Vision and Strategic Planning:

Goal | Measure(s) | Success Criterion: A simple, back-to-basics way to outline a project, process, or product worth investing in, but also a direct challenge to colleagues or leadership when you feel they are acting on instincts and not facts. By nailing down the goal, how you intend to measure, and what criterion constitute success aligns everyone in the room on what is being discussed and affords an accountability for the inevitable pivot or preserve moments to come.
Innovation As Arrogance: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." - Henry Ford (not really). I’ve heard this quote, which Henry Ford never actually said as far as anyone can tell, to dismiss customer input into everything, in favor of innovation. Customers, after all, don’t know what they want. Everyone form Product Managers, Designers, Researchers, Executives, etc. throw this around to justify doing what they think is the right thing to do without the need for validation. Validation will come once their vision is available for purchase and people flock to it by the millions. Funny how that rarely materializes. If you hear these words, someone is putting a lot of stock in not giving the customers what they want, and must know, intimately, what they will want. Gates, Jobs, Musk, Zuckerberg, they did it. They innovated products that people didn’t know they wanted, and are now ubiquitous. Your Product Manager has a very slim chance of doing that. It’s rarely innovation, it’s more likely arrogance.
404, The Painted Door, The A/B, & More: You should test everything. In customer functions, people lose sight of this. There is a tendency to set it, and forget it. In one group I belong to, a new leader in a company, in the customer service space, was asking for recommendation for a telephony system with all the standard features, which ones people liked, and the cost, knowing she needed to scale the operation by 100% or more in the coming year. All well and good, I suppose, but if it were me, alarm bells would be going off. Telephone Customer Service is expensive and inefficient, even when fully outsourced. Certain customer segments really prefer it, but if you asked them, BPO experiences aren’t what they have in mind, and certain industry processes need it (think voice authorization) but man, I would be exhausting a bunch of other options before I threw all in on doubling my telephone customer service. I did this specific thing once, using what we used to call a 404 test (resulting in a page not found), now we call it the painted door. Without changing a thing, I threw up clickable options for support Chat | Email | Phone and varied the order of those options, for a few hours a day, a couple of days, in one week. What do you know, 40% of customers chose chat (it wasn’t an option back then, but I knew the potential since our customers were multitaskers by design and our service required some async actions to resolve common friction points.) Imagine my delight at being validated, then 10x that delight when I showed the cost-savings projections for our service team to my boss. It was a simple test, cost me nothing, and took very little time. Test everything, even if you just end up confirm that what you are doing is working, the insights will come.
Content & TV Guide: Back before the earth cooled, we used to get a smallish magazine in the mail that listed TV Channel Schedules for the 4-6 channels we had. Look it up kids, it was a draconian. Anyway, the format was like Show, Title of Episode, Actors, Plot Summary, Run Time. If the show was a prime time hit, it might take up 4-6 lines, if it was a rerun, it was usually concatenated and the plot summary was removed, maybe the actors too, leaving you with Show, Title, Run Time and taking up 1 line. Apparently, TV Guide went to the people that wrote up the original versions and said something like, going forward, we will write a short, medium, and long version for every show (and an effort will be made to do this going backward too) so that, as a show gracefully exits prime time, the different versions will already exist for the changes in copy size allocated. Supposedly the writers weren’t too pleased, but acquiesced in the end. This was long before computers, the internet, digital TVs, etc. That said, if you pull up some older show like, I don’t know, The Love Boat on your TV today, and press info, info, info the progression of information from small —> medium —> large is the same information those writers wrote oh so many years ago. The principle that this illustrates is that content should not be written based on the format/medium of display, and the intended display should not dictate the format of the content. Remember this when writing FAQs, blog articles, learning materials, etc. Modularity isn’t just good practice for software, it future proofs many areas of effort in the present.Back before the earth cooled, we used to get a smallish magazine in the mail that listed TV Channel Schedules for the 4-6 channels we had. Look it up kids, it was a draconian. Anyway, the format was like Show, Title of Episode, Actors, Plot Summary, Run Time. If the show was a prime time hit, it might take up 4-6 lines, if it was a rerun, it was usually concatenated and the plot summary was removed, maybe the actors too, leaving you with Show, Title, Run Time and taking up 1 line. Apparently, TV Guide went to the people that wrote up the original versions and said something like, going forward, we will write a short, medium, and long version for every show (and an effort will be made to do this going backward too) so that, as a show gracefully exits prime time, the different versions will already exist for the changes in copy size allocated. Supposedly the writers weren’t too pleased, but acquiesced in the end. This was long before computers, the internet, digital TVs, etc. That said, if you pull up some older show like, I don’t know, The Love Boat on your TV today, and press info, info, info the progression of information from small —> medium —> large is the same information those writers wrote oh so many years ago. The principle that this illustrates is that content should not be written based on the format/medium of display, and the intended display should not dictate the format of the content. Remember this when writing FAQs, blog articles, learning materials, etc. Modularity isn’t just good practice for software, it future proofs many areas of effort in the present.
