaking, on whatever). Not all introductions are created equal. With weaker introductions, that something exchanged is information. With very good introductions, that something exchanged is friendship. In the best cases, a kindred spiritness.
In all these instances, our offline interactions have been enhanced, sustained by our online presences. I think about the friend I am meeting for dinner. We have only met once in person for maybe 10 minutes in a group setting, had one long Skype conversation. But through all our other mutual reading of blogs and tweeting and email exchanges, I feel I know him well enough that I would be glad to use my social capital to recommend him to anyone. (And I also feel close enough to demand that he bring an autographed copy of his new book to dinner!)
I would go so far as to argue that there are meaningful parts of online interactions that cannot be replicated offline. When you read someone’s blog for instance, you get to hear a version of what they sound like to themselves and how they want to be heard by the world.
Emails, long pensive personal emails, achieve a similar effect. I once had a friend call me and he said he wanted to pick up the phone and call because he was tired of how emails felt so impersonal. I thought to myself, no, that’s just because you don’t understand how good emails work. I love a great 2-hour catch up phone call, but don’t dismiss email. A good, thoughtful email gets closer to how that person wants you to know them when they are presenting themselves, edited and uninterrupted. There is communication and then there is communication.
I’m not about to suggest that online interactions are better than offline. Of course not. I do think it’s simplistic to insist that all offline interactions are “better”. I don’t know what “better” means. You can’t build the same connection across different media. But that’s the whole point. A smiley face :) is a poor substitute for how it feels to have someone beam at you in person. But there are tones of a lighthearted Twitter exchange between friends that cannot be replicated in an offline conversation. You cannot speak a URL.
The point, to me, is always the connection.
The internet doesn’t change what we as human beings need to feel connected to each other. It’s just another tool, another medium. Our psychological and emotional needs for connectedness are the same as what they have been for thousands of years. The internet, if you get how to use it, is connection enhancing. The very opposite of isolating.
People who want to connect will find a way to do so meaningfully in any medium. On this trip, I am glad these online interactions can go offline. And I’m sure we’ll pick them back up online. Seamless. It’s wonderful.
Of business trips and a three-year-old
Another day, another business trip. This place is growing on me.
It’s funny but there are things mentioned in the meeting that refer back to things that happened months ago. I remember what happened and I also remember how I felt back then, how lost, how mildly terrified that I was going to screw up a big deal. Except that of course, I had no idea how big a deal. And I had no idea that this particular working relationship would turn around and become a partnership. We’ve come a really long way.
Getting to see people change is an amazing thing. Getting to see companies change equally so.
**
I squeezed in an extra meeting that afternoon. I got to catch up with a b school friend over ice cream. He brought his two daughters along. Kate is 5 and Jane is 3. At one point, I have a moment alone with little Jane and she decides to pretend to be Kate.
I ask Jane, “Okay, if you’re Kate, what would Kate say? Say something that Kate would say.”
Jane thinks for a long time. Then she bursts out, “‘No, Jane!!’ That’s what Kate would say.”
:)))
When we leave, I hug my friend. I get in my car. Then Jane decides she wants a hug too. So her dad carries her over. My new three-year-old friend hugs me and kisses me on the cheek.
**
May all your business trips be so full of blessings.
The way to love your job
Step 1. Follow that feeling
Last March, I almost chose a different path. I actually gave up this job, almost signed with another one. But then I just couldn’t fight the feeling. It ate at me. I couldn’t sleep. I was terrified that I was changing my mind so dramatically - overnight it seemed! I’m not one to make fickle decisions. When I make decisions, major ones, even smaller ones, I tend to know. But it was just one of those few moments in life where the feeling overrode everything else. I wanted to move across the country and take this job with a startup that I frankly knew very, very little about.
I would say whenever you get that feeling, follow it. Especially if you think of yourself as a rational person. Follow it.
