Tag: work

Incentives: Invisible and Important

Incentives: Invisible and Important

I’ve had the good fortune of getting a lot of advice from folks who are farther along in their careers – either greater velocity, higher heights, more reps on the work, really a diverse crew of mentors and advisors.

During one of these conversations I was given the advice, to shift my thinking when it came to partners and stakeholders within the company, away from broader business goals, and instead try to focus on and get crisp on individual peoples’ incentives. Incentives, they pointed out, often illustrate someone’s motivation and behavior better than any other factor.

Teams at the end of the day are collections of people, and people (not teams) have relationships – but we have to remember that they also have motivations and incentives to do the things that they do. Especially at work, no one is a chaos agent, not really; folks are busy, and are trying to do the right thing for themselves, and for their team, and for their family.

I’m sure pure spite-based actions have happened, but the vast majority of the time, no one is actively working to frustrate or bypass you, your team, or your work. It’s true when we tell our kids and it’s true as adults: no one is thinking about you as much as you are. There is almost always a more parsimonious explanation that does not involve malicious intent. And, since malice and spite are not good predictors of future behavior, they’re not super useful in your mental model.

Like Heinlein tells us, we’re better off understanding and appealing to someone else’s self interest – similarly to how Ferrazzi describes co-elevation in “Leading Without Authority” (a great read for anyone working across multiple teams or organizations in any context), you have to understand what someone else perceives as valuable before you can start to explore what a mutual win would look like.

It feels obvious in retrospect – folks want to achieve a win, and we of course want to pursue our own success, but figuring out the way that those puzzle pieces can fit together can be much less clear. The problem of course, is that incentives are invisible. We don’t always even understand why we ourselves do what we do, how can we possibly hope to understand what is driving other people?

We have two kids (the featured image is us at Meow Wolf in March!) – they’re nine and seven. Our daughter, unbelievably, turns ten in May! They sometimes experience a flavor of this same social space. If a friend is unexpectedly unkind, or a coach or teacher says something that surprises them, we like to use the “Something Missing” framework to think it through.

“That doesn’t sound like something she would normally do – is there something missing that would help explain it?”

… often for kiddos it’s something like, having trouble with another friend, or losing in a game, and for teachers and coaches it’s often grounded in wanting a particular goal for the whole class or team. In a way that a lot of things start to stitch together, this Something Missing prompt also become a useful framework for me to think about my relationships in the workplace – “What incentive is missing here? What part of their landscape am I not seeing, that explains this behavior?”

Often the simple act of prompting myself to accept that there may exist some invisible factor that is not yet known to me, can be helpful to set aside my own (sometimes hurt!) feelings, and instead move into investigation and resolution.

Teams Don’t Talk, People Do

Teams Don’t Talk, People Do

“Oh, that project is behind because Platform Widgets doesn’t talk to us.”

As humans, we do this thing, where we ascribe people-ness to things that aren’t people, and we talk about those things in ways that we would talk about other people. Pets are a great example of this – and wild animals too, but it’s also true for inanimate things, like cars, and also things that aren’t things at all, but just, abstract concepts, like “New York State” or “HR”

“Everybody knows if Subscriber Acceleration is involved, our timelines will go out the window.”

This can be a nice way to make our lives more interesting – naming your car as a teenager felt like almost a rite of passage in the early 2000s! – but it carries some risk when we start to let our understanding of how humans interact and work over to more abstract concepts, especially in the workplace or when working with governmental or nonprofit organizations.

“Why can’t Global Avian Legal get their story straight?”

The problem is, when we start to think about “other teams” as singular, seamless atomic units, we start to make some simple mistakes:

  • We assume the whole team has the same opinion on a project or priority
  • We assume everyone on a team has the same knowledge and is equally informed
  • We begin to set up a mental model where teams relate to one another directly

But that’s the thing – teams don’t relate to one another. In some very real way, teams don’t even exist, they’re a collection of people, and people are complicated, and messy, and have differing incentives and mindsets. You can’t talk to a team. You can’t take a team out to coffee. You can only relate to individual humans who are a part of that team.

