Transition Reflections

Posted on July 18, 2022 by Julia Austin

Monarch chrysalis (Danaus plexippus) in its “neutral” phase.

Over the past year, I have had several clients going through periods of transition. Some have been co-founders who realized that it was time for a more experienced leader to take their business to the next level. Some were just ready for something new. Others have shifted their roles from leader to individual contributor and in one recent case, a CEO-founder sold their company and is now transitioning to a leader within a very large organization. In each of these cases, these were not overnight changes, but rather they were thoughtful shifts that each managed with intention. By transitioning with intention, we are more likely to come out on the other side with more clarity, less stress and with a higher likelihood of success – in whatever way each individual defines success.

The book Transitions, by William and Susan Bridges, outlines the three stages of transition – The Ending, The Neutral Zone and The New Beginning – and encourages the reader to pause and understand each of these phases during their own transitions. This is something most of us do not do with intention – whether it’s ending a relationship, changing a job or transitioning from a household of kids to an empty nest. When it comes to our employment, we have our last day at an old job on a Friday and start our new job on Monday; perhaps taking a week or two in between to decompress. Most people do not have the luxury of long breaks between jobs or extended periods of time to think about their transition before they step into the next thing. Additionally, as Bridges points out, we often don’t see when we are in a neutral zone – that time when we have officially “let go” of who we were before things ended, before we fully embrace the new beginning. Think of it as that time between how you associate yourself with “we”. When you stop saying “at my last company, we…” but you have yet to associate yourself with the “we” of your new role and still refer to your new team as “you”. E.g., “How do you do things here?” It is in this neutral zone where we are truly able to start our transition to a new beginning.

With this neutral zone in mind, I encourage my clients to take a moment – even if it’s just an afternoon – to consider the impact of a transition and what lies ahead. This is usually in the form of journaling where they write their responses to the prompts below and then we discuss them together. Whether or not you have a coach with whom to process your answers to these prompts, you should find journaling your responses to be a useful exercise. You might also consider asking a friend or partner to be your listening guide as you talk them through; be sure to encourage them just to listen and be curious about insights vs. helping you try to solve things.

The prompts below are very career-centric, geared towards startup founders. However, one can easily apply this guide to any type of transition.

Document Your Feels

There is lots of research proving that writing what’s going on in our brains is an important way to process and organize our thoughts. Whether you keep a journal or are just taking a moment in transition to write your thoughts, consider the following:

Highlights & Lowlights

What are 1-2 highlights from your experience? This could be a memory of your first big product launch, closing a hard funding round or even just that night that all hell broke loose and you fixed a hairy bug at 2am. What made these experiences great? What do you remember about how you felt – physically and emotionally – about these events? How did they motivate you going forward?
What are 1-2 lowlights from your experience? It could be that one time you really thought the company was dead or when one of your best employees quit because they just couldn’t adapt to the frenetic startup life. What made these experiences awful? What do you remember about how you felt – physically and emotionally – about these events? How did they motivate you going forward?

Learning

What have you learned as…a leader, partner, employee, peer, innovator, business-person? Most leaders wear many hats and it’s important to use these different lenses to fully embrace all the learnings that came from your journey.
What specific skills have you developed or mastered? Consider all functions within an organization – financial, sales, product, hiring, etc. These are typically your marketable skills and are often very transferable for the next gig.
What are you more aware of about yourself that you may not have known at the start of this journey? For example, you may have thought you were not technical, but after having to build your company’s first app because you couldn’t afford to hire a developer, you now know you are more technical than you thought you were at the start!

Evolution

How have you evolved? Consider phases in your journey – by role or “eras”. For example, perhaps who you were as a strategic leader was very different when you were bootstrapped vs. once you raised your A-round and had a board of directors. Or, perhaps you have shifted in the way you approach the work day as you went from being single to being married with children.
Who have you become? Think about your key characteristics, your behavioral patterns and attitudes. How is the current “you” different from who you were when you first started this journey? Do you feel differently about things (family, relationships, career) or have changed your reaction to certain situations (more/less triggered, sensitive, focused, caring)?

The Future

What new tools do you wish to ADD to your toolbox? For example, a product-oriented CEO may wish to learn more about creating a sales playbook or experience venture from an investor’s perspective vs. as the fundraiser. What tools are missing from your toolbox?
What existing tools in your toolbox do you wish to HONE? For example, a founder may have led a small team and might want to know what it’s like to lead a larger team at scale. Or perhaps you were great at building a social media campaign, but want to learn more about the broader elements of marketing and brand functions.
What do you wish to leave behind? Consider elements of your role that you didn’t enjoy and that you don’t want to do again (e.g., finance or maybe even management!). Similarly, consider behavioral characteristics that no longer serve you. Were you a micromanager who spent too much time in the weeds? Did you spend too much time on product and not enough time on the rest of your business? Think about what drove you to develop these behaviors, why they did or didn’t serve you in your role and how they will or won’t serve you going forward.
- NOTE: The act of physically releasing things can be very healing. Start by writing a few sentences or drawing pictures on a piece of paper and (safely) burn it or fold it into a paper airplane and toss it from a city window or into the sea. Instead of writing, you could also use natural objects to represent things (e.g., an acorn to represent your tough outer shell or a dried leaf to represent being fragile in certain situations). State your intentions – out loud or in your mind – as you let these things go. What will be different once you let them go?
What do you wish to teach others? Whether your transition is related to a great exit or awesome promotion or because you feel you failed in some way – your business imploded or you were fired – you have lots to teach others! My father called any learning, even if we failed, “money in the bank”. Take time to reflect on what you learned (above) and how you might be able to mentor others to grow or avoid pitfalls. Not only will this help others following your path, but this will also help you further process your transition.

When journaling the above, I encourage writing full sentences and fully expressing your thoughts around each. Don’t worry about being legible – you may never go back to read them – it is the act of writing that is key here. As you write, look for themes or patterns – do these further inform your transition? Do you see new patterns and/or growth opportunities?

Other Opportunities To Reflect And Reach Closure

If your transition involves others such as cofounders or partners, consider conducting a group reflection process in addition to your individual process. This can be a great way to recognize how the sum is greater than its parts. While each team member played a role in your efforts, it is almost always how the team worked together that led to where you are now. Schedule a couple hours to be together – ideally, face to face and out of the office/home – and share the following with each other:

Highlights & Lowlights of the work you did together. Consider specific wins you had as a team and what made that work together special. Name one or two times that the team was not at its best. How did these moments affect the trajectory of your business/relationship?
What are you most proud of as a team? Are there events or elements of your business that could not have happened without the team coming together?
Key learnings for each individual. Have each person speak to one or two key learnings. It is OK to “+1” someone else’s key learning, but that should not supplant one’s own learnings. Try to acknowledge each of your team members as they cite a learning. “You crushed that big deal. I learned a lot from watching you navigate such a tricky negotiation.” OR “Firing that great engineer who was a bad teammate was so hard. I really admired the way you handled that situation.”
State what you wish for each other to encourage their path forward. For example, wishing them a great new partnership or a challenging new role.
Finally, commit to each other. This may be very tactical like committing to getting together once a quarter for beers or a family gathering. Or, it could be committing to supporting each other in their journeys going forward (networking, job reference, a place to crash when they are in town, etc.…).

These prompts work best when they are spontaneous vs. prepared in advance, so I recommend sharing the prompts when you come together. This certainly depends on the type of relationship you have with your partners, but if you are the CEO with co-founders all going through a transition, I recommend you do the above with a facilitator OR at the very least encourage your partners to speak first so as not to bias their reflections. Further, if you and/or your partners have significant others, do not lose sight that they too are going through this transition. A partner who’s significant other is all of a sudden more available than they were when they were running a company, or who is feeling insecure because their partner just lost their job, needs to reflect as much as you do. Make the space for this and include them in any group processes that will serve these important adjunct members of your group.

The New Beginning

You may know exactly what your New Beginning is – e.g., your company was acquired and now you’re in a new role at the acquiring company – you’ve got a new business idea or you have no idea what’s next. When you are unsure about what’s next, it can be easier to think about what you don’t want in your next role vs. what the perfect next role might be. Here are a few prompts to consider for the next thing:

What types of roles do you know you definitely don’t want? This could be a level of responsibility (e.g., a founding CEO may know they never want to be a CEO again) or within a function of an organization. (e.g., an engineer who became a product leader may prefer to go back to coding).
What industries are off the table for you? Maybe you spent the last decade in e-commerce and you’d like to try an adjacent area like MarTech or retail?
What type of people do you prefer to not work with? E.g., extroverts or introverts, micromanagers, jerks, etc.
What stage of business disinterests you? E.g., does the thought of inheriting a team vs. starting a team from scratch sound miserable? Or perhaps you never want to have to fundraise again.
What would you have to see in your future role to signal potential? Often, when in transition, we overcorrect for the things we didn’t enjoy in our last role. You may cut yourself off from something you might enjoy based on fear from your past experience. Consider what characteristics are important to you in a new role that may allow you to step into discomfort in an effort to grow and learn.

Whichever route you take, if you have less urgency to get employed ASAP, take as much time (if not more) to consider what’s next as you do with your reflections about what was. I suggest a ninety day period – yes, I know, that may be an unaffordable luxury – where you take at least 30 days to reflect, 30 days to consider your new beginning and then 30 days to gear up for the next thing. Even if you are working through the next thing during this period, try to recognize that you are still in transition and journal new insights as they arise.