Step 2. When you get there, give it all you’ve got
People tend to put too much effort into a getting a job, and sometimes even a wrong job. This seems to be especially prevalent among b school types. They don’t put enough effort into the job itself when they get there. Given that you should be at your job longer than you spent recruiting for it, it would make sense to channel your efforts into the actual job.
If you have gone through the pains to find work that you deem worthwhile, the thing that matters is committing to the work.
Step 3. Then let it go, give it away
Give away the success. The only thing you can do with any success you receive is to use it to benefit others. Any skill, power, influence you accumulate must be used to help those around you do better. You can’t hold onto it anyway. I know, I’ve tried holding onto it before and lost more than I thought was possible. So I have learned that the best way to hold onto success is to give it away.
And give, more. This week came with a very nice prize. Regardless of whether I deserve the prize, I know that the conditions that led to the circumstances that made the prize possible, the conditions that made it possible for me to love my job? That is undeserved good. Grace.
A good friend sent a note this morning saying the universe has been kind to him recently, so he’s doing his regular habit of putting money into Kiva. A good reminder. I put $100 into Kiva this morning and will give more this weekend.
Cultivating Creative Depth
I was asked today what it takes to perform well in the Product and Engagement Manager role, what skills we expect from candidates, what skills I bring to this role. I said something about being analytical and being technically comfortable even without a CS background and being a good problem solver, because you’re doing a lot of things that just haven’t been done before. And then I said, it takes a certain kind of creativity to do this job.
Then I was pushed on that point. “Where does that creativity come from?”
I suppose there is nothing in my formal previous work experience that is particularly creative. I’ve done personal projects that were acts of creativity, in the sense that I was creating something where there was nothing before.
But in this case, I said, “Well, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a deep thinker.” Recently my lead engineer came up with a creative and actually very un-technical solution to a problem that had completely stumped the rest of us. The solution first struck me as out of left field. Then as we talked more, it became clear that this was the latest expression of something he had been noodling on for months. This came easily because he had considered these ideas in many conversations many times before.
This led me to wonder, how do you cultivate creative depth? How do I learn to do what I had witnessed? Admittedly the gap between me and this colleague is at least a PhD and several magnitudes of brilliance, but that aside…
I think it is a combination of many things. Spending more time, thinking about it more, talking about it more. Understanding the whole product at greater depth. Throwing more ideas against it and seeing if anything comes of it. Applying your thoughts in novel ways to edges of the problem. Trying on multiple perspectives.
And then there is this matter of breadth. You need to expose yourself to other ideas, other problems, other ways of thinking. Things that might be completely unrelated. Adjacent possibles and adjacent adjacent possibles. Breadth is necessary to cultivate depth.
And then there is this matter of heart. Committing to knowing something inside and out. Knowing it well to the point that you can exercise creative thought around it. It stops being something you need to get to know and starts becoming something with which you create.
Work’s been busier lately, so it’s been hard to check in here. But these things have been very much on my mind.
Tasks vs. outcomes
I figure out what to do each day based on a running to-do list. This is the first job where I’ve really needed it, because there are too many discrete, non-standardized tasks to keep it straight in my head. A task on my list takes anywhere from 15 min (email customer about something) to a few hours (do a deck for a particular analysis that I’ve never done before).
The problem with the to-do list is that it’s about tasks and not about outcomes. It is outcomes that matter. An outcome could be something like increase revenue for a customer or building good relationships with people. There is no one single task that will cause the outcome. There is arguably a set of tasks that could build up to it, but the tasks are hard to define. And concrete, measurable outcomes are better than vague ones, but some highly desirable outcomes can only be qualitatively stated and cannot be quantified.
So I am trying to get better at linking my daily tasks to the outcomes. More importantly, I am also trying to nail down this art of defining the outcomes.