Budgeted Hours, Not FTEs: Getting the right staffing levels for the work in your purview can be complicated, especially if that involves hiring more staff. One thing that all good executives are mindful of is increasing FTEs. FTEs have a 30-40% cost beyond their salaries including benefits and shares, 401K matches, etc. so adding headcount can cause an allergic reaction. One method I have used that has been very effective is to pitch the ask in terms of hours, not FTEs. That is, I’ve created charts and graphs, including projects, timelines, impacts, ROIs, all the things I think are worth doing in addition to what my leadership has asked me to accomplish, and broken that down by hours. Just like a development cycle with sprints and Fibonacci points and velocity metrics, I offer what can be done with current staffing levels vs. what could be done with X more hours, forcing a conversation about trade-offs and what can’t get done without investment. Maybe it’s the framing of the problem in an agile development mindset. Executives in tech have long had to make expensive decisions about staffing and throughput around engineers, and a consistent supply and demand problem for quality engineers often leaves executives wishing they could hire MORE engineers to increase throughput of features and functionality. That constraint thinking, perhaps, works in your favor in non-tech roles. Frame it is hours vs. output and break the stranglehold on budgets when you say that terrible acronym, FTE.
You’re The Expert & There Is No Plan: Two things you’ll discover at every level of leadership. You’ll be in your first meeting with management, company leadership, executive leadership team, doesn’t matter how high up you go, it will continue to be an experience to navigate. You’ll be in a discussion on a topic that you know very well, and someone of respect and authority, with great command of professional and domain expertise, will be saying something that either isn’t true or is derived from incorrect facts with which you are well acquainted. You’re the expert in the room. No one else may know that, yet, but you’ll know it, and you have to find a voice to contribute to the conversation and share your expertise so that the collective knowledge is the best it can be AND the other people in the conversation don’t feel countermanded, talked over, or dismissed. It’s a common misconception that, at every level, there is a well established plan that you are simply unaware of, and joining the next level of hierarchy will undoubtedly reveal the mysteries heretofore shrouded in secrecy and on a need-to-know basis. While there may be high-level machinations afoot (think enterprise level contract with a major brand in your domain that will pivot the business significantly, if you’re the optimistic sort) the truth is, your organization is reliant on YOU to help mold the plan. There is often directional clarity and several objectives laid out for he next quarter, but once you’ve been through it a few times, counting on anything greater than a quarter’s worth of resource allocation will leave you confused, maybe even jaded. Of course, big corporations can be slower-moving, and longer-planning, and certainly industries like car manufacturing have an annual seasonality that impact deviation from longer-range plans, like for delivery of new models, etc. , but in many companies, you are the plan. Be ready to contribute.
Expertise Isn’t Leadership, Nor Should It Be: No one knows how plumbing works better than the plumber, but that doesn’t make every plumber a leader of people, it makes them an expert in plumbing. I use this example thoughtfully. Tradespeople are such a highly specialized skill, but we don’t always think of it that way. A good friend of mine is a welder, and they routinely lower him on a bosun’s chair, hundreds of feet into smoke stacks, to check and repair the metal infrastructure. He can teach people to weld, sure, but can he run a union welding shop? Does he want to? I am sure he could, but it’s a learned skill, just like welding. The paperwork, the contract negotiation, navigating when to hire and who to put on what job, compliance with union rules, safety rules and routines for equipment. He’s an awesome welder, he’d have to learn the other things. And, he likes the work, the actual work of welding. All that’s gone if he’s running the shop. Promoting someone to leadership is actually asking them to take the knowledge of their experience and expertise with them, and learn a whole new set of skills. Most experts can’t become great leaders, and, given a choice with equal opportunity for advancement and compensation, most probably wouldn’t want to try.