Transitions are not always easy and we often don’t give ourselves the time to fully process our endings before we jump into the next thing. Take the time if you can and I am almost certain you will find it helpful. Have you tried other techniques to help you process a transition? Please share in the comments!

Paving The Way For Less Experienced Hires At Early Startups

Posted on March 8, 2021 by Julia Austin

Photo Credit From: https://hfaplanning.com/

So many of the early stage companies I work with are struggling to hire talent. Despite the pandemic, they have raised capital and are looking to hire everything from engineering and UX to marketing, sales and support. You’d think with the pandemic there’d be a lot of people looking for work, but in startup land (tech or not), it’s definitely a candidate’s market…unless you are considered too inexperienced for a role. I especially see this for candidates in underrepresented talent groups where there are less opportunities to develop strong networks. Further, less experienced candidates coming from first jobs at a big company where they hoped to gain mentoring and experience before going to a startup can be boxed out before they even get their careers of the ground. These candidates are often viewed as unable to work in a more scrappy, smaller scale organization.

The most common reason for not hiring less experienced talent in a very early stage company (say, less than 20 people) is lack of time to manage and mentor these team members. I get it. If you are a startup leader, you want an A+ team of people who are self-starters and have seen the movie before. While also more expensive, experienced hires should know how things work and in theory should hit the ground running. That said, even experienced hires rarely work effectively and that independently on day one. Further, I don’t know a single startup that has hired an all senior team and never had to let someone go (or they quit) within their first 90 days. This can be because of a mismatch in expectations, lack of alignment or often it’s because the more senior team members had become accustomed to managing more than doing in their prior roles; they were potentially “startup curious” and couldn’t scale down and/or they had lost their player-coach edge.

It is rare that any startup gets their first twenty hires right. Iteration, learning what you need in your team and evolution as your product changes and company grows is a likely cause for lots of refactoring of teams in the first few years. Therefore, hiring a few less experienced folks could net the same result as one senior hire – some will work out, and some will not. Yes, letting someone go or having them quit and starting over is a total time suck, but that’s part of the game and most companies get better and better in finding and keeping great talent over time. From my personal experience working for several startups early on, each of which had insane growth, I found having a mix of seasoned and less experienced team members can be a super power. Less experienced team members were hungry and eager to learn and the senior team members enjoyed mentoring and handing off the more menial tasks so they could focus on meatier and often more strategic work. It was a win-win and many of those junior team members have had incredible careers after we gave them their first shot.

For the Manager

Here are a few things to consider for those anxious about hiring less experienced talent:

Pipeline: In this candidates’ market, hiring managers need to treat recruiting like a sales exercise. Fill the funnel! Overly prescriptive job descriptions will limit applicants (especially women) – this includes being too specific about the number of years of experience required which may not translate well for someone who’s been coding since middle school, but has only been in the workforce for 1-2 years. Get the resumes in, then decide how you want to weed out less relevant candidates.
Pre-Interview Screening: Don’t judge a resume by it’s timeline! As noted above, many inexperienced candidates – especially engineers – have been doing relevant work well before they went to college or may be understating their contributions in their current roles. They may lack the confidence to promote their work, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get the work done. Consider having a screening question about how long the candidate has been doing relevant work that may not appear on their LinkedIn/resume.
Interview: Size the questions and/or the coding exercise with the experience. Determine if the candidate can learn quickly, whether they ask good questions and whether they can deliver on time. Early on in their careers, these are the key skills that will assure they will thrive vs. showing you their perfect coding capabilities in an interview or through a take-home exercise.
Potential for hire: If all that is keeping you from hiring a less experienced candidate who shows tons of potential is having the time or talent to mentor these candidates, look beyond yourself and your more experienced team. Have advisors who can sign up to serve as mentors for inexperienced folks. This can range from doing code reviews before check-ins to helping an inexperienced salesperson practice their pitch. These mentors do not have to have full context on your business or the details of the work; if they are seasoned, they know what to look for and should be able to offer objective guidance (and you should offer them some equity and have them sign an NDA, obvi!).
On the job: Yay! You are ready to hire a less experienced team member. Set the right expectations and scale the work. As with any hire, they won’t be up to speed on day one. Their 30-60-90 day onboarding process may look different than a more senior hire though. Start small and work up to more challenging tasks. As my favorite leadership coach Brené Brown says in her amazing book Dare To Lead “Paint what ‘done’ looks like.” The most common reason for failure between employees and their leaders in any job – regardless of experience – is misalignment about what the endpoint should look like. Always define and communicate measurable, clear, goals.

NOTE: If you will hire for a role within the next six months, but are not actively filling it, and a current candidate shows promise for that future role, hire them! You don’t want to kick yourself in a few months that you didn’t hire that candidate when you had the chance. This of course assumes you have the budget to do so.

For The Less Experienced Candidate

For folks dealing with the catch-22 of needing experience, but not getting job interviews or offers because you lack enough experience, here are some things to consider:

Highlight Transferable Skills: Look deeply at your resume and try to tease out skills you have gained in past roles that are applicable to the job you wish to land. Were you a camp counselor while in college? You likely have strong leadership skills, can multitask and work well in teams. Worked as a waitperson in college? You have sales and customer service experience! Were you on the robotics team or helped friends build their first websites in high school? You started building your technical skills earlier than you think! This also works for job shifters – pull out the buzzwords that highlight your transferable skills. Be explicit under each role such as “Product Management Skills:…” or “Sales Skills:…”.
Get Help: Find someone in your network to help you further tease out your experience in your resume and help you practice your interviewing skills. Tap into former bosses, advisors and college professors. If they can’t help directly, they may know someone who can! Practice both technical skills and general communication skills. Both are important.
Continuous Ed: Continue to develop your skills outside of school or your day job. Take coding classes online (there are tons) or participate in one of a gazillion webinars designed for core skills like sales, growth marketing and design. A silver lining of the pandemic is that there are now so many great online resources! If you complete these courses, list them on your resume; this shows initiative, willingness to learn and the ability to multitask if you did this work outside of your day job or school.
Never Assume: Finally, never assume that just because a company doesn’t have a job posting commensurate with your experience that should not apply. This could be a stretch opportunity or the chance to get a warm introduction to the hiring manager for a future opportunity. Taking steps like this is a first sign that you are ambitious and creative and many people will hire talent despite a position lining up perfectly or even being open. As noted for hiring managers above, good people are hard to come by! I have personally hired many talented people without a perfect fit or a role open at the time because someone showed promise or I knew I’d need them within the next six months.

If all else fails…

Still not sure you can bring someone less experienced on board or can’t get a young startup to take a chance on you? Get creative and offer a “try before you buy” option. Even if part time, it can be great for both the company and the candidate to do a small project together – for pay. The manager can get a sense of a candidate’s work and the candidate can get a sense of what it’s like to work at the company.

Tips on this concept:

Agree on a project that is no more than 2-3 weeks worth of work for a junior team member and with a clear deliverable.
Use the time working on the project to meet other members of the team. Schedule a quick meet and greet on Zoom or join team meetings to get a deeper sense of the company culture.
If the trial goes well and an offer is made, the equity vesting/cliff start date should be from the start date of the trial project.
Be careful about competitive situations. If a current employer has a clause in their employment agreement that says any relevant work done outside of business belongs to them, don’t do a trial role like this for a related business (sounds obvious, but I have seen this happen too many times!).

I am truly hopeful that more young companies will take chances on less experienced hires. This is where magic can happen for all involved and I can’t tell you how amazing it is to see some of my most junior hires “back in the day” now in senior leadership roles or starting companies of their own. Hopefully, they are now paying it forward!

How have you figured out ways to hire less experienced people or find a role as a less experienced hire yourself? Please share in the comments. You can also read more about my thoughts on hiring here.

Balancing The Many Hats Of A Startup CEO

Posted on September 9, 2020 by Julia Austin

Startup founders wear many hats that they take on and off as company priorities ebb and flow; especially, but not exclusively, CEOs. One moment they are the CFO and raising capital and the next they are the Head of Product and making critical roadmap decisions. As a quarter-end nears, they become heads of Sales and as the company expands (or contracts) they’re running HR. There can be tremendous stress when a founder tries to wear too many hats at once or struggles to decide which to wear, which to remove, and which to hand off to someone on their team – if such a team exists! The entrepreneurs I coach have used the following framework I’ve created to help them determine which hats to wear and when to wear them. While this article is largely focused on startup CEOs, the framework can also be an effective tool for other organizational leaders.

* * * * *

The Hats

The most common array of hats that a CEO may wear at any given time fall into the categories below, but no CEO – early stage or not – can split their time and attention so perfectly as the chart denotes.

Before deciding which hats to wear and when, a startup CEO should first identify with what their hats (categories) are in their current role. Using the visual above, here’s how I define these very common categories:

Product (What & When): This is what the company produces. It includes customer discovery, design, building, shipping and support. It also includes prioritization and tradeoff decision making for features, new products and services. Many startup CEOs are product people and this can often be one of the hardest hats to take off completely – if ever. Note that being a product visionary and/or a great coder or designer does not necessarily mean one is a great Product Manager – knowing how to make tradeoffs, analyze customer requirements or develop a product roadmap. Be sure to fully explore this “hat” before deciding it’s one to wear or take off.

Culture & Process (How): I was inspired recently by a coaching client of mine who combined these two into one category. If the culture doesn’t work, then the processes won’t work either. Creating high performing teams goes well beyond what workflows, policies and procedures are in place. It is how the team communicates, operates and evolves as a living organism. Never underestimate the value of focusing on culture with process starting from day one! Some CEOs are natural culture builders and system thinkers, but if this is not a strong suit, it’s definitely a hat that should be worn by an in-house culture expert or by someone with natural team-building/program management skills.

