The Continuous Cycle of Growth

Do you remember the first time you rode a bike? Or perhaps the first time you played a sport? If you were anything like me and almost everyone out there, then diving into anything totally new starts with a lot of embarrassing failures (unless you are a superstar at everything you do- I’d love to meet you). I still remember when I first started playing tennis I would go watch professional tennis on television, feel inspired and then go and play on my own. This would normally result in either one or two things- a swing and a miss or sometimes if I was lucky enough a swing and hitting the ball over the fence. Eventually, I went on to have a 10 year career in the sport and played competitively at a Division 1 program. We all remember the famous old adage ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day.’ Well neither are careers, and that’s the purpose of this read- to talk about how I’ve thought about growth in my career and to help you assess your own personal growth.

For most of your life up until you get to the workforce, the process for success was relatively formulaic. You go to high school (and focus on getting good grades) go to college (pursue the major you’re interested in and you guessed it- focus on getting good grades again). You generally know that you’re succeeding (and doing well) by performance in classes through grading system and your standing relative to your peers. Hopefully through your education/university, you may venture out and have the opportunity to try out a few internships and then get a full time job and crush it in the workforce. I started my career off in software engineering, and later got into product management after undergrad because I was really interested in understanding what customer problems to solve and why they were important (in contrast to the stronger emphasis on the technical delivery and execution that an engineer might be focused on). During these internships, my experience was that these companies generally had a few metrics that they would evaluate employees on. These were based on a standard system of values that the company was founded on. A few examples could be customer impact, business impact, or collaboration. You would be given a level (Ex. needs improvement, meets expectations, or goes beyond expectations). This approach was effective, but one of the many reasons we started the TechKnowledgical podcast was because we also wanted to help people understand how they can grow within a certain role or discipline. I’d like to discuss a few ways I’ve thought about it personally.

Transitioning forward to my first role in product management, I was really excited about delivering massive value+impact from day 1 to help benefit our clients and business and to work with an incredibly talented and passionate team in doing so. In reality, this process was really rocky and bumpy at the beginning. There were so many new phrases and technologies (that I hadn’t heard or been exposed to in college), several of the people on my team that I worked with were already so experienced and comfortable with their processes, and it was very tough to understand where I could add value to the team (especially in a role where your job is to help define the customer problem, vision, and strategy of your product. Similar to the failures I mentioned in playing tennis, this was the process at the beginning. Despite the challenges, I continued to be persistent in asking questions (challenged my own ideas and hypotheses), developed relationships with my stakeholders and various team members, determined ways to add value to the organization, and embraced ambiguity and failure.

My journey started off by working on very specific features and projects and supporting other senior product managers on the team. Under their supervision and support, I learned how to survey what to build, properly write out feature templates, communicate with other cross-functional teams, and to ensure we were effectively measuring the impact we were delivering to our customers. As I continued to do this, I kept going through this cycle and worked to gain credibility and support from my team. Over time, I slowly noticed that the features and initiatives that I was working on spanned additional teams and products within the company, I was able to help provide frameworks for other teams to follow, and finally I started to realize that concepts and items that I thought were obvious weren’t as readily apparent to others- I was learning and providing value. When this started to occur, I felt like I was stepping from a more entry level team member to someone more mid-career level. I wanted to provide a set of questions and criteria that I think may help you in assessing yourself and your own career growth.

1. Do I feel more confident to take an ambiguous problem from start to finish? As you grow in your role, career, and scope, you may find yourself being handed ambiguous problems from either a customer, the business, or someone in your leadership. You will be expected to take these ambiguous problems and determine how to put shape, structure and actionable plans towards them. Ultimately, it will be your job to lead your team and/or other teams to execute on this plan. If you don’t feel like this is the case for you, keep starting small and working through the end to end cycle. Slowly this scope will grow.
2. Do I feel that I can help other teams and/or team members solve. similar problems I faced? When you continue to solve problems and projects for your team, you may start to get confident about how to approach these problems with a common framework in mind. Other teams and/or team members might find themselves faced with similar issues. If you can help provide them with direction around your approaches and solutions (what worked and what didn’t), you will be able to jumpstart their process. This in time will help add more value to the organization and team- attributing to career growth.
3. Am I contributing to the broader team’s and or company’s goals/objectives? Your company and your team (and ultimately you) exist for a certain reason. When you look at your team or your company’s north star, your work should continue to be more and more impactful towards that objective as you grow. If this doesn’t apply to you or doesn’t make sense, start with asking your leadership team what their objectives are and find a way to make sure your work relates to those and increases its impact back to those over time.
4. If I were to switch domains and industries, would I still be able to apply my learnings and skills? As you grow, you should be able to apply your newly earned skills and knowledge to the new environment you find yourself in. Most companies and roles (regardless of industry), need people to deliver on a standard and consistent set of responsibilities. If you were to shake things up, challenge yourself and take on a role in a new space with different customers and as a result different types of problems, do you feel like you could go there and add value? If the answer if yes, then congratulations you are growing! If the answer is no, that’s ok, keep working through cycles and completing projects end to end at your current role.

By focusing on these criteria and questions, I was able to learn, grow and ultimately gain additional scope and responsibility in my role. This has helped me understand how to keep pushing myself in the right direction and to assess when I need to make a change or take on newer challenges. These suggestions for input are by no means exhaustive and just served as a rough guide for me. Hopefully this is helpful to a few of you, and if you have any feedback or thoughts, please don’t hesitate to reach out!