Empowering and Developing Teams:

Find your why, find your way: The juxtaposition of “fake it until you make it” and imposter syndrome is a reality that many professionals face. I’ve seen many professionals reach a dead end in their careers because their focus isn’t something that energizes them. If your professional focus isn’t personally fulfilling, odds are, you’ll meet that dead end too. This isn’t to say you have to do what you love, or work for a company who’s mission is your mission, though those things help. Ans a dead end isn’t career-ending, necessarily, it may just result in you working to support your family or your hobbies instead being something you are passionate about. If you can find what energizes you, the application of that passion affords you the ability to contribute across many industries and in many capacities without it being married to one job, one company, one boss, one field, and reaching that dead end.
Relentless Positivity: Impassioned dispassion may sound like an oxymoron, but being in command of your professional and domain expertise includes being in command of your emotions. Sonny Corleone wore his passion on his sleeve and his enemies used it to their advantage. Michael Corleone, on the other hand, played a long game, angling against his adversaries until each could be bested and his goals accomplished. When you show frustration outwardly, act out of anxiousness, or don’t act out of fear, you reveal weakness that can be used against you. By controlling your emotions, you control the outcomes. Never let them see you sweat.
Introverts & Extroverts: As a self-diagnosed extrovert, I spent many years working my working style and leadership skills to harness that proclivity. I learned, over time, that acting on instinct often put less extroverted people at a disadvantage and limited their ability to feel successful under my watch. By example, I love to brainstorm, and improvise, but I learned over time, for instance, that other people flourish when they have an agenda and can pre-think on a problem. Brainstorming may make them ill at ease, and they can struggle to contribute impromptu. Even worse, hours later, they may have something awesome to contribute, which can leave them feeling bad about themselves that they didn’t think of it in real time and regretting the less-than-optimal offering they gave in the session. Know your tendencies, enable success in others.
Superstars as Leaders: A huge pitfall in corporate life is a lack of intentionality in identifying, promoting, nurturing, and supporting leaders. SMEs often embark on the managerial path because of a battle-field promotion or because they’re the best at their job. Neither of these reasons are because the person has leadership competencies, and even worse, they may not have aspiration to leadership at all, but see it as either their obligation to the company or their only opportunity to get ahead. Forgoing that gap, the biggest hurdle I’ve seen for new leaders is confusion, specifically an inability to understand why other people can’t just see things the way they do and do things the way they did it. Every journey is different, but most new leaders would do well to accept, straight away, that the best their staff is ever going to do is to meet 80% of their expectation. Some employees will surprise you, even surpass the self-appointed perfection from which you surfaced out of IC and into a leadership capacity. Until that happens, learning to enable and empower, selflessly, putting aside the judgmental comparison to their accomplishments, is the first step to understanding whether leadership is something you can grow into or something you should seek a path out of, it’s not for everyone.
Employee First: In it’s best rendering, putting employees first, over yourself, can be transformative and win the loyalty and best effort of each member of your staff. In it’s worst version, it’s a trite and lilliputian statement that leaders know they are supposed to believe, but don’t support it with their actions. I will say it plainly, and it will either resonate with you or it won’t. Ambition and effort will take you a long way, but in a leadership role, you will be most limited by your inability to put your employees first. Take it as it is stated. Your only successes will come at the hands of your employees. Ultimately, putting them ahead of yourself, is selflessly selfish. My favorite part is, it doesn’t work if you don’t actually do it. There is no faking this one. Your staff know exactly where they stand in the hierarchy of your internal dialogue. You’ve heard the phrase “leaders eat last?” Well, you can eat last and still put yourself first. They know, and you know, they come first or they don’t, and you can’t hide it. Do it.
