What does it take to grow from a junior to a senior position?  

How do I become more valuable?

While every type of position (development, marketing, sales, etc) has it’s own set of hurdles you’ll have to overcome I think there is one universal truth:

You become indispensible by making everyone else awesome. 

You will not find a step by step guide to doing this.  If someone tells you there is one you’ve been lied to. It’s subjective and everyone’s path will be different.  But if you’d like some practical examples I’ll go on to prove the point:

Getting to Level 2

If you are a new recruit, out of college, you probably depend on other people for assistance.  From that POV you are actually making people less successful because other people are spending time assisting you complete your tasks.

Moving out of the junior (or whatever title your company puts on it) should be based on how well you are able to complete your own work without depending on others to be successful.  At this point you are contributing to the greater good and growing your skills on your own.  This should be the quickest transition for people.

Getting to Level 3

Once you’ve demonstrated your successful independence and growth over time you’ll ask what it takes to be a viewed as a “Senior” member of the team.  This is where you need to drop your focus on individual success and move onto team success. 

The first indication that you are on the right path is when people start coming to you for advice.  That means you’ve found a niche in something that’s made you individually successful.  The hard part is not learning to turn your secrets into team success.

It doesn’t mean you need to be a manager or team lead.  A good example of this in the development world is having created your 1st framework that other team members can use to be more successful.  It could simply be that you become the go-to person when people want their work reviewed. 

Beyond Level 3

There are two equal paths here that any good company should recognize:

Path #1 is for people that want to dedicate 100% of their time to other peoples success. 

These are people that will be directly leading people. At this point your success is demonstrated by your ability to attract, motivate, and retain fantastically successful teams and do so on a continually larger scale. 

Path #2 is for people that want to become an expert in their field. 

It’s the most often forgotten path for a lot of companies, so I’ll provide some more details here.  The universal success factor remains true and good companies would never succeed without these people.  Your title/paycheck/worth here is still valued by how successful you are at making other people shine.   Except in this case you are doing so through what, on the surface, may appear to be individually focused accomplishments:

• You continually solve problems that other people give up on for those people… but along the way you teach them to fish for themselves.
• You take every opportunity to share what you’ve learned with other individuals on the team because you know you’ve failed if you have to be the goto “hero” for everything.
• Your niche has become bigger and more important now that you’ve found a new way to look at something.
• You discover new patterns and implement scalable frameworks that other people can use over and over again to solve multiple problems. 
• You kick start efforts or projects by taking those first painful steps or proving that the impossible is possible… and it doesn’t cost as much as other people thought.

Bonus – Taking the Macro View for World Domination

As I was thinking about this topic I came to the ?obvious? conclusion that the most successful ventures and companies are the ones that are dedicated to extending this philosophy to their customers and derive meaning for their employees in doing so.  On the surface there are individual accomplishments, but when you dig there is always a larger platform/framework play that drove unprecedented success by making other people money.

On the surface… Microsoft commoditized a simpler computer experience, Google helped you find information faster, twitter helps you communicate more quickly, and Apple re-invented smartphones.

Dig deeper and you find… Microsoft built the best PC development platform, Google developed a business model for web sites through ads, twitter built the simplest communication API, and Apple one upped Microsoft by making the best* mobile platform for developers to make money with.

The challenge is to become the best at scaling what you believe in for other people.  As an employer… once you find people that are good at this… don’t lose them since they are the hardest to replace… as they’ve become the most indispensible.

My mother was in town and she had her heart set on a new Netbook (no fancy iPad for her).  We decided to go to Target to check them out.

While we were loitering around their electronics section a Target employee spotted us and asked us if we needed any help.  We told him we’d decided on a the netbook and he offered to fetch the blue one for us. 

When he returned he asked if we needed help picking out a case for it.  We asked his opinion and settled on a case.  Then the following conversation occurred.

Me: “Ok, well, thanks for you help.  We have some other shopping to do so we’ll check out in the front.”

Target Employee: “If you don’t mind, could you check out in Electronics so I get credit”.

Me: “I didn’t think Target worked on commission, but if they do I’m glad to make sure you get it. “

Target Employee: “We don’t have a commission plan.”

Me: “So what’s the motivation for you to check us out here before we’re done shopping”.

Target Employee: “Well, I get points for selling accessories with the electronics… like the case you got.”

Me: “What can you do with the points?”

Grinning Target Employee:  “At the end of the month we get a smiley face.”