When I first started at Disney, in my initial listening tour, I asked a senior colleague of mine if he could recommend any books or blog posts that would help me to navigate working at Disney, which felt like a huge battleship compared to the tiny fishing boats I’d worked on before. He recommended Ferrazzi’s now-classic Leading Without Authority (which I would also recommend to any PMs or aspiring PMs!)

One of the pieces that Ferrazzi touches on repeatedly in the book is this idea of listening to pursue co-elevating, his model of finding opportunities to achieve shared successes. “To influence others, you must first build strong relationships,” he says.

The thing is, you can’t build a relationship with a team – only with another person. This is especially important for folks who work across many teams or business units to accomplish big initiatives and build big impactful solutions – you need to find ways to stay grounded to the actual folks doing the work, and push back (in your own mind at least!) on the anthropomorphizing of teams.

The best way to know that it’s time to build a relationship with another person, or to encourage a leader working with you to develop a 1:1 relationship, is when you start hearing people say things like those called out above.

When you yourself, or someone working with you, starts assigning motivations or personality traits to a team, be alert! An opportunity for greater collaboration and clarity awaits if you dig one layer deeper:

“Who on Platform Widgets did you talk to?”

“Who on Subscriber Acceleration usually sets timelines?”

…and then, go talk to that person!

The Time Brian Chesky Scared Me So Bad I Bought A Book

When I first heard that the CEO of AirBNB, Brian Chesky, had eliminated the Product Management role, and transitioned that department whole cloth into Product Marketers, I was surprised – and skeptical.

Surprised in part because, AirBNB is a company whose product folks have had a serious impact on me and my own product practice – Lenny of course but also more directly Nick and James from the Transform team (who I got to know during my time in the modern data stack space). To think that a company that produced such thoughtful and successful product folks, was pivoting away from this mindset and methodology (which I’ve built my professional journey on!) was jarring, to say the least.

Was this part of a larger market shift? Was Product Management going the way of the Elevator Operator? Surely a little over-the-top, a dramatic overreaction from a former theater kid. But even so!

A quick Google will give you lots of hot takes and deep dives on what Chesky really meant, and how what they were really doing was shifting from the way that they had found themselves doing product, more intentionally to a revenue- and market-focused direction.

That being said, in hearing the news, my first reflection was more personal – I’ve had the opportunity to work with some world class product marketers, but that part of the overall Product Toolkit was an area where I felt quite weak – not for lack of interest or adjacency, but just, never happened to get around to it!

So, I did the thing any good Product person does when faced with uncertainty; I did some discovery! I reached out to the undisputed most talented product marketing professionals I know, and asked for help.

And help they did – after a few Zoom powered coffee hangouts, I felt as though I had passed through the Dunning Kruger horizon. The depth and complexity of the topic unfolded before me in an exciting (and nervous-making) way, like any topic does once you get close enough.

One aspect of my concern was validated almost immediately: while I had worked closely with marketing teams and marketers, my own toolkit could use some sharpening in this area. So, I set about doing just that sharpening – ingesting a lot of audio and text content, YouTube videos, and overall sort of soaking in the broad Product Marketing Content Ocean – and an ocean it is! There’s no shortage of folks who are happy to opine on the many aspects of the field.

Through this effort I did find two resources to be especially useful and continue to be folks I look to for expertise and value regularly, which I share here:

  • Jason Oakley of Productive PMM – I subscribe to his newsletter, which shares regular quick-hit examples and analysis of interesting things being done in the wild.
  • April Dunford – I will read, write, and listen to anything that April makes! I’ve been so impressed by her thinking, her storytelling style, and her deep and expert analysis. She has a podcast which is a great first stop.

It was through April’s podcast that I first started to think a lot about positioning – not something I had considered with much depth before, but something which, due to the topic itself or perhaps due to April’s natural charisma and engagement around the topic, really drew me in.

I think most folks have the experience of, occasionally, being really taken by an aspect of their own work, some line of thinking or research, or new approach or methodology, that can arise with a sort of renewed energy, a renewal of excitement and a new sort of lens on a great many things that you’ve been doing regularly without much new insight or novelty.