Team Accountability, Transformative: I’ve learned a ton of hard lessons over the years, navigating the leadership space, and something I hear often, from people I respect and admire, even leaders that have worked for me… “The team works hard for me, and the company.” It’s great don’t get me wrong, but the best teams, in my experience, work hardest for each other. As I see it, it’s my job to inspire and empower, aligning my team’s vision and operations with that of the company mission and objectives. I can teach them to be excellent in their professional competency and execution, but the best, the absolute best teams in my experience, have been the ones that are accountable to each other. I’ve done enough, my directors and managers have done enough, to equip them with the tools and information they need, and they run at the work, excited, confident, and lift each other up. Being primarily motivated by the personal recognition and reward you may (or may not) get from leadership is a trap. And that isn’t to say that people shouldn’t be fairly compensate and recognized, it’s to say that the culture should be one where everyone has equal opportunity, and the shared goals and objectives are the focus, not the individual. It’s optimistic, perhaps idealistic, bordering on delusional, but when teams are accountable to each other for the quality of the work and the outcomes they achieve, it’s transformative and it’s possible.
No Success Alone: It’s true at every level, but as you ascend the hierarchy of an organization, there is a bright light illuminating this simple truth. People may enjoy your company, like working with you, appreciate your work product and your ideas, but you can’t promote yourself or give yourself more responsibility or higher compensation, recognition requires an outside agency. And, while it may be the case that working harder, creating opportunities, proactively acting on insights, and the like, will garner more recognition, your success is ultimately reliant on everyone around you. Seems simple, but too often I find colleagues and employees alike locked in an internal dialogue, focused on themselves and their activities, certain that the rugged individualism ideal is how to get ahead. And, while you might argue that a primary characteristic of a successful founder or entrepreneur is an unwavering belief in their own ability to succeed, even when no one else believes they can, I would counter that even this archetype is a mechanism to absorb the intense, often singular, responsibility for failure so that the people in their company can work together to succeed.
No Credit? Don't Care!: Perhaps a bit on the philosophical side here. I had a conversation with someone who repeatedly had their ideas, their work, even their words, offered and repeated by someone else as their own. In some cases, this might be cause for legal action, but in your work life, especially if this is an employee, I don’t care, and I mean it! That’s the key, you’ve got to REALLY NOT CARE, not just fake it. I’m going to have more good ideas and produce more good work, over and over, my value should never be in question. If my colleagues and bosses can’t see the value I provide, I am certainly not going to improve that by making sure everyone knows someone else is passing off my work as theirs. Spotting talent and recognizing employees at all levels for their value can’t be manipulated easily and if it can, you’re in a pretty bad company culture. I don’t work for credit and accolades, I work for outcomes, and I believe that if you are truly committed to outcomes, you can’t care about the credit. Outcomes are company goals, credit is a personal goal. Maybe that’s naive, and self-promotion is an effective way to get ahead, but I am not programmed that way. I’ll take the credit if you’re offering, and I deserve it, but I’ll always deflect it to my team. Measure me by my team’s outcomes, I’m good with that.

Effective Communication and Influence:

Everyone Wants A Good Day: I’ve reframed teams using this perspective exercise dozens of times, in various forms. People, and whole teams, can fall into a natural human reaction to their environment, believing that other individuals, teams, or even their own company has ill-will toward them or intentions to sabotage them or make their job harder. I’m not saying that doesn’t happen or that there aren’t bad actors out there, but consider this proposal. 99.9% of people, on 99.9% of days, no matter their occupation or station, want the same thing out of every day. They want to do good work, that produces something of value, and to be recognized and fairly compensated for that work. If you don’t believe that, you have some personal work to do. Every day won’t be one of these good days, that’s true, but your coworkers aren’t your enemy, they are just people, who want the same thing out of their work day as you do. Start from there and your odds of having a good day will go up astronomically.
Buttered Bread: You can’t blame someone for knowing what side of the bread the butter is on. I like this better than don’t hate the player, hate the game, but the meaning is similar in this context. People make choices they believe are in their best interest and in a business context, sometimes those choices feel directed at you, in a negative way. If they are, it’s almost always incidental in my experience. You don’t always have to know why every decision is made, you can chose to trust that your peers and colleagues made the best decision they could with the information that they had at the time, and you should believe that they will be right more often than they are wrong, hopefully by a lot. What is really injurious is when we blame other people for making decisions that are in their best interest, believing they are making the right choice for the company as well, and taking offense that it has a negative, real or perceived impact, on ourselves or our teams. They see the bread and the butter from where they are standing and more often than not, they know what side of the bread the butter is on.