Me: “And what does the smiley face get you?” – Anticipating some sort of reward beyond the sticker…

Highly Motivated Target Employee: “If we have a smiley face next to our name at the end of the month we don’t have to sit through the 2 hour training on how to sell more accessories.” 

Me <Now having decided to withdraw my application for employment @ target>: “So meeting avoidance is your only motivation?”

Sad Faced Target Employee that wished he was selling for ANYTHING other than points & stickers: “Pretty much… that meeting sucks. “ 

I think you can readily spot the lessons contained in that conversation. 

The usage of user personas as they are built today has to stop.  If you aren’t familiar with the concept that was developed in the mid-90’s….

“Personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/or behaviour set that might use a site, brand or product in a similar way. Personas are a tool or method of market segmentation.”

Meet Mort.  He’s 50 years old and he is a rocket scientist.  He’s been married twice with 4 children.  One of the things he does as part of his job is develop applications that connect to embedded devices used to test missile guidance system.  He doesn’t have the time to learn the ins and outs of programming languages so he relies heavily on visual tools and code completion services in the editor to help him write.

It’s too bad I don’t read fiction or I’d probably be better at writing it. Mort doesn’t exist, but to a couple thousand people building software at Microsoft he did.  He was a compelling character that helped drive the features and focus of several teams.  The genius was in the illusion of agreement about Morts character traits. This was a guy everyone wanted to get behind and help succeed at his job.  User personas, as a tool, are used to drive thousands of projects every year in the software industry, but it’s time for a change.

We are now in an era where customer connection is so painfully simple Mort can be replaced with real users.  User personas are not people and you are building something for real people.  Here are some of the issues with the use of this abstraction technique.

1. You can’t ever ask Mort any questions. Once the persona has been made you can only consult the character sheet… Which only has information you have already collected about this perception of your customers.
2. Personas are generally built with very little validation. It’s a tool that requires significant resources and dedication to use properly.  It’s rare that someone goes back to customers after interviews were conducted (that assumes there were interviews) to state, reflectively,  “this is who we are building our products for… Does this character speak for you?  My bet is that most people would say no and probably laugh at what they saw written on the character sheet.
3. Personas allow you to be one step removed from anything real about the product or service you are offering. You get to have lots of meetings, visits, etc designed to facilitate building a persona instead of using those resources to offer a updated product or service based on what you heard… Why do you need the level of separation? Why not speak directly to people about the problems they want you to solve.  This practice is like playing the telephone game with the feedback that could be used to make your offering better. If you have people working for you that aren’t smart enough to draw the right conclusions from real information…. Why do they work at your company?
4. Timelines. If you have to ship a product in less than a year… you don’t have time to do this properly.  By the time you’ve created agreement about the character traits they are probably outdated.
5. The Fiction. Everyone loves to participate in creating neat fiction.  It’s fun and it makes it easy to create the illusion of agreement.  By the time the persona gets to an engineer, in an effort to make sure facts don’t get in the way of a good story details may have been omitted and some disparate customers may have been lumped together… Meaning the Frankenstein you created probably doesn’t exist. The people good at solving problems are now doing so with static variables that were set incorrectly.

So now what???

So what’s to be done instead? How should customer traits be aggregated into something that can do some good?

1. Get real. If you must use personas do yourself a favor and find 5 real people that map directly to a persona.  Make the story about these five people and the challenges they face. Use only real quotes from these customers to rebuild the persona so it’s has a clear foundation in reality. Videos or audio are even more powerful.  Create a library of real data that everyone can read and a way to contact the real people behind the information.
2. Trust Osmosis. Have a question, transcription, or some feedback delivered to your team every single day. This is only for reading unless there is something that can be done in 15 minutes to reply to the customer.  No big changes need to happen as a result of this feedback.  The big changes will happen over time thanks to the osmosis.   Everyone at your company should be spending 15-30 minutes today at least reading something from a real customer that is using your service.  This creates a personal connection that just can’t be delivered from a fictional character.  People want to know they are building something for other real people and they need to hear, from those people, the kind of positive and negative impact their work is having. Over time the realities will sink in and if larger changes are needed they will feel natural and no one will question these changes since they’ve been reading why they need to be made everyday.
3. Leverage customer support. These people spend most of their days working with real customers that like your product enough that they didn’t give up at the first sign of problems… They let you know about the issues!!!  Of course you should make sure you solve their problem first, but then you should encourage a real conversation be had.  Rotate a set of 10 questions that you can ask people that contact support about how the software is working well for them.  Record the answers and share it with everyone.  I’m not talking about some canned survey, but open ended questions that would lead to a real 5-10 minute dialog.  This information will add up and you might find that, once you have the customer thinking about the positives they will come back to buy more of what you are selling later on.. If not on the same call.
4. Make sure customer support is everyones job. Everyone can answer one question a week from a customer.  They don’t have to do it directly, but if you have people employed that can’t answer one customer question a week on their own… Why do they work for you?  When they do it, they get to ask their question and ideally engage in a real conversation with the customer.
5. Use real data whenever possible. Does the data validate what the customers are telling you? Eye witnesses are the least reliable source of information on a crime seen… If you have real data on the behavior it needs to be put right next to the eye witness report.   If you don’t have numerical data to validate an observation it must be treated as an isolated observation until proven otherwise.