Strategy (Where, Why & When): Determining the company’s True North, setting direction for at least the next 12-18 months and making critical decisions about the company’s mission for things like fundraising, revenue growth and human capital. This is also about defining and communicating why the company is doing what it does which is as important as where it is going. Employees and investors/board members all perform better when there is clarity on why the company is moving in a particular direction. This hat is quite commonly on the CEO’s head forever.

Talent & Development (Who & How): A company will not succeed or grow without hyper focus on the growth of their employees. It is vital to the success and stability of an organization to establish best in class hiring practices and programs as well as to develop each person’s skills as individuals and leaders. As companies grow, CEOs must be thoughtful about where to focus hiring efforts, how to provide incentives to retain top performers and how to grow those with high potential. In addition, as companies grow, there will always be tradeoffs on when to promote from within, when to hire more experienced talent and when it’s time for some team members to move on. CEOs often wear this hat more often than others, but many have COOs or strong HR leaders on their teams who wear this hat permanently.

Back Office (How): A company can have the best product and team in the world and mess things up royally because the back office hat was on the wrong individual’s head. This is mostly finance (accounting, receivables, payroll, etc.) and legal (employee contracts, partnerships, etc.). I’m amazed at how many CEOs wear this hat for too long. It’s ok early stage, but let the professionals do this work once the company hits product market fit and is beginning to operate at scale. Some CEOs are former CFOs who are perfectly capable of leading back office teams, but data shows that CFOs often lack “Outside-in” thinking (a strong mega-trend and customer focus)” and lack the creative and inspirational leadership qualities of a great CEO.

Marketing, Sales & Business Development (What, Why & When): Brand identity, target audiences, community development, filling the pipeline, closing deals and creating strategic partnerships. These tasks often require CEO leadership – especially early stage. Some CEOs are very marketing/sales oriented which can derive huge benefits for the business as long as there are capable leaders on the team wearing other hats. However, many CEOs are not marketers and, like the Back Office hat, should leave that work to the experts.

The Have-to-dos, Want-to-dos & Good-ats

Rather than being stressed out trying to balance all hats at once, it is best to focus on wearing 1-2 hats at a time. These 1-2 hats are those that HAVE to be done. It’s great when these prioritized hats also happen to be hats a leader wants to wear and require skills that they believe they are good at, but that is not always the case – especially for early stage CEOs who often need to do a lot of things that they may be good at, but don’t necessarily want to do. Similarly, there can be things a CEO is good at and wants to do, but the business doesn’t require them to do it. Finally, there are times when something has to be done, the CEO wants to do it, but they lack the skill to do it well (self-professed or not!). Here are a few examples:

Finances – CEOs may be good at doing the accounting for the business and it has to be done, but often very willing to give that up as soon as they can hire a head of finance. They don’t want to do it!
Product/Technology – No matter how much a founder/CEO wants to design or code – and they may be good at it – there is a point as a company scales when CEOs have to take off this hat. They are no longer “have to-dos” at their level. Note, I have seen a number of CEO-Founders take their CEO hats off to dive back into the product!
Hiring – Inexperienced CEOs may be managing people and leading teams for the first time. They have to hire and want to hire, but are often unskilled when it comes to sourcing, interviewing and managing the onboarding experience. This is a skill they are not good at. However, this may be a skill they have to develop vs. hand off to someone to do for them.

If a company has the runway, the CEO can usually move swiftly to swap or delegate hats with the support of their co-founders and leadership team. They may hire more seasoned leaders or team members and/or offer training for those who need to develop their skills. However, for the fledgling teams who can’t fund these improvements, it is even more important to make hard choices about which hats to wear…even if that means letting some things slide or not executing perfectly. The tradeoffs can be hard and it is extremely common for CEOs to become so paralyzed about which hats to wear that the performance of the company is suffering more than if they had just picked 1-2 hats to focus on and move forward. The focus of this exercise can allow a leader to move quickly from one to the next so things don’t slide for too long.

To get started on assessing “have to-dos (HTDs), want to-dos (WTDs) and good-ats (GAs)”, I recommend a two-pronged approach:

Using the categories or hats identified, rate the HTDs, WTDs and GAs today and what the HTDs should be in the future. This exercise requires self reflection and a large dose of humility.
Define what measurable goals must be achieved to remove a particular hat OR issues that need to be resolved to put on a particular hat. Include an action plan (with timeline) that ensures goals can be met.

Using a framework like the chart below, begin to outline and rate the categories, 1-5. 1=low (this is a hat not being worn, not wanting to do, or something one is not good at ) and 5=high (absolutely something that has to be done, there’s strong passion to do it, self-assesses* that it is a strong skill).

*Self assessed skills are different than how others perceive one’s abilities. If unsure, do a 360-feedback survey with your team or seek outside help!

An optional third step is to color code each row to visually identify hats that are critical to wear (red), not urgent but important (yellow) and the hats that are satisfactory at this time (green).

I’ve created two charts below – before and after – as examples of how a CEO of a post series A startup with modest revenue might perform this exercise:

In the above example, the rows in green show where the CEO is satisfied with their current involvement (“hat wearing”). The rows in yellow are places where they need to adjust their involvement, but not urgent. The two red rows are urgent and where the CEO wants to put their focus.

In the case of Culture & Process, the CEO only rates their hat wearing as a “2” and there are serious issues in the organization to address. The CEO has identified what is going on in the “HTD Achieved/Needed When…” column which requires them to put on the hat and what actions they will take to ensure they are wearing that hat at least at a “4” (HTD Future).
In the second case, the CEO knows the Back Office work is important, but does not want to do back office work, nor do they feel they are good at it. Thus, they are working to remove the Back Office hat and reducing their involvement from a 4 to a 1. In this case, the bullets in the “HTD Achieved/Needed When…” column clarify what will be happening when the CEO has officially taken off that hat, moving it to a “1” (HTD Future).

Identifying what hats need wearing – and how firmly to wear/remove said hats – is step one. Taking actions to add or remove the hat(s) is step two. In the case of ramping up on Culture & Process noted above, the CEO would kick off the action items and set a timeframe of when they would be able to remove that hat. They would then update the chart to be clear what will need to be in place for them to remove/loosen that hat. Similar with Back Office work, once the key actions are achieved, the chart is updated to reflect that the Back Office hat no longer needs wearing. The updated chart may look like this:

With the updates above, the CEO has removed their Back Office hat and is firmly wearing the Culture & Process hat. They can now continue to focus on the Culture & Process hat until it can be taken off (“1”). They can also decide which of the two yellow rows – Product and Talent & Development – they want to focus on next while the other areas of the business require less of their attention.

Most CEOs who follow this process use months or quarters to time-box focused efforts and update the charts, but it all depends on how one works and how fast change is happening inside the organization. Choose what works best for you!

No Recipe Is Perfect

The exercise above is one way of thinking about how to balance many hats a CEO – or any leader of a large team – might wear. There’s no perfect algorithm and while one might aim to only wear a maximum of two hats at a time, there will be times when more hats will have to be worn. I’ve also seen CEOs who find that once they’ve mastered a new skill, the hat they didn’t want to wear is actually one that they enjoyed wearing more than they expected.

There are of course sometimes when CEOs realize that no matter how much training, coaching or mentoring they get, they are not able to wear any of the hats well or they just don’t enjoy wearing them. This is often when the company is achieving a level of scale that requires more experience than the CEO’s own professional experience. Some CEOs recognize this and work with their boards to find a successor, but sometimes this can be a decision taken out of a CEO’s hands when their board/investors decide the business can’t wait for the CEO to grow into the role. I’ve also seen many CEOs who find a great partner (President or COO) to run the business with them and augment some of the skills they have yet to or want to master. This not only keeps the company on the rails, but gives the CEO a role model to learn from along the way.

Conclusion

CEOs should be performing a regular assessment of where their time is focused, identify measurable results when changes are made and what actions to take to get there. Even a simple visual like the Before and After on the balance wheels below can kick start the process. Identifying what the current focus areas are (before) and where should they be (after).

No matter how a leader decides to assess and prioritize their hats, leaning into the balancing process will likely mitigate stress and potential burnout. What processes have you seen that are effective towards balancing hat wearing? Please share in the comments! Meanwhile, if you are thinking about trying this exercise, I have created a google sheet template for anyone to use to start this process. Feel free to save a copy of the template for yourself and dig in!

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NOTE: The balancing hat illustration at the top of this article was created by my daughter, Amelia Austin and is copy-written.

Self-Awareness & Asking For Help Are Super Powers!

Posted on February 19, 2020 by Julia Austin

What’s the difference between having an Advisor, external coach, internal coach, and/or therapist? Should I join a Peer support group? I get asked these questions a lot. The good news is that usually when I am asked this question, it’s because someone knows they need help. With so many options these days, it’s hard to know which to choose or how best to leverage each, or whether adopting a combination of any or all make sense.