1st & 2nd Narrative: People sometimes think, and act, as though they are being asked to do something they don’t truly believe in or that the message from the top doesn’t ring true to their experience. The truth is we are all asked, at times, to take on an effort when our instincts tell us that resource would be better spent elsewhere. The better you are at your job, the more your instincts are correct, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’ll have to take on responsibilities and activities that don’t 100% align with your opinion, it’s part of everyone’s working life. The way I like to frame this up for myself, and my staff, is that a 1st & 2nd narrative (even a 3rd or a 4th) can coexist without either being “right” or “wrong”. In fact, it is our job, on occasion, to put 100% effort into a 1st narrative that we don’t instinctually believe is beneficial, while maintaining efforts in a 2nd narrative that we do instinctually believe. This isn’t nefarious skunk works, undermining the 1st narrative, it’s weaving the threads that your professional domain expertise tells you to keep weaving to make the longitudinal effectiveness of your team more impactful. It’s not either/or, it’s both and…
IIUI: It isn’t until it is or it is until it isn’t. In operations, this is painfully tricky. We often operate on a dangerous and sometimes costly assumption. That is, in my experience, I’ve been caught more than once by assurances inside my own company that X will be Y by Z date only to have that work never materialize, which influenced allocation of resources that would have been better spent had I not accepted those assurances. Sometimes, there is simply a delay, but there is also a tipping point, when delay becomes inevitability. These choices are hard, and sometimes they are frustrating, but operationally, I’ve found it essential to stand this ground. Orienting around agility alleviates the pressure here, becoming independent of the assurances, and dependent on the reality.
Steering the Ship: I had a manager working for me that expressed some frustration with me, saying I feel like I’m in command of the ship (his team) but when he turns the wheel to steer the ship, the rudder doesn’t move. I thought on that one for a bit and I said, think of it this way, this isn’t one ship with one wheel, it’s an Armada, and everyone is the captain of their own ship. Your job is to keep the wheel of your ship pointed in the right direction, avoiding hazards, signaling the way to go. The other ships (your employees) are going to tack to the port and starboard, surging ahead, and falling behind. By the light of day and the stars at night, you lead, and some undoubtedly will not make the journey with us. Those who see you lead, and trust that your primary interest is their safe arrival, will follow. If we concern ourselves with every ship that veers toward danger or surges ahead without protection, your ship will be delayed. Stay the course, you’ve traveled these seas, you know the way. Onward.
Polyglot: I love watching Xiaomanyc videos on Youtube. He’s a true polyglot and speaks dozens of languages and dialects, traveling to markets and restaurants around the world, shocking native speakers as he speaks their language, in many cases very, very well. You can see the immediate smiles and connections he makes when an average looking white guy from American freely converses in Somali, Yoruba, Telugu is infectious. they are often confused at first, then delighted and amused by something they have truly never seen or heard. It’s remarkable. I remember unlocking this secret at work, when I first studied The Lean Start Up and used practical pieces in my customer teams, to organize things like FAQ revisions into sprints, hosted Blameless Post Mortems for crisis response procedures, created testing frameworks, held scrum standups, and presented sprint reviews, etc. Frankly, my boss wasn’t sure what to do with me way back then. I wasn’t then, and am not currently, and agile devotee, and I certainly am not entangled with the debates around SAFe and what is true agile. There are things to learn and adopt from any system. If it achieves outcomes, at a faster and more impactful pace, I’ll use it. What it taught me though, was I now had a seat at the table in the broader organization. I could ask product and engineering, in their language about A/B tests and feature flags, what their sprint was focused on and what their velocity was. I would ask about goals, measures, and success criterion, lending an insight from the customer’s perspective that had never translated so well before. They were confused at first, then amused by something they had never seen before. I went on to learn the language of marketing with the same effect. To be engaged as a colleague, you need to be a polyglot. the alternative is both you and your peers speaking a shared language that is missing the nuances of either of your native tongues.