There you have it.  Leave the fictional reading for your vacations and get real with your teams.  If you like writing these stories… Take a class at your local community college, but don’t force fiction on people.  Take it from someone that’s been reformed.  There is no such thing as the ideal customer.  I used to be part of these definitions and seen them used well… But never as well as non-fiction.  Its so easy to engage in real conversations with people today it’s a sin to abstract that information behind fictional characters.

Hmmm… I wonder what’s not easy to read, thin, and under a pound?!?! 

I’ve decided that new feature work should start with a design for a mobile device first.  We’ve been working on mobile stuff for a while now and I’ve realized there is power in the constraints.

1. You have an easy excuse to cut all those “extra requirements” & the “wouldn’t it be easy/cool if features”… screen size.
2. You focus on what’s core to the experience in the content column… face it, most of your users aren’t going to read all the crap you put in the sidebar of your sites. They’ve been trained that’s where ads live.
3. It makes you think twice as hard about any imagery on the page.  The buttons have to be obvious so the user knows what they are going to get and you don’t have room to explain it with text.
4. Even with wifi and 3g you don’t take page size and bandwidth for granted. Even with wifi the browsers on these devices aren’t as fast as their desktop, native javascript running, counterparts. Minimalistic FTW!
5. You’ll be done faster and able to communicate the core experience more quickly to others to get feedback about what’s really important.
6. If you give someone a HUGE blank canvas they freeze with the thought of everything they could do with the space.  Give them a post it note and they can focus on one part at a time.

Over the weekend I finished Rework and figured I’d share some quotes from it as well. This book was excellent and the perfect complimentary read to Linchpin.  There was a lot of overlap and similar concepts.  While Linchpin was more psychology, Rework gets a little more practical and specific in it’s advice.  Now, onto the quotes..

“Another common misconception: You need to learn from your mistakes/ What do you really learn from mistakes?  You might learn what not to do again…You still don’t know what you should do next.”

They go onto to talk about how the best learning comes from success.  This, IMO, is like choosing to build your product based on it’s strengths and not it’s weaknesses.  If you’ve done something well then chances are you can do it even better the next time because you will have learned from the success.

“We’re just as proud about what we don’t do as we are of what they do… We’re willing to lose some customers if it means that others love our products intensely… if you had to launch your business in two weeks, what would you cut” 

Just a reminder of the classic advice that you can’t make everyone happy.  I also loved the discussion that follows about how the are OK when customers outgrow their software. 

“The business world is littered with dead documents that do nothing but waste people’s time, reports that no one reads, diagrams that no one looks at, and specs that never resemble the finished product.  These things take forever to make, but only seconds to forget.” 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a 60 page specification written when only 10 pages of the functionality are implemented. It’s so much easier to say yes when you are months away from doing something than it is when you are right about to do it.   The ones that read the document are blinded by the end of the story about the awesome thing they saw in their heads… which wasn’t really the key part of the feature being described.  The writing it just not consistently that good.

In our last cycle there was an opinion that we never wrote specs or planned features.  The reality is that, if you lined up the work item descriptions, comps, and real mock-ups we generated nearly 300 pages of documentation.  But the hit rate on those 300 pages was MUCH higher than if we’d started out be trying to write 300 pages of functionality. In retrospect we were working hard to remove “the illusion of agreement” that Jason described. 

When it comes to reports… I’ve also written my share of reports that I’m pretty sure I could have filled with LOLcats… and no one would have noticed.  Critical data doesn’t need to be repeatedly shared.  One time analysis, when it’s needed, is MUCH more powerful than regular, de-humanized, status.  So, my advice would be to at least try and humanize any required status reports you make and come up with one insightful stat that means something to everyone that week.