My perspective on the many ways to get help…

Advisor: Most advisors are domain experts or experienced operators in a particular area (product, marketing, sales, finance, etc.). They are commonly called upon when domain-specific guidance is needed, to make introductions to customers, prospective partners or job candidates. Advisors may also mentor junior members of a team when you lack the funds or time to hire in an experienced leader. Advisors are usually given equity for their contributions, commensurate with their experience and the time they commit to the company. Some advisors work ad hoc as needed, others are more prescriptive with set number of hours per week/month that they are available for consultation. In some cases, advisors are involved so much that it warrants a mix of equity and consulting fees. My heuristic for these types of engagements are to assess whether they are performing a part-time role you’d otherwise fill with a full time employee (FTE) if you could find/afford them. These engagements should be time-boxed and outcomes measured as you would do for any FTE.I recommend nailing down expectations prior to any equity grant and using a template like the FAST agreement to solidify an advisor relationship. Most startups have at least 2–3 advisors filling in complementary areas, sometimes many more, but be cautious about too many overlapping interests or people who seek to be an advisor too early before you’ve established a rapport and figured out how they can be helpful. There are a lot of bad actors out there just looking for free equity.
External Coach: External coaches are objectively focused on professional (and often personal) growth. They work within the context you bring them. The best coaches guide individuals towards finding their own solutions using tools and frameworks they’ve developed themselves and/or learned from professional training. “A central tenet of coaching is a faith in your client’s inherent wisdom. Good coaching is about revealing their truth, not yours.” (Tarikh Korula) You should expect to commit a minimum of 2–3 hours per month with a coach and many offer email/text touch-points between a regular cadence of sessions. If properly trained and experienced, external coaches can be pricey. Most charge thousands of dollars monthly or quarterly, but if the chemistry is strong it can be a partnership – and an investment! – that’s well worth the money and time. My dear friend Steve Schlafman has great advice here on how to find the right fit with a potential coach.
Internal Coach: Internal coaches (sometimes called “Talent Development”) usually have the same skills/training as external coaches and are hired to develop executives, managers and occasionally individual contributors. They are a marvelous add to any team, but remember that they are employees and therefore have inherent bias as part of the inner workings of the organization. Internal coaches are accountable towards the overall success of the business vs. to an individual and may not always be objective — especially given that they know the players and may be coaching them as well. If you are hiring an internal coach(es), be thoughtful on who they will work with and how to measure their success vis-a-vis employees’ growth. Success metrics can be everything from basic employee retention numbers to frequency of/average time to promotions, employee satisfaction surveys and external recognition as leaders and contributors. Learn more about how internal coaching and talent and development is evolving inside organizations here.
Therapists: What used to be stigmatized, is now considered almost a right of passage for most entrepreneurs and leaders dealing with the stress of scaling their companies and balancing life’s demands. Therapists are medical professionals with extensive training who focus on an individual’s psychological, emotional and physical wellbeing. Most therapists lack business context or domain expertise, but may have some insights and empathy from other clients with whom they work. Therapists are wholly objective, can be very expensive, but also extremely worth it if you are under a lot of stress at work and/or at home. If you can afford it or have insurance to cover, I recommend being proactive and engaging a therapist even if everything seems “OK”. Establishing a relationship and providing historical context ahead of any stressors or crises will prepare both you and your therapist if those events arise.
Peer Support Groups: The ultimate in gaining empathetic support is being a part of a tight knit group of people going through the same types of challenges you are facing. I highly recommend finding a small, like-minded, group of peers to connect with on at least a monthly cadence. The group is ideally made up of a minimum of six (for breadth) but no more than eight individuals to encourage intimate conversations. They should be from a diverse set companies with varying personal backgrounds to allow for different perspectives and to avoid any awkward competitive conversations — although there should be an inherent “cone of silence” among the group. There may be some areas of commonality like all are at roughly the same stage in their careers, stage of company (e.g., pre-series A or post-IPO), or stage of life. Often, these groups are facilitated by a professional coach or peer mentors who ensure that conversations are meaningful and everyone has a voice. Reboot.io has a great program for CEOs as does the Inc. CEO Project, YPO, etc. but there are also niche peer groups like VPE Forum that specializes in engineering leaders. It may take some time to find the right group, so be patient. You’ll know when you’ve found your people!

All of the above resources are valuable for anyone in an organization, not just to founders and executives. It is a sign of strength when I meet a leader who taps into each one to develop a healthy, well-balanced, support system. More and more CEOs and leaders are recognizing how critical this support is to their personal and professional growth. Being self-aware and asking for help is a super power, and no time is too soon to get started!

MBA, Accelerator Or Just Go For It?

Posted on July 24, 2019 by Julia Austin

You’re in your mid-to-late 20’s and your thinking about being a first time entrepreneur. Maybe you already have an idea for a solution to a problem that needs solving or perhaps you just know in your bones that the entrepreneurial journey is your destiny. You’re probably in your first or second job after undergrad and feeling like now’s the time to figure out how to make the most of this “prime time” in your life – this is the tail end of your defining decade. Perhaps this is the right time, before you have family or other life commitments; or maybe because you feel if you wait too long, you’ll never do it.

Regardless of where you are in life, if you’re feeling like you are at a cross roads in the early part of your entrepreneurial journey, you probably fit into one of these categories:

Screen Shot 2019-07-23 at 2.44.18 PM I see aspiring entrepreneurs approach these categories in a few ways: Learning as they start their companies, enrolling in an MBA or certificate program and/or applying to a startup accelerator. Some also choose to join an early stage company while they noodle their idea(s) so they can see how others do it and learn from their successes and failures before they strike out on their own. There are pros and cons to each approach and each is a highly personal decision based on your risk threshold, what you’re building, and who you are as a human being. There is no “right” way to do it, but here are a few ways to think about each approach, noting that sometimes doing more than one can be the best formula.

On the Job (OTJ)

I am a big proponent of experiential learning. Touch a hot flame, you know not to do that again. Take an active listening role face to face with a customer and you’ll learn more about their needs and how you can solve them vs. running a survey or doing passive research on-line. However, some might argue that OTJ learning is a “two steps forward, one step back” approach as you’ll make a lot of mistakes along the way. Some mistakes will be recoverable, but some may be life threatening to your business and almost none of these mistakes can be predicted. Many of the most successful startups got that way because of luck and timing or because they had made/raised enough money to dig themselves out of a hole or two until they got it right.

OTJ_Poll

Questions to ask yourself if you are thinking about this approach:

What is your pain tolerance in terms of how far you can stretch your money, lifestyle and idea? Your about to get on a roller-coaster. Do you think you can handle it? Are you ready to hear “no” a lot and live off of ramen noodles and pizza indefinitely?
Do you have a strong network of mentors, coaches, advisors, investors and friends to get advice (and potential capital) from? Do you know how to get that advice/money and will you take it or not?
How easily do you make decisions? Will the noise of endless advice, competition, differing opinions from employees/co-founders/investors thwart your progress?
Are you a good salesperson? Can you recruit talent, fundraise and acquire customers?
Do you understand the product development process for your idea? Have you fully explored the problem to be solved, who you’re solving it for and the potential solutions? Do you think you have an MVP that will get you off the ground as you work towards product market fit? How confident are you that there’s an addressable market worthy of you/your co-founder and/or investors taking a risk of time and money on this idea?
Are you as in love with the problem you want to solve and passionate about the possible solution as you are in love with being a leader/CEO? Where is your ego in this process? Starting a company is one of the most humbling experiences you’ll ever have – it’ll touch your insides in ways you never thought it could. Are you ready for that?

If a few of the above points give you pause, either figure out how to resolve them before forging ahead, or consider some of the other options below.

Applying To An Accelerator

I’m a big fan of well structured accelerators with strong reputations for developing entrepreneurs and their products (e.g., Y-Combinator (YC) or TechStars). The programming is usually very solid and the results are almost always positive – companies are typically much further along with their business plans and messaging by their usual culminating event, “Demo Day”. Fundraising is also a big part of an accelerator program and the better ones have a pretty strong network of investors eager to fund each cohort. That said, in my recent Twitter poll, 50% of the respondents said that the network was the top benefit. I’ve seen this firsthand from my years of experience as a mentor with TechStars. Whether it’s needing help with introductions, getting advice on business strategy, building products or even just a shoulder to cry on, these networks have proven to be invaluable for entrepreneurs who’ve gotten into a quality program.

accelerators

There are many accelerators out there. In addition big brand names like YC or TechStars, there are a myriad of others that range from niche areas (biotech, robotics, healthcare, fintech…) to city-specific, to those that cater to underserved populations, etc. The list is endless! Here’s how to think about applying to accelerators:

Figure out which accelerators are a fit for your idea/company and what you want to get out of their program. It’s no different than applying to college – everything from where you want to live to who you’ll hang out with 24×7 counts in the decision process.
Make sure your idea/company is far along enough to apply. I often see founders trying to apply way too early and while it can be a good experience just to go through the process, it’s a big time waster for you, your company and for the accelerator who is evaluating your application if you are not at the right stage.
Talk to alumni from programs you’re considering. Find out about their application process and any lessons learned (things they think they nailed, what was the program worth it to them, tips on how to get the most out of the program, etc.)
Understand program expectations while you’re running your business. Many founders who get into the more intense programs don’t appreciate how hard it is to keep the momentum of their business while going through the program. It’s like having two full time jobs!
If you are definitely applying to a program, line up your references in advance and try to get warm intros to the Managing Directors (MD) of the program. Warm intros are worth a lot in all parts of business, accelerators included. Also, you may find that a warm intro can serve you well if your timing was out of sync with the accelerator’s application process. Sometimes. a company drops out of a program last minute, just before the start date, and a warm connection with the MD could be the fast track to fill that open spot (several companies I’ve worked with have been accepted into programs because of this situation).
Apply to more than one and know that some may push you to another location of theirs or class depending on where you are in the process, stage of your company, other cohort needs, etc.
If you don’t get into a program, either decide if the time to apply was worth it (maybe it forced you to learn more about you, tune the story of your business or products?) and try again, or move on and keep on trying to accelerate your business on your own.