The Tough Conversation: There are times in every leader’s career when they have to have a difficult conversation with an employee. This isn’t the course correction or advice session you carve out to help someone on their way, it’s the turning point conversation. We tend to think of these as negative, like putting people on a PIP, etc. but I’ve had plenty that are positive, I need more from you because I know you have more to give and you are going places type conversations. I came up with this method because it addressed my anxieties and allowed me to have these conversations effectively. Maybe it’ll help you. I write down two sentences on a piece of paper, usually one around the behaviors/actions I need to change and the other about how that impacts me personally (not the team or the company, I’m not projecting here.) And here’s the key, I commit to reading them exactly as written. This forces me to edit, rewrite, focus, rewrite again and again until I know I have it where I want it. When I bring the employee in, I tell them the same thing. I have to have difficult conversations to do my job effectively, this is going to be one of those conversations. These are hard for me to get right, and it’s too important to me and to you to just wing it, so I commit to writing down two sentences and reading them verbatim. I revise them over and over until I get exactly what I want to say down on paper, then I sleep on it, and I have the conversation the next day. I am going to read those two sentences to you now and I’d like your feedback. You’d be surprised how effective this is for me. It takes my emotion out of the situation and forces me to consider the recipient with empathy, my tone, how they’ll take it, does it convey what I intend, etc.
What? Why? How?: A guideline for working cross-functionally that is effective in getting buy in and resource support across an organization. The what and the why are analytical and can be presented as a opportunity to improve something that deserves attention. The how, however, should be a group effort. If you present a colleague with the how (in addition to the what and the why) there is a natural resistance. You are basically just assigning them work, without their input. You may have the best path forward for the how, but if you are open to input from your peers, you’ll be surprised how often they can build upon your what and why to innovate the how.

Vision-Making and Accountability:

Customer Service | Support | Success | Experience: This is difficult to write as a customer professional. We’ve labeled and relabeled this function so many times, nobody agrees on what these competencies are anymore. Instead of trying to tell everyone else how they should think about it or how to put the various functions in a box, I’ll offer this: no matter what you label it, your company is in the business of providing customer service, product support, evaluating the experience of your customer, and ensuring their success. You can mix these ingredients in many ways, just like the 4 traditional ingredients in beer (barley, water, hops, and yeast) and get a nearly infinite amount of flavor profiles, strengths, colors, aromas, and densities. The difference between a great tasting beer and your buddy’s home brew that tastes like moldy socks, is a combination of the objective skill of the brewer and the subjective taste of the customer. I won’t go too much further with this analogy, but I will say that you need a true customer professional as your brewer to create a flavor profile that your customer loves. A master customer professional will adapt the functional profile to your customer, then experiment and iterate until they truly love it. If you choose to orient your customer function around a marketing or sales professional, you better be damn sure your customer absolutely loves Blueberry Grapefruit Cask-Aged Imperial Farmhouse Ales, because they won’t be able to adapt your functional profile to anything else. They’re not master customer professionals, they’re not master brewers, they’re your buddy, handing you a pint of smelly sock they brewed in their bathtub. Cheers!
You're Right, And That Doesn't Help You: I once heard the phrase “you’re all knees and elbows” meaning, you’re abrasive, hard to love, etc. I’ve coached many SMEs in their career growth, learning how to set and accomplish aggressive goals, find allies and partners throughout an organization to achieve things that, alone, would be impossible. SMEs are experts for many reasons, not the least of which is that they’re right way more often than they aren’t, but being right is only part of reaching a solution. And, as you climb the ranks, it can be only a minor factor. You’re increasingly surrounded by other people that are right, almost all the time, and navigating competing priorities and limited resources is a daily exercise. This isn’t saying you need to “suck it up” and “try harder”, but that’s part of it too. In the end, you’ll need to build the tools and skills to find success in all kinds of environments, and just being “right” isn’t going to get you very far if your version of right is all knees and elbows.
Trust & The One Thing: Building team trust is a multi-billion dollar industry, but real trust requires courage and honesty that can’t be bought or won in an offsite. I once challenged a team, that I knew was ready, that fought for each other selflessly, to write down one thing about every other member of the team, including myself, that sabotaged the success of our team. Nothing personal, only professional behaviors. The recipient of the feedback could say nothing in response, except “tank you” if they felt like it. I had my direct report go first, giving me criticism, and I cheated. I told them a couple days ahead of time about the exercise, told them I was going first, and they were to sit to the left of me, and that they needed to dig deep, gloves off, give it to me straight, to set the tone. She was brutal. I said thank you. I then asked everyone to take a minute, and if their feedback wasn’t rough enough, to throw out their answer and write it again. We then went around the room, each person taking a turn receiving criticism. There were tears. At the end, I told them the only reason I did this was because I knew they were a strong enough team to survive it and would be stronger because of it. Receiving the toughest of criticism didn’t cause the world to end and it didn’t make any of us hate the other person, we took it as intended. It was a gamble, and it worked. I haven’t had the courage, or a team I thought could survive it, since. If you aren’t there with your team, there is room to grow.