“If what you’re doing really worth it?  is this meeting worth pulling size people off their work for an hour? Is it worth pulling an all-nighters tonight, or could you just finish it up tomorrow. “

One of the best managers I’ve had put it to me this way “If a difference of 1-3 months matters that much then what you were doing probably wasn’t going to succeed anyway.”  Not weeks… MONTHS. 

“Interruption is not collaboration, it’s just interruption. And when you are interrupted you’re not getting work done. “

One of the advantages of being a remote worker is that I get 2-3 hours of “alone zone” time.  It really is when I’m most productive.  I’m not sure how anyone in the office gets real work done without working 12 hour days sometimes.  I also enjoyed Reworks rant against meetings that followed this. 

“Meet at the site of the problem instead of a conference room. Point to real things and suggest real changes”

+1

“… estimates that stretch weeks, months, and years into the future are fantasies. The truth is you don’t know what’s going to happen that far in advance”.

This continued Reworks assault on traditional planning.   Do you think the release known as “windows phone 7” was actually on Microsoft’s roadmap… or did it completely break the long term plan when they saw the market rejecting Windows Mobile?

“How should you keep track of what Customer want?  Don’t. Listen, but then forget what people said… The requests that really matter are the ones you’ll hear over and over… You won’t be able to forget them. “

I’ve found this VERY true.  The important bugs, features, and requests will simply keep coming up. The ones that seem important to one customer, when it’s not repeated, is probably not that important.

“Geography just doesn’t matter anymore. Hire the best talent regardless of where it is.”

+1

“The more people you have between your customers words and the people doing the work, the more likely it is that the message will get lost or distorted along the way.”

I tweeted “Second hand feedback kills” a week or so ago.  This could not be more true.  The people that file the best customer reports are the people that simply post verbatims or even recordings of what the customers actually said and know how to ask the best questions.  No interpretation can substitute for the customers actual words.  The skill is not in the translation… it’s in the interview.  The answers should speak for themselves.

“There are four-letter words you should never use in business… they’re need, must, can’t, easy, just, only, and fast. When you use these four letter words, you create a black and white situation. But the truth is rarely black and white.“

+1

“Create a rock star environment… there’s a ton of untapped potential trapped under lame policies, poor direction, and stifling bureaucracies. Cut the crap and you’ll find people are waiting to do great work. They just need to be given the chance.”

This was the part of the book that really overlapped with Linchpin.  The simple point was to create an environment where the linchpins can thrive and you’ll get more out of everyone. 

Just like Linchpin, there are a bunch of quotes I didn’t share with you all, but that’s why you should read the book.  

“…Achkowledge to yourself that the factory job is dead.”

“Having a factory job is not a natural state. It wasn’t at the heard of being human until very recently. We’ve been culturally brainwashed”.

I love how Seth correctly describes how “white collar” work has been successfully converted to a factory system over the last 100 years and how that’s now made the majority of our workforce replaceable.  There are even whole books dedicated to how you can create your own software factories. So not even “modern” jobs like software engineering are safe from the commoditization… and who wants to be a cog… which of course becomes the key part of the book. How to avoid being a cog.

“Answering questions like ‘when was the war of 1812 is a useless skill in an always on wikipedia world”

I found this in a chapter about how our educational system brainwashes us from the start to worry about questions like this.  It made me very grateful that my parents rejected public schooling in my area.  Most of my education focused on answering the why’s and hypothetical’s instead of the what’s.  I missed out on brainwashing. 

“Six-Sigma refers to the quest for continuous improvement, ultimately leading to 3.4 defects per million units.  The problem is that once you’re heading down this road there is no room for amazing improvements and remarkable innovations. “

This explained, to me, why pursuing training in the ways of Six-Sigma never interested me. It’s learning a skill that takes you down the path of a solved problem for perfecting execution… which isn’t interesting to me.  It’s the perfect example of how white collar work has been turned into a factory line. 

“Artists think along the edges of the box, because that’s where things get done.  That’s where the audience is, that’s where the means of production are (still) available, and that’s where you can make an impact. “

This statement tackles the absurdity of “thinking outside the box”.  The real win is doing something on the edge of possible that keeps pushing the goal line at the intersection of innovation, audience, and possible to ship.