Getting Your MBA

There are countless reasons one should or should not get an MBA, all of which I will not cover here, but if you are thinking about how to learn about entrepreneurship or further your business, it can be a great way to go. Of course, in most cases it is very expensive and yes, it’s ~2 years “checked out” of the real world, but in the right type of program, it can be a great solution.

DISCLAIMER: I am on the faculty at Harvard Business School, but I try to be unbiased here and cover more general aspects of MBA programs with an entrepreneurial focus. Also, full disclosure: I enrolled in a dual MS/MBA program early in my career and in the end I only completed the MS as I found that particular program adequately met my career needs. I was also self-funded, and in debt from undergraduate school; despite some scholarship money, the added debt was untenable. Most B-schools now have great financial aid and fellowship programs (50% of our HBS students get fellowships), but MBAs are still not for everyone!

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Considerations for whether to apply to an MBA program with an entrepreneurial focus:

Cost – can you afford both your time and money?
Do you have an idea/company already in process that you want to move forward? How will the particular program help you do that? Are there specific courses for your stage of business, industry or problem you’re trying to solve? Are there faculty, peer mentors or other on-campus experts available to students starting businesses? Is there time during the program to actually work on you company (e.g., experiential courses where you build your business for credit, summer programming, etc.)
Do you want to be somewhere where you can find an idea and/or a co-founder? Are the programs you’re looking at known for incubating new ideas and/or fostering co-founder relationships?
Are you unsure if you want to be a founder, but would at least like to become a joiner to learn more about startups? Do the programs you’re evaluating offer opportunities for joiners to meet founders building their companies while in school? Do they offer courses that educate the joiners as much as the founders?
Beyond the curriculum, what e-ship programming is available in a given program? Do they run accelerator programs or have space for young companies to connect and incubate their ideas?
Is startup funding available such as contests, access to venture funds, loan forgiveness for startups coming out of the program, etc.?
What access do students have to the school’s network such as alumni, the local startup community, investors, other universities in the area etc.? How do they add value to the entrepreneurial experience of admitted students? Will this network fill in gaps in your current network?
If you’re considering the venture side of entrepreneurship, do the programs you’re looking at have an investment-oriented curriculum and/or opportunities for aspiring investors to experiment with investing and learn to work with founders while in school?
Finally, what is the entrepreneurship track record of a particular program? How many startups were founded by their alumni (either while in school or within five years of completing their MBAs)? What is their alumni companies’ funding track record? In what other ways are their alumni founders successful (revenue, social impact, focus on diversity & inclusion, strong and ethical business ethos, etc.)

In the world of entrepreneurship, there are so many variables to consider when making just about any type of decision – from what product to build, who to hire, how to sell and how to finance your business. The list is endless and extremely tied to the type of business you are building, your customers and who you are as a leader. Similarly, which route you take to develop your entrepreneurial skills is highly personal. The route one entrepreneur took that worked out well for them does not ensure the same will hold true for you. Consider all of the above and decide which one or combination of all options makes the most sense for you.

Have you done one or several of the above to help kick-start your entrepreneurial journey? Please share your experience and lessons learned in the comments!

Go Big, Or Go…Startup

Image source unknown

A common career advice question I get all the time is what the tradeoffs are between going to a startup vs. going to a big company. There are many things to consider and lots of “it depends” when it comes to where you are in your career, where you live etc., but when it comes to the general aspects of a startup vs. mature company, most of the situations don’t vary that much. I’ve done both, several times, so here’s a perspective on the tradeoffs based on my own experiences.

Startup vs. Mature Company

Putting aside for a moment industry and how you feel about the products the company is building (both of which are very important!), most of the differences between a startup vs. a mature company are pretty obvious. In a mature company, you will likely have more role models to learn from and stronger teams to collaborate with, a clear direction and a mature board. The role you consider may have a narrow scope, but could offer deeper learning and of course great benefits, compensation, etc.. You’ll also get exposure to what good (or bad) looks like at scale and possibly a nice brand for your resume.

Startups can offer a chance to do “all the things” which can be either a blessing or a curse depending on your interests. You may miss out on having peers to collaborate with, have to look outside of your company for mentors and role models or have limited budget to get stuff done, but you may get high value equity in exchange for lower than market-level pay. If you want to dig more into deciding which startup to join, I suggest Jeff Bussgang’s book Entering Startupland which goes deep on the different roles at startups and how to get your foot in the door.

Leadership

One thing often overlooked when considering a new job is the leadership of the company. Serial entrepreneurs will have a very different approach than someone who has limited real-world experience and mature company executive teams can be world class or “legacy” leaders who can’t move with the times. There are many tradeoffs when factoring in leadership into the decision process of startup vs. a mature company.

Startup founded by serial entrepreneurs: This can often be the best case scenario if you want to learn from those who have “seen the movie before”. They likely had no issue raising money and were selective on who their investors were and who sits on their board. They will know how to get the flywheel moving incited by past mistakes OR failures.

“When I started my fifth company I knew exactly how I wanted to build the team. So, on day one I hired a head of recruiting to get things off to a strong start. I also knew market adoption would be critical to fundraising so focused on growth very early on – before we even had a product!” – David Cancel, CEO & Co-Founder Drift

Serial entrepreneurs may also try to overcorrect in areas where they failed the first time, such as over analyzing or delaying decisions, being too conservative on cash flow or focusing too much on scalability too early in the product development process. If you’re interviewing with a serial entrepreneur, it’s always good to ask what lessons they learned in their last startup and how they’re bringing those lessons into their new venture.

“I joined Drift in part because I wanted to learn from the experience of the co-founders. They’ve seen it before so they anticipate issues, they know when (and how) to hire experts to level up the team, and they know what’s “normal” for a hypergrowth company. It’s the best of both worlds: you get the rollercoaster startup experience with some of the more measured leadership and strategic characteristics of a bigger company.” – Maggie Crowley, Product Manager Drift

Industry veterans doing their first startup: Founders coming from mature companies with no startup experience can have big company confidence, be great at hiring and leading teams, but lack scrappiness to get a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) out the door and work towards product market fit.

“At our first startup after a series of roles at large enterprise software companies, we tried to force a big company perspective on how we did employee feedback and reviews. We were too structured with this initially and quickly cut back to a more loose feedback and review process with our team.” Izzy Azeri & Dan Belcher, Co-Founders Mabl

They may also be too used to having teams of people and systems in place to cover the more mundane duties of running a company and don’t want to get their hands dirty. On the flip side, they often know how to implement those processes and know the people to hire to run them so once the flywheel is moving and cash is in-hand, they can get momentum quickly.

“Earlier in my career, I hired a small team within a large corporation that was scrappy and had entrepreneurial mentality. At my startup, I quickly realized the benefit of once having a corporation behind me when things weren’t working out. The impact of a bad decision or process was much greater with no safety net.” – Karen Young, CEO & Founder Oui Shave

Startup with limited leadership experience: Working with a skilled group of founders leading teams for the first time can be tons of fun. If you bring some experience to the table, it can be very gratifying to not only work from the ground up, but also work alongside these founders as they grow. However, it can be frustrating if you find yourself figuring out things on your own because there’s no one in the company to mentor you. These situations can be very rewarding if you’re patient and you can always get outside mentors and advisors if they’re not available at this type of startup.

“When we started, we got a lot of advice like: stay focused, don’t expand too quickly, be careful that experienced hires match your culture. All good advice, but we discovered there’s no real substitute for learning the hard way. The lesson just doesn’t sink in until you feel the pain of doing it wrong.” Wombi Rose, CEO & Co-Founder LovePop

Mature company with inexperienced leadership: If they made it this far, they are either wicked smart, lucky or both! More likely they also have surrounded themselves with strong, experienced leaders, investors and/or board members. You can learn a lot from joining a company like this, but they are very, very rare! When companies scale too fast, they can also suffer from having people in roles that have outgrown their experience. Read more about the impact of Hypergrowth situations written by my friend at Reboot, Khalid Halim, for First Round.

Mature companies with experienced leadership: These organizations have all the standard things you’d expect. Probably more politics and process than you’d ever find at a startup, but the benefit of exposure to great role models and best practices can be invaluable. Sometimes, these bigger companies can also expose you to the “dark side” of leadership and processes which are also great learnings on what not to do in your next job or company you may start yourself.

Which comes first in your journey?

For those doing early career path planning and knowing they want to do both a startup and a mature company at some point, there’s always the question of which should come first. Hiring managers at early stage companies can get “spooked” when they see someone with too much time (5+ years) at mature companies; questioning whether the candidate will be able to transition to startup life. Not that it’s impossible, but it’s something to consider. For these candidates, I suggest highlighting any scrappy “ground zero” work they may have done at their companies to demonstrate they can handle ambiguity and take risks. I am also a huge (and very biased) fan of people who’ve joined companies early and scaled with them. They have learned a TON from those experiences and can often start scrappy, but know how to operate at scale. Win-win.

Conversely, someone with a lot of startup experience may have a hard time adjusting to mature company. A hiring manager at a mature company may question whether a candidate with only startup experience can handle a slower pace or won’t know how to navigate a complex organizational structure that requires political and communication savvy. You may have to sacrifice title and maybe some salary to get a foot into larger institutions who may view your past role, which may have been very senior at a startup, to being pretty junior if those around you have decades more experience. However, I always find those with startup experience can be invaluable to a team that needs to be shaken up, take more risks or explore new ground. Often, those who sacrifice title and pay when they joined, make it up fast as they move up the chain in a larger organization.