Let me explain one area where I know I’ve done it wrong. I’ve been setting these quarterly goals. I have “keep up classical music habit” as an outcome, and the corollary tasks are to see a certain number of performances a quarter. The problem is that the task itself can become quite meaningless. If I just show up at concerts for a bunch of evenings and check off my to do list, I would have completed the tasks and even achieved my stated outcome, but I would not achieved what I actually want.
What I actually want is a deeper relationship with the art, a more in-depth appreciation. I want these experiences to make me feel and think differently about the world. A tall order but I think that’s the point. So I need to define my outcomes a bit differently. A well defined outcome should put me in a different place from where I started.
So that’s what I’m trying to figure out. What are these outcomes that I would like to have say, a year from now. And what are the tasks I can do every day so that a year from now I arrive at that outcome.
(And how do I stop doing tasks that don’t lead to the outcomes.)
Matching your job to your leisure reading
“Every time I switch jobs, I learn to read a different section of the papers.”
-@chewinglum
That’s a one way to do it. I’ve done the exact opposite. I’ve matched my job to my leisure reading.
Two years ago, I found myself reading a whole bunch of social impact books. Three Cups of Tea. The Blue Sweater. Half the Sky. Etc. Couldn’t get enough of it. I figured, if I’m going to spend all my time thinking about social impact issues, I might as well try to work in that field. I went after impact investing.
A year and a half ago, I got hooked on TechCrunch and VC blogs and my Twitter stream of tech reads. When I wanted to procrastinate b school homework, I’d consume tons and tons of that stuff. It also made me really want to work for a startup.
When I started recruiting for startup jobs earlier this year, I could now do the same thing but feel productive. The funny thing is, I just felt like I was procrastinating all the time. Getting to procrastinate all the time is a great feeling.
I once chatted with a classmate who really wanted to work in VC and told me she keeps up with the latest tech trends by reading TechCrunch. The problem with this is that she’s keeping up. Her competition for these jobs read, eat, breathe all things startup for fun. To the people who love this stuff, TechCrunch is less like the Wall Street Journal and more like People Magazine. In a field where there are people driven by love, it is very hard to trump love with brute force.
Not all leisure reading habits can be turned into jobs. And success in any field requires some serious hard work and discipline at some point. But where you waste your time can be a pretty good indicator of where you should use your time.
Thank You Project Update #3: Last Call
(Cross-posted from update to the Thank You Project)
Dear backers,
We have 4 days of fundraising to go! We are now 541% funded by 49 of you. Wow. This has totally exceeded my expectations.
Some stats and observations:
- 65% of you know me in person; 35% of you were total strangers to me before this project. The stranger % is much higher than I had expected. The Kickstarter “discover” function has worked surprisingly well. My new day job is all about enabling the discovery of good content. When I look at the number of you who have backed multiple projects, it’s really interesting to me that Kickstarter has solved a version of the content discovery problem by building a very special kind of community.
- 51% of you chose 1 card; 31% chose 3 cards; 17% chose no reward. This means I will be making 70+ cards. !!
- I continue to be really curious about why people back this project. Some of you like sending thank you cards (“Southern tradition” came up). Some of you just love the idea of “thank you”, regardless of the card part. Some of you think it’s “good value”. One of you is running a Tumblr to document all the cards you’re sending via snail mail to people this year. (How cool is that!) And some of you are just really sweet and generous to back this because you know me and I’ve bugged you about it. :)
What happens next:
- Next week, I will be sending you a survey to get your recipient message, address, etc. Once the surveys go out, you can fill out the survey any time in the next 30 days. As your replies come in, I will make and send your cards.
- There will be a brief note enclosed with the cards to explain to recipients what the Thank You Project is about.
- You’ll get a confirmation when your cards have been mailed.
Thanks a huge bunch for being part of this! I’ve actually drawn all the cupcake covers. Yes, many baker dozens of them. I’m super excited to start writing your messages soon.
If you know of anyone who might like to back the Thank You Project, tell them it’s last call - just 4 days left!
*
If you’re reading this from the blog, send a card through the Thank You Project here.