“You work with people who are totally at the mercy of the resistance. They assist the devil by being his advocate in meetings. They follow the rule book, even parts you didn’t know about. They love what worked before and fear what might be coming. “

There is a lot of talk about “the resistance” and “the lizard brain” that comes from our evolutionary heritage where survival comes first and change is scary.  I thought there was some oversimplification of these points, but it served the book well.  Everyone has a resistance in them that tries to prevent us from making forward progress, improving ourselves, and shipping something outstanding.  The resistance could include fear, office politics, and generally worrying about things you have no control over.  You do, however, have control over what you do every day and a chance to do something awesome with your time instead of 20 things that are merely good.

“In a world with only a few indispensible people the linchpin has only two elegant choices: 1. Hire plenty of factory workers and scale like crazy. Take advantage of the fact that most people want a map… 2. Find a boss who can’t live without a linchpin.  Fine a boss who adequately values your scarcity and your contribution, who will reward you with freedom and respect. Do the work, make a difference”.

That sort of speaks for itself.

There were a lot more sections that I highlighted to share with you, but i committed that I’d ship something on a deadline so here we are. 

Windows Mobile used to be awesome.  If you wanted a geeky phone it was the cat’s meow.  Then the iPhone came and made customers demand strengths in phones (as a product) that Windows Mobile simply didn’t have.  So they had to reinvent themselves.  There is art in reinvention and it’s captured very transparently in Charlie Kindles blog post “Looking into the future – last year”.

…Then we said to the team

“Pretend you writing a product review for your friends and family. Also pretend it is late 2010 and the new phones with Windows Phone 7 Series are in consumers hands and developers have been building & selling apps & games for a while. Write a fictional review critiquing what we built.”

We actually did this at an “offsite meeting” and had groups of 3-4 people go off for about an hour and report back to the group.  We really wanted to get people thinking about this product the way connected busy people outside of Microsoft would perceive it.

He then goes on to share some of the new product strength definitions that they goaled themselves with. 

• It’s easy to build beautiful applications users just love

  • The platform makes it easy to ensure performance, reliability, security, and battery life.
  • The platform encourages high-quality and rejects low.
  • Deployment, upgrades, updates and safe removal are handled by the platform
  • An application that works on one device form-factor works on all others

The combination of this planning exercise… getting the team involved and then clearly stating simple strength definitions resulted in the creation of art.  I don’t have one yet, but I love what I’ve seen about the new Windows Phone experience and developer platform. 

Now if they could just get Words with Friends written for one by the time it comes out. 

What does a manager have to do to tell them to work faster… show them what the people paying them had to say. Starbucks was clearly ahead of the curve when they were one of the first companies to employee the mystarbucksidea.com concept and this, IMO, is the next logical step. 

They need to arm their local outlets with the same sort of tools to connect with customers, publish their feedback, and respond.  Enter the “hyperlocal ideation” age.  It’s only a matter of time before they will want software to manage this process once this concept proves popular.  Heck, every star bucks I go to already has a big-screen that could show this information. 

Combine the data from cards, online surveys, a group created for that branch, foursquare tips, etc and you can get an idea of the type of BI that a local manager could soon be armed with to improve business. 

The reality is that you have very little to do with what your true product strengths are.  True product strengths (or TPS for office space fans out there) is really defined in the intersection of what you do well and how customers use the product you sell them. 

On the left side you see “Employee Talents”. This is what you are good at building and what you may currently be defining your product strengths as.  On the right side you see customer usage.  This is how your customers are using the product you sell.  In the middle is your TPS… this is the set of things that you really do excel at that combines the two. 

Strength based product development would be a set of practices that focus on growing the True Product Strengths intersection by focusing on them.  A very simplified set of practices could be incorporated into any development methodology:

1. Self Evaluation – Always re-evaluate your employee talents, what you are good at building, and define the list on the left hand side. 
2. Customer Listening – Working with your customers to identify what parts of your product they really love and leverage you for.
3. Create your TPS Report – Create the unison (TPS).
4. Prioritize the TPS items in your development.

It’s not rocket science and any good company is doing at least #1 or #2, but doing it right involves combining the two into step 3. 

The side effect of doing this right… You will stop focusing on your weaknesses and your requirements become absolutely clear. Other than baseline requirements for all products like security, performance, etc you are wasting time you spend not focusing on TPS.  Features & requirements that don’t focus on TPS will only frustrated your teams since they aren’t good at delivering those things and your customers will complain they get things they don’t need to pay for.

Executing strength based development properly will result in growing the true strengths of your product, employees will love working on things they are good at, and customers will be delighted that you are delivering more of the things they already love about your product.