There’s no right or wrong place to start. A lot depends on how you define your skills and how willing and patient you are in either case to adjust. Much can depend on who hires you and their management philosophy. I’ve seen some people bounce between both types of situations over and over, some that just can’t handle startup life, and others who have startups in their DNA and should just stick with that world 🙂

“At a startup, every job matters and you can see almost daily that you are creating something that wasn’t there before. You have the ability to learn quickly and have a fast feedback loop to let you know how you’re doing. It’s very different working at an established company vs a startup, but you can learn a lot at both – you’ll just learn very different things.” – Rebecca Liebman, CEO & Co-Founder LearnLux

Questions To Ask

Regardless of whether you are a seasoned veteran or fresh out of school, as you ponder whether you want to join a startup or a mature company here are some final things to consider:

What tools do you want to add to your toolbox? Will the role allow you to hone skills you already have or add new ones?
Who do you want to learn from, and how do you want to learn? You can learn from experienced colleagues and mentors, but having bad role models can also teach you a lot about what not to do. Similarly, if you are an experienced hire coming into a company started by inexperienced founders, you may want to learn by mentoring or teaching these young leaders. Taking the skills you’ve developed over your career and applying them to a new situation in itself can be a very enlightening experience.
Who do you want to work with? How important is the size and culture of the team you’ll work with? Remember, you’ll probably spend more waking hours of the day with these people than anyone else in your life – regardless of the size and nature of the company you join.
What do you value? At the end of the day, love what you do and decide what role will allow you to maintain the integrity of who you are and who you aspire to be!

Do you have other tips on how to decide whether to join a startup vs. a mature company? Please share in the comments!

So You Want to Be A Product Manager

Posted on October 31, 2017 by Julia Austin

Because I teach a course on Product Management at Harvard Business School, I am routinely asked “what is the role of a Product Manager?”. The role of a Product Manager (PM) is often referred to as the “CEO of the Product”. I disagree because, as Martin Eriksson points out, “Product managers simply don’t have any direct authority over most of the things needed to make their products successful – from user and data research through design and development to marketing, sales, and support”. PMs are not the CEO of product and their roles vary widely depending on a number of factors. So what should you consider if you’re thinking of pursuing a PM role?

As an aspiring PM, there are three primary considerations when evaluating the role: Core Competencies, Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and Company Fit. The best PMs I have worked with have mastered the core competencies, have a high EQ and work for the right company for them. Beyond shipping new features on a regular cadence and keeping the peace between engineering and the des

ign team, the best PMs create products with strong user adoption that have exponential revenue growth and perhaps even disrupt an industry.

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Do you have what it takes to be the best PM?

Core Competencies
There are core competencies that every PM must have – many of which can start in the classroom – but most are developed with experience and good role models/mentoring. Some examples of these competencies include:

Conducting customer interviews and user testing
Running design sprints
Feature prioritization and roadmap planning
The art of resource allocation (it is not a science!)
Performing market assessments
Translating business-to-technical requirements, and vice versa
Pricing and revenue modeling
Defining and tracking success metrics

These core competencies are the baseline for any PM and the best PMs hone these skills over years of defining, shipping and iterating on products. These PMs excel at reflecting on where each of these competencies contributed to the success or failure of their products and continuously adjust their approach based on customer feedback.

Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
A good PM may know the Do’s and Don’ts of a customer interview, but the best PM has the ability to empathize with customers in that interview, are tuned into their body language and emotions and can astutely suss out the true pain-points that their product/feature will address. A PM with a high EQ has strong relationships within their organization and they have a keen sense of how to navigate both internal and external hurdles to ship a great product. Here’s a deeper look at how the four EQ key traits, as defined by Daniel Goleman, relate to the PM role:

Relationship Management: Probably one of the most important characteristics of a great PM is their relationship management skills. By forming authentic and trustworthy connections with both internal and external stakeholders, the best PMs inspire people and help them reach their full potential. Relationship management is also vital in successful negotiation, resolving conflicts and working with others toward a shared goal which is especially challenging when a PM is tasked with balancing the needs of customers, resource constrained engineering teams and the company’s revenue goals.

Authentic and trusting relationships within an organization can lead to more support if additional funding is needed for a product or to sway an engineer to include a quick bug fix in the next sprint. Outside an organization, these skills could encourage existing customers to beta test a new feature for early feedback or convince a target customer to try the MVP of a product still in stealth mode. These relationship skills can also be what makes the difference between having irate customers because of a bug introduced into the product and those who say “no worries, we know you’ll fix this!”.
Self-awareness: PMs must be self-aware to remain objective and avoid projecting their own preferences onto users of their products. If a PM is in love with a feature because it addresses their own pain points (PMs are often super users of the products for which they are responsible), they may cause a user to say they love it too just to please the PM (“False positive feature validation”). If not self aware, a PM may push to prioritize a feature they conceived even when all the customer interviews and evidence is stacked against it. This lack of self awareness could derail more important priorities and/or damage the PM’s relationship with engineers who may lose confidence in their PM when the feature isn’t readily adopted by users.
Self-management: Being a PM can be incredibly stressful! The CEO wants one thing, the engineering team another, and customers have their own opinions about feature priorities. Managing tight deadlines, revenue targets, market demands, prioritization conflicts and resource constraints all at once is not for the faint of heart. If a PM cannot maintain their emotions and keep it cool under pressure, they can quickly lose the confidence of all their constituents. The best PMs know how to push hard on the right priorities, with urgency, but without conveying a sense of panic or stress. These PMs also know when to take a breath and step away if needed, regroup, and go back into the game to get sh*t done (GSD).
Social Awareness: According to Goleman, the competencies associated with being socially aware are Empathy, Organizational Awareness, and Service. PMs must understand customers emotions and concerns about their product as much as they understand the concerns of the sales team on how to sell that product (or support team to support it, or engineering to build it). PMs have to have a deep understanding of how the organization operates and build social capital to influence the success of their product – from obtaining budget and staffing to securing a top engineer to work on their product. Finally, social awareness ensures the best PMs service their customers with a product that addresses their jobs to be done which is ultimately what drives product market fit.

Read more about what Paul Jackson has to say about EQ and PMs here – including a sub-link of an interview with Sam Lessin, former VP of Product Management at Facebook, who says he has ‘never successfully trained empathy.’ (or as Lady Gaga would say “you were born this way”…or not!)

Company Fit
So if the best PMs have well developed core competencies and a high EQ, does that mean that they are then destined for success no matter where they work? Going deeper, it is taking these skills and personality traits and applying them to the right company – amid a broad array of opportunities – that will ultimately guarantee success.

I have yet to see a standard job description for a Product Manager because each role is ultimately defined by the size, type of product, stage, industry and even culture of the company. Assuming the core competencies and high EQ as the minimum requirements, the next step is to unpack who’s hiring and what they are truly looking for:

Technical Skill – The type of product, who uses it and/or the type of company (e.g. Google who requires PMs pass a technical skills test regardless of what product they’ll work on) will determine how technical a PM needs to be. If the company is building a SaaS CRM, there may be more requirements for experience with go-to-market and customer lifecycles than how the product itself is built. If it’s a data science product with machine learning algorithms and APIs, the role may require a lot more technical depth to not only understand how to build the product but also how to talk, credibly, with the customers who will use it. That said, having a basic technical understanding of what is “under the hood” and mastery of the tools that PMs use is definitely important for the role, anywhere. Colin Lernell has more to say about these necessary skills here.

If you are an aspiring PM concerned you lack the basic tech skills for the role, you might consider taking online courses such as the renowned Introduction to Computer Science (CS50) course offered by Harvard University or one of the many intro and advanced technology courses offered by The Flatiron School.
Company philosophy about PM – Every company has a different philosophy about the product development process and where PMs fit into that process. Below are the three most common types with pros and cons:
- PM Drives Engineering: A “throw it over the wall” approach where PMs gather requirements, write the quintessential PRD (Product Requirements Document) and hand it off to Engineering to spec out the technical requirements. Contemporary organizations may do this process in a more agile and collaborative way, but the expectation is that PMs know best about what customers need and engineering is there to serve.
  - Pro: Engineering can focus on coding without a lot of distraction; tends to work well for Waterfall development shops with long lifecycles.
  - Con: Engineers lose sight of the big picture and do not develop empathy for customers which can lead to a poor user experience; often there are unhealthy tensions when tech-debt and “plumbing” work needs to be prioritized against customer requirements.
- Engineering Drives Product: More technically oriented product companies (e.g., cloud, big data, networking…) tend to be engineering driven where engineers are advancing the science in their domain and PMs validate solutions or create front end access points (UIs, APIs) to tap into this new technology. There can be a collaborative relationship and feedback loop between customers, PM and engineering, but typically, PMs are serving engineering in these companies.
  - Pro: Breakthrough technology can offer customers things they didn’t even know they needed (VMotion at VMware was a great example of this. An engineer thought it would be cool to do, a PM figured out how to monetize it and it became THE billion dollar game changer for the company).
  - Cons: Engineers chase the shiny new thing, over-architect the solution or iterate forever (seeking perfection) before getting customer feedback; PM input on priorities are ignored, which is sometimes the most basic needs of customers to encourage adoption and increase stickiness of the product.
- The PM<>Engineering Partnership: There is a strong yin-yang between PM and Engineering where there is joint discovery, decision-making and shared accountability. Engineers join PMs in customer interviews and PMs are insprint meetings to help unblock tasks or bring clarity to requirements, but the two roles respect the line where one starts and the other stops. PMs understand what’s being coded, but don’t tell engineers how to code and engineers have empathy for customers’ needs, but leave the prioritization to the PMs.
  - Pros: Streamlined prioritization process that values tech-debt/plumbing projects; better design processes leading to a more positive user experience; higher performing teams with improved product velocity, quality and typically, happier customers.
  - Con: Breakthrough innovation may not get light/investment; time-to-market may seem to lag (but I’d argue what’s released is far better aligned with customer needs with a far more scalable product).