For me, the most recent example of this is positioning – in coming to better understand this line of thought and methodology, I’m find it applying to more and more aspects of my own work.

It has me so fired up, between the great fright that Chesky gave me, and the compelling nature of Dunford’s podcast, I did something I never thought I’d do. I bought a sales book.

I haven’t finished the sales book, but I am already seeing some unexpected intersections of how we thoughtfully market and sell to external customers, and how internal / platform product teams could more thoughtfully represent the value of their partners and work. There’s something here, and I’m stoked to dig in more.

All this to say, if there’s a kerfuffle in your industry, in your place of work, and it makes you nervous or anxious (as Chesky’s shift to Product Marketing did for me) it’s worth sitting with that internal landscape, spending some time interrogating that feeling, maybe having a coffee or two with friends or mentors. You may find there’s something new and exciting behind that anxiety that unlocks a whole new space in your journey.

Joining a Giant Company: Three Concerns

I started working for The Walt Disney Company in August of 2021 – it has 190,000 employees. The Walt Disney Company’s employee base is roughly the same size as the biggest city I’ve ever lived in.

(that’s Providence, RI, by the way)

As a younger man I did work for larger organizations – The Federal Government (roughly 2 million employees) and Starbucks (in the neighborhood of 350,000 employees) – but that was in some ways a different professional landscape. I was an AmeriCorps community organizer, I was a part time barista, whereas at Disney I’m a Proper Professional, I have a letter/number designation

(P4! Senior Product Manager II!)

I have to navigate the workings of the organization to accomplish my goals in a way that is different from those other jobs.

Since becoming a tech professional, I’ve worked at two organizations prior to Disney – Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com and Tumblr, where I was employee number 130-something, and dbt Labs, where I was employee number 42. While these were both undoubtedly tech companies, in the same broad industrial space as Disney’s tech arm, I did have my concerns about shifting my professional context from the startup space to the established enterprise space.

(even just considered by itself, Disney Streaming Services, the arm where I work, is larger than dbt Labs and Automattic combined)

That’s what this post is about – what those concerns were, and how they’ve played out so far. Note that I’m just about seven months in, and I still have a lot to learn, and some of the following may turn out to be inaccurate, or maybe overly optimistic!

Concern: A big company won’t be as flexible or as energetic as a startup.

This concern, I’d say, is partially correct. I think maybe what I’ve found to be more important is, figuring out what I really value at work. That is to say, there is some part of working at a startup, of always having nine hats and a dozen projects to juggle, the constant uncertainty and balancing act of this vs that, of some weeks where you feel like you’ll never get to grab a breath – there is a part of me that really is temperamentally inclined toward that way of working, and the intensity of the relationships you develop in that environment.

What I’m coming to see now, though, is that I am not sure that I particularly like that part of myself; to be in a constant state of reaction and forward momentum at all costs can be thrilling, but it isn’t necessarily good for you, or your marriage, or your mental health. It might not even be particularly good for your career – more on that later.

The flexibility piece, I think I have been surprised by: I am able to operate in some ways more flexibly at a larger organization, because, and this may be especially notable for a Product Manager, who has to work across departments and functions quite a lot to get basic things done, you have so many more degrees of freedom. When you’re at an organization of 48 people, there are very few decision makers, very few paths to success for any given proposal or suggestion – when you have dozens of departments and directors to chat with, the opportunities for creative solutioning open up in ways that I had not ever expected.

Concern: I will be stifled and stymied by suffocating adherence to The Process.

Another sort-of-true, sort-of-not concern here. There are times when I do feel some pining for the faster cycles and lower organizational overhead of my earlier startup jobs – but I also think that the trade off makes sense, as an organization gets larger, and the pieces become more complex to place correctly, and the timelines and dependencies multiply exponentially, of course you need more scaffolding and structure to keep everyone rowing in the same direction.

There are also times though, especially on a Thursday afternoon, when the week’s Zoom Fatigue is really settling in, that getting a checklist of super clear action items from someone that outline exactly how to move my project forward, can be a balm on this PM’s decision-blasted brain. Sometimes it can be nice to not have to generate generational change in an explosive way at will, and instead, write the doc, and set up the meeting, have the simple satisfaction of a mildly productive day.

