Many EMs and Directors struggle to understand how to drive their own career and personal growth, this session seeks to use the destination as a way to reverse engineer the path to personal growth.
Many EMs and Directors are type-cast into a single area of excellence, whether this is people management, technical operations, or some other thing. This can lead to an artificial ceiling on your own growth, you know how to do this one thing so well that you fall back on it too often, and you may find that roles that you aspire to evade your reach, that you’re overlooked in favour of others. In my experience this can be overcome by not asking what you need to learn, but instead asking what those who have those roles further in your career path are doing, and then to reverse engineer the path to that destination by looking at which skills gaps exist for you today.
I use a simple framework for this, a set of a few questions that will help show what other aspects of your current role you can start developing. To those managers I’ve mentored in the past, these questions have unlocked self-learning and drive, and helped accelerate their growth and steepen career trajectory, it’s all very accessible as a set of concepts, and applicable to any manager from those starting their people management career through to those at Director level, and I hope those above this level have already figured this out.
This talk is also applicable of Staff+ IC levels, as a lot of the basics are directly transferrable to IC leadership skills too.
Key takeaways
Five key questions are used to highlight areas for you to focus your learning:
- Do we have the right team?
- Do we have the right technology?
- Do we have the right product vision?
- Do we have the right balance between innovation and liability?
- Do we have the right product <> market fit?