I’m clearly biased (as is Fred Wilson) on the third type of philosophy about PM as I’ve experienced all three and found the yin-yang to be most effective, but it’s not to say the others are notably bad and, again, it really depends on what type of product, stage, etc,. Regardless, when considering a PM role, the philosophy of PM at the company could be the deciding factor on fit for the role.

Stage of company – The role of the PM at a startup is far likely to be responsible for “all the things” vs. a mature company where their role will be more distinctly defined. Eriksson, Banfield and Walkingshaw’s book Product Leadership
has a section that has a lot more detail on this topic).
- Startup: Beyond discovery, definition and shipping, they may also be responsible for pricing, marketing, support and potentially even sales of the product. These PMs thrive in a scrappy environment and are comfortable with ambiguity and frequent changes to direction as the company works towards product market fit and learns to operate at scale.
  - Pros: Likely to be more involved with company strategy, exposure to senior leadership/board, able to take more risks/make a bigger impact; more influence/authority over company resources.
  - Cons: Little-to-no mentorship or role models or best practice within the company (may have to seek externally); may not have requisite experience for some of the “things” (comfortable winging it); tight budgets.
- Mature Company: The PM may have a more narrow scope (deep vs. broad), have co-workers who handle pricing, go to market strategies, etc.. and likely part of a larger team of Product Managers.
  - Pros: More likely to have mentoring/role models and development standards/best practice; close association with an engineering team can develop strong relationships over time (great for long term impact/career growth); if product has market fit, there is an established customer base and performance baseline to work from vs. guessing until you get it right.
  - Cons: Less exposure to company strategy; just one of many voices of the customer; can get “lost” in the system; more politics; tight budgets.
Founder/CTO/CEO relationship with PM – Especially in earlier stage companies, it’s important to know how involved the Founder/CEO/CTO is in the product process. If they are deeply involved, the PM role may play more of a support role to flesh out their ideas or validate concepts with customers vs. conceiving and driving ideas of their own. This can be great fun for some PMs who enjoy partnering with founders/c-levels and collaborate on the product evolution, but for some PMs it can be very frustrating if they prefer to take more ownership of product direction. It can also be challenging if the more technical founders/c-levels prefer working directly with engineers. This can leave PMs out of the loop or undermined (even if unintentional) causing not just personal frustrations but delays if they have to play catch up and/or continuously recalibrate. When considering a PM role that may work closely with the founding leadership team, be sure to find out their expectations of the PM function and decide whether this is the right fit with your interests.

There are of course many other factors to consider for any role such as the type of product you are building (B2B, B2C, industry, etc.), the humans with whom you’ll work and the overall company culture (diverse, inclusive, flexible work hours, remote culture, etc.), and of course compensation and benefits. There are also a million articles on hiring product managers to get perspective on what the hiring managers are looking for – I especially recommend my friend Ken Norton’s piece How to Hire a Product Manager. However, if you are striving to be the best Product Manager, consider all of the above before signing on to your next gig. Developing core competencies will be an ongoing activity throughout your career and leveraging a high EQ will ensure a more positive experience, but where you work, how they work and who you work with/for will ultimately determine your long term success.

Have additional pointers on succeeding in the PM role? Please share in the comments!

Visualizing Mile 26

Posted on September 6, 2016 by Julia Austin

Boston Marathon

“I don’t know how you do it” seems to be the comment du jour these days. I think it’s a compliment most of the time – an appreciation for everything I have taken on – but I do get this little jab in my brain when I hear it and it makes me wonder if I am insane.

I have a lot on my plate, that’s true. I am the CTO at a growing tech company in NYC, I teach a very hands on course at Harvard Business School in Cambridge. I have three daughters – one college kid in NYC, and a freshman and senior in high school (that’s right folks, college application season, round two!) – and two cats (one of which has a chronic disease requiring daily meds). I manage my household solo (yep, I’m a single mom) and I advise a few companies, coach a few rising stars and sit on a couple boards. Oh, and I occasionally blog.

What?

Ok, so I have taken on a lot, but I simply LOVE everything I do and I make it work by visualizing Mile 26.

I have never run a marathon, but I did the 26 mile Walk for Hunger many years ago with two of my BFFs. I remember being at mile 24 that day and thinking “oh my God, two more miles?!”. I had practically lost my mind because my feet hurt and I was tired and hungry, but instead of throwing in the towel, I just powered on and ran the last 2 miles and left my two friends in the dust, aghast. I had committed to this thing and I wanted to reach mile 26. It was for a good cause and my feet would feel better a week later.

Our lives will always have peaks and valleys. There were many sleepless nights when each of my girls were newborns that I thought would never end. By child three, when I had some experience under my belt, I got through those hard days of barely having time to eat, let alone take a shower, by visualizing Mile 26. The time would come when they’d all be sleeping straight through the night and the days would come when I had to drag them out of bed for school! I was close and I could make it to the end of this phase – Mile 26.

We also have to constantly recalibrate our priorities. When my Dad had major heart surgery back in 2001, I was running Engineering at a tech company and I had two little girls at home. During that time, my mile 24 was several weeks of a daily drive from work to the hospital to home to keep all the balls in the air. I missed many dinners and bath times with the girls, and my work suffered a bit, but Dad was a priority at that time. He eventually was back to himself and under good care at home – Mile 26 – and I was back to having dinner and splashing in the tub with the girls.

I’m not the only one trying to balance so much at once, so here are a few tips and tricks I use to keep it all together (most of the time) that others may find useful:

Give yourself permission to let stuff slide and get help
The school months are my most hectic time of year with many mile 24s (think: 90 degrees and humid running up a hill after 23 miles). I visualize many Mile 26s during this time, like holiday breaks, scheduled trips and the summers when school is out. During these killer mile 24s, I let some stuff slide like that growing pile of clothes I should really get to Goodwill or cleaning out the refrigerator (petrified clementines are cool). I may skip an evening networking event in favor of sleep or to catch up on work and I get help when I need it for errands, home repairs and cleaning (thank you Instacart, Taskrabbit and Handy!).

Say “No”, but offer an alternative
As my career has progressed, I get a lot more requests of my time outside of work. I love paying it forward whenever I can, but my cycles are few and I am getting better at saying “no”. I’m flattered by every ask for advice, to speak or to attend an event of some sort. I wish I could do all of it but over the years I’ve learned to become more selective about what I say “yes” to. Whenever I have to say “no”, I try to find an alternative for the requester. Someone else who could coach or speak or attend the event. I find it not only gets me off the hook, but it usually ends up being a great experience for the alternate and very often the requester is quite happy with the result. It’s great when these situations turn into a win-win.

Block time off to GSD
I routinely block off time to make sure I can get stuff done (GSD). Sunday mornings are my most productive times – because #teenagerssleepuntilnoon. I focus on cleaning up my in-box and getting prep work done for the coming week. I have help at work with my calendar, but I do all of the personal stuff myself like making doctor appointments or coordinating carpools. I maximize driving/Uber time for that sort of stuff. It’s important to me that I stay plugged in and not offload everything – especially most things to do with my girls – and there’s something satisfying about getting out of the car and feeling like I just knocked a few things off of my to-do list – mini mile 26s!

[If Applicable] Respect your kids – you only get to do this once
My mile 24 life has taught my girls to be highly independent which is not so bad! They can make themselves meals, do their own laundry and help around the house (ok, with some prodding). That said, I make sure we have dinner at the table together a few nights a week and we have a no cell phone rule at meal time so we can actually talk with each other face-to-face.

I keep an open line of communication for my kids to voice when they need me for anything or feel like my crazy life is not in sync with theirs. When I’ve got a lot going on in a given month, we have “family meetings” where we make sure their priorities for me are in check. For the theater geek, I have a minimum number of shows I must attend (I usually make all of them, tyvm!) and for the sports kid, I have to attend at least two games a season – home or away. I get quality time with my big kid in NYC (perk of the job!) and thank God for texting and social media where we all stay connected probably more than my parents did with me when I was their ages! From Instagram, FB and snapchat to our “My3girlz” text stream that’s endlessly entertaining and annoying 24×7, we are in constant communication.

Take Care of Yourself
If I’m not ok, no one in my life is OK. I do yoga, walk or run a couple times a week. I am a self-proclaimed spa addict and try to get to one at least once a month – even when I was just scraping by early in my career, I made the budget work for this little luxury. I love to travel and take my all three of my girls on a trip together at least one a year. I do acupuncture, sleep eight hours most nights and I am a total freak when it comes to what I put into my body (GF, sorta vegan, organic). I also make time for friends – because friends are what keep me whole beyond my kids. Whether it’s a well needed night out on the town or just a long stream of texts to vent or to laugh, I have an amazing network of people that bless my life.

—

So, I guess that’s how I do it. I’d be lying if I said it’s a piece of cake. Sometimes I lose it amid a mile 24 and snap at the girls when I’m exhausted and stressed. Sometimes I cancel a few meetings and check out for a couple hours when I’m at work because I need to just think. Sure, a few balls get dropped on the floor – maybe a lot, sometimes – but that’s life and I try not to beat myself up over it. After all, Mile 26 is right around the corner.