Concern: Working at a giant organization won’t allow for the kind of rapid career advancement that a startup can offer.

This one I feel may be right, depending on how you think about career advancement.

Part of it has to do with titles vs toolboxes (and there’s probably a longer post in here that I can loop back to later) – there’s also something here wrapped up in the book Peak (by Anders Ericsson, I had to search my own site to find, shockingly, that I haven’t written about this book already!)

That is to say, joining an early stage startup can represent a huge title gain – you can jump to a level that possibly wouldn’t be accessible to you otherwise. This can be amazing for your career, especially if you’re trying to make a lateral or business-area kind of shift (see my own move from data org to product org, in fact!)

But what it doesn’t afford you, the high stress, high energy, mostly-reactive world of a growth stage startup, is much space for reflection and repetition – since you’re doing, nearly by definition, new things all the time, and learning just-enough on the fly to move onto the next brand new thing it can be really challenging to build meaningful mental models around how to do the work itself, in a way that is sustainable and excellent – what I’m calling here the toolbox.

Whereas working at a larger org, with lots of folks in similar roles, with semi overlapping experience, can offer the kind of community of practice that you’ll struggle to find at a smaller org – notably in Product, where there tend to be few professionals, and they don’t typically have built-in opportunities to peer mentor or skillshare.

I don’t mean to say that this is a pure binary – it’s probably a sliding scale, and I’m sure there are some orgs that offer access to both title and toolbox. I also don’t mean to imply that one is better than the other – they’re both growth, but certainly different kinds of growth, and choosing one or the other (like many things!) is an exercise in trade-offs.

Fatigue: Emotional and Intellectual

I know not everyone follows my LinkedIn profile with rapt attention. That’s OK – I don’t follow your LinkedIn profile very closely, either.

So, you might not know; I’ve moved into a different-but-not-so-different role at Automattic (the folks behind WordPress.com, Woo Commerce, Jetpack, and a heap of other great stuff)

I was previously leading a support team, and have since moved into a role that we call a Data Analyst, on the Marketing team.

If you’re familiar at all with Automattic’s naming policies, both for jobs and teams, yes, this is an outlier in the direction of the mundane in both cases. I went from being a Happiness Engineer on Team Athens (and also technically on Team Redwood) to being a Data Analyst on Customer Activation.

100% consistent with Automattic standard, though, are the many and varied hats that come with this role: at other companies my day to day work could be described as Marketing, Growth Engineering, SEO, SEM, Pay Per Click, Customer Success, Data Science, even a little bit of database architecture. It’s a lot!

(As a sidebar, I think the job duties and title change may make it seem like I’m making a career change or otherwise sort of changing direction – let me assure you, my focus continues to be on building explosive value for our customers. I’m expanding my tool set – not changing my approach.)

Today, was a cognitively demanding day. Working remotely means taking on a lot of responsibility for structure and organization of one’s work – I’m still figuring out how to do that the best way I can, in this new role. It also means being disciplined to push back distractions which are constantly at the ready in any browser window.

Spending hours looking at databases, considering queries, performance, outputs, accuracy – this is work, it’s real work, and it builds fatigue. A day of work, focused, attentive work, can certainly leave me in need of a deep breath and a long walk.

(I personally find it especially hard to think critically and well about SQL, statistics, databases, and so forth, near the end of my work day. It’s like I’m running out of gas.)

What struck me today was how different this kind of fatigue feels, especially compared to the kind of fatigue I’d feel after a tough day leading a team of Happiness Engineers. I’ve reduced them into two distinct types for the title – Emotional and Intellectual – but I’m sure there is some overlap, maybe some days more than others.

Maybe the difference is, in the lead role, the fatigue comes from trying to serve others, trying to hold them and their full personhood in your mind, whereas in this analyst role the fatigue comes from the intensely individual and personal kind of focus it takes to do it well, to take it seriously.

It does feel different to say to my wife, “I had a hard day – I couldn’t get the data types to reconcile the way I wanted,” rather than “I had a hard day – I think I really let some people down.”

Maybe they’re not different. Maybe I’m different.