Do you take on a lot or wonder how you can take on more? Share your thoughts and concerns in the comments.

Scaling Another Rocket Ship: Hello DO!

Posted on June 7, 2016 by Julia Austin

Every once and awhile, I meet a company so exciting, I can’t sleep because I’m thinking non-stop about its potential to scale, massively. Fortunately for me, I ended up joining two of them that turned out to be great success stories and I think I just found my third. Starting this month, I am joining the ranks at DigitalOcean as their CTO.

Sammy10

Anyone who knows me well would agree that as much as I am an organizer and planner, I am also a risk taker. I love diving into challenges and creating results that require skill, agility and building relationships. While business savvy and technical skill are paramount to growing a successful tech company, understanding the human element and building high performing teams is what separates the good from the great.

In 1999, with a three year-old and an infant, I quit my healthcare IT job to go to Akamai to help them get organized before our IPO. Most of my friends and colleagues thought I was nuts, but I was hungry for bringing order to chaos and building something that made an impact. My three years at Akamai were among the toughest and most rewarding years of my career. We created the world’s first CDN for businesses and turned it into the backbone of the internet. The teams I led and partnered with were some of the smartest and coolest humans I’ve had the pleasure to work with. We pulled all-nighters together, cried together when we lost our CTO-Founder Danny Lewin on 9/11 and still celebrate the company’s success together at our annual “Akamai Pre-2002’ish Employees” reunion.

In 2005, I landed at VMware right after the EMC acquisition to help them figure out how to run a global engineering team. I took a leap of faith that we would not get fully absorbed into EMC (which was their MO at the time) and that I could help build another company made to last. What I found when I interviewed at VMware was the same good vibe I had at Akamai. Super smart people, fun, passion and humility…and of course, a wicked cool product. I still remember my final interview in Palo Alto – a last minute “Diane Greene would like to meet you” – that threw me for a curve. I was pretty frank with Diane that I wasn’t sure I could balance my role at VMware with three small children. She assured me that VMware would make it work, and they did. Both my career and the company flourished over my eight year tenure at VMware. When I joined the company, we had just over 800 employees and around $200M in revenue. Today, it boasts close to 19K employees and 2015 revenues were $6.57B. It was an incredible ride to help scale something that spectacular.

When I left VMware in 2013, I felt very lucky to have been part of two incredible rocket ship stories in the technology industry. After much soul searching around “Julia.next”, I settled into the startup ecosystem in Boston. I became a mentor at TechStars and recently began teaching a Product Management course at Harvard Business School. Until recently, I was fairly certain this was the tail end of my journey, but something was gnawing at me that I had at least one more in me. One more amazing rocket ship I could help scale.

Over the past few years, I’ve made a few investments and became a formal advisor to the founders of several local startups. It was one of these founders who introduced me to Moisey Uretsky, DigitalOcean’s co-founder and Chief Product Officer. For those who don’t know Moisey, let’s just say brilliance and tenacity is an understatement. Despite my protests against working with a company in NYC, Moisey convinced me to come to DigitalOcean HQ back in January to meet his equally brilliant and tenacious brother and co-founder-CEO, Ben, and get to know the business. One visit became several and within a matter of a few weeks, I was fully enamored and signed up to advise the company.

During my early work with the DigitalOcean team, my instincts told me that this is going to be another winner. It is beyond impressive how, in just four short years, DigitalOcean has built such a strong platform and community. Ben, Moisey and I – along with the other key members of the DigitalOcean leadership team – began to work together to forge a partnership that will enable us to super-scale this company. The achievements we’ve made to grow the business so far left me unable to resist the temptation to join full time to help take it all the way. So now here I am, honored and excited to be DigitalOcean’s new CTO.

So what is it about DigitalOcean that gets me so excited?

In addition to our tremendous business growth, strong culture, talented team and impressive list of investors, the most striking is the simplicity of DigitalOcean’s features that developers love. We let developers create, automate, and manage a robust cloud server infrastructure out of the box with floating IP addresses, shared private networking, tier-1 bandwidth, team accounts and SSD hard drives which all come as standard. And all of our services can be provisioned in as little as 55 seconds with a plan for as low as $5 a month.

I am continuously blown away at the reaction I get from people in our industry who hear I am working with this company.

“I love how easy it is to spin up a Droplet to build software!” – MIT graduate student building software for his own startup

“I have 6 Droplets of my own!” – Boston VC

“Their tutorials and community engagement is the best in the industry” – Engineer building a neuroscience application

“DigitalOcean gets developers – they give us what we need with no BS” – SaaS application developer

In addition to our core feature offerings, our multiple data centers around the world and a 99.99% guaranteed uptime enable companies to build and scale robust SaaS applications. Even more exciting is what’s to come. Our storage capabilities will begin to roll out this summer and what follows is a list of features that developers building production applications will surely love. Because at DigitalOcean, it’s all about love…

#digitalocean – where we use ❤ as much as 🙂 in a typical conversation.

— DizzyD (@dizzyd) May 20, 2016

This is going to be another incredible journey of risk, opportunity and balance for me. We are an organization that values learning and what better way to hold that true than to continue teaching my course at HBS (fear not, @teisenmann & PM101’ers!). And, while I’ll certainly be spending a lot of time at our HQ in NYC, I will remain living in Cambridge and to continue to be an active member of the Boston area startup community.

Finally, I am hiring! We’re looking for amazing talent across the company. Check out our current career opportunities both in and outside of NYC.

Will DigitalOcean be another massively scaling rocket ship ? I’m pretty bullish about it. So check back here soon for updates on how it’s going!

Note To Parents: When The Helicopter Flies Too Close To Work

Posted on February 28, 2016 by Julia Austin

Last week I had the pleasure of co-hosting an event with the wonderful team from Inteligent.ly. Our goal was to pull together local Chief People Officer types from startups (COOs and CFOs included) to get a conversation going around scaling organizations. It was a wonderful dialogue centered around talent acquisition, development and retention as companies scale. I think most of the attendees would agree, we could have talked for hours if we had the time. One striking take-away from the evening, however, was the topic of parents involvement in the hiring process.

Yes, you heard me, parents are flying their helicopters too close to the work place. helicopter_PNG5313

The topic on the table was “hiring and working with millennials” and the question was how far to go to cater to this demographic. One attendee told a story of a recent job candidate with approximately 5 years of experience who was shopping his offer from his company around to others to see what kind of deal he could get. The experienced, C-level, leader telling the story had given this candidate a short window to make a decision – he either wanted the job or he didn’t. When the candidate didn’t respond by the deadline, he was informed via email that the offer had been rescinded. The candidate responded with a detailed email on why he needed more time. When the leader questioned the rationale for needing more time, the candidate responded with “that’s what my parents told me to say”.

Most of the group hearing this story were not surprised. Many of them have been in hiring or manager roles of some sort in the past ten years and reported that it is becoming more common for those helicopter parents who harassed teachers about grades or college professors about assignments to continue on to the workplace and be over involved.

Another dinner attendee asked the group how many of them have received a phone call from an irate parent about the salary or benefits their child was being offered. I was aghast at how many nodding heads there were around the table. Seriously?

Every summer, my daughters attend an all-girls, sleep away camp in the Berkshires that develops young women to be independent thinkers and leaders. When the girls “age out” of camper status, they have the option of applying for a Leader in Training (LIT) program. There are only ~30 positions available for this coveted program and an average of 2-3 times that number of former campers apply. Each year, the camp director sends a very stern email to parents that explains the selection process and the competitive nature of the few spots in comparison to the number of applicants. She makes it clear to parents that she welcomes a call “from your child” if she is not selected and wants feedback or guidance on other leadership pursuits that summer. Yet, the camp director says that every year, without fail, parents continue to call on behalf of their daughters.

Certainly it is a big disappointment when your child doesn’t get what they want or you want for them. When one of my daughters did not get into the camp LIT program it was a very mournful day (more like a week) in the Austin household, but my daughter grew tremendously from the experience. She not only learned how to accept rejection, but she became more aware of who she was and what she really wanted to pursue. It was a pivotal moment in her life and one I am so grateful for her to have experienced at such a formative age. She has since applied to programs more thoughtfully (she ended up spending that summer doing a program with NYFA and is now a sophomore in NYU-Tisch‘s Film and Television program) and is now experiencing the job application process with mixed results (“how does one get their first barista job if they all require prior barista experience??”). It has been entertaining and sometimes heartbreaking to watch her trip and fall as she gains her legs as an adult, but hey, we watched her learn to toddle a long time ago. We never did the walking for her.

One of my favorite parenting books read when my girls were very young is The Blessing of A Skinned Knee, by Wendy Mogel, PhD. She writes of over-indulgence in today’s society (too much stuff, over-nurturing and soft structure) and how it leads to bless_knee_cover children actually feeling unlovable, needing constant affirmation, lack skills and lack self-sufficiency. Many managers of young professionals today, express frustration with these characteristics of their work force – needing constant affirmation and lacking that self-starting grit that comes from many a skinned knee.

Our job as parents is to provide our children with tools to handle what life brings them. To be empathetic and good listeners when they’re thrown a curve ball and to make suggestions and offer guidance when things are tough. If we do it all for them or augment their work, how will they ever be self reliant, confident, members of society?

So, put that phone down and delete that draft email ,moms and dads! Go fly that helicopter over the Grand Canyon or some other joyful place. Let your kids skin their knees, get rejection and suffer the consequences. My bet is, most of you did that when you were their age and you became capable adults through the process.

Being FA and Other Ponderings

Innovation, Insights, and Opinions (that are my own)

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