KPI, CPI, Acronym Soup: I recently saw a LinkedIn post touting a new metric to replace KPIs, announced as CPIs, Customer Performance Indicators. Intriguing, I read on. They started with TTV Time To Value, great, I can get behind that. Then CES, Customer Effort Score, awesome, it’s harder to integrate than CSAT or NPS, but provides really good information on friction customers are having with your company’s product or service. But wait, there’s more, they then when on to include LTV, Lifetime Value and Customer Churn. OK, you lost me. LTV and Churn are company metrics, not customer metrics. Here we are again, relabeling things and calling them new. Listen, LTV and Churn are super important, but man, Sales and Marketing thinking in the customer function is pervasive and this stinks of both. Customer Success is just that, it’s not company success. When you do it right, you establish relationships in which mutual success is the goal, where both company and customer benefit from the partnership. When you do it wrong, you use jargon and spin that ensure the customer knows their role with your company, as a dollar sign in a table somewhere.

Adaptability and Change Management:

No Success Alone: It’s true at every level, but as you ascend the hierarchy of an organization, there is a bright light illuminating this simple truth. People may enjoy your company, like working with you, appreciate your work product and your ideas, but you can’t promote yourself or give yourself more responsibility or higher compensation, recognition requires an outside agency. And, while it may be the case that working harder, creating opportunities, proactively acting on insights, and the like, will garner more recognition, your success is ultimately reliant on everyone around you. Seems simple, but too often I find colleagues and employees alike locked in an internal dialogue, focused on themselves and their activities, certain that the rugged individualism ideal is how to get ahead. And, while you might argue that a primary characteristic of a successful founder or entrepreneur is an unwavering belief in their own ability to succeed, even when no one else believes they can, I would counter that even this archetype is a mechanism to absorb the intense, often singular, responsibility for failure so that the people in their company can work together to succeed.
100K vs. 200K: One of the most ambitious employees that ever worked for me was a constant force. He advocated for himself tirelessly, and he had his hands in every department and effort in the company, eager to move his career forward, and make more money. And, let me be clear, I don’t view the pursuit of more money as something to be ashamed of or as something we should pretend isn’t a motivation for people. More money is highly correlated to longer life, better health, better education for children, etc. and it affords people to pursue interests that aren’t more work, so can we all stop pretending it’s some sinful preoccupation? Anyway, so, this guy worked for me and asked my advice on how to get to a position to make more money. I told him that he could get to 100K in 2-3 years, easy, but getting to 200K would be a long road, unless, unless, he committed to doing one thing very, very well, instead of doing 20 things pretty good. And, if that one thing wasn’t something he was passionate about, that energized him instead of draining him, he might not ever get there. There are plenty of people, I think, that make 200K, 300K, even more doing things they don’t love, but I don’t think that’s the norm. The energy and investment it takes to perfect a marketable skill, for most people, takes years to nurture and develop, replete with setback and leaps forward. I also believe that most people will burn out long before they’ve maximized their potential (and their potential earning power) if they aren’t engaged in work that they truly enjoy. It’s not quite eat 1 skittle now or 10 later simple, but it’s not too far off from my perspective.
Planned Work, Unplanned Work, Emergency Work: A simple exercise that sheds light on resource allocation for individuals or teams. Make a 9 x 9 Grid with painters tape (or use a digital version in Excel or Miro, etc.) For the column headers, list Planned, Unplanned, Emergency as the column headers. For the rows, use Backlog, Active, Completed. On a Friday, place sticky notes in the Planned | Backlog quadrant for the upcoming week. Over the course of that next week Place a sticky note for every hour of work completed in the appropriate squares. You should find 3 things. First, emergency work can vary, but you will find it most often in the Completed row. Over the course of a longer period of time, you can start to anticipate if this is 5% - 10% - 15% of your resource. The smaller the better in healthy companies is a general rule of thumb, but it’s never 0%. The second learning is that Unplanned | Active often contains a significant amount of resource by %. This can be executives asking for additional data, assisting other teams, previously unscheduled meetings, etc. You should able to see a pattern of grouping of these “kinds” of unplanned work. Bottom line, this should ultimately be anticipated and included in your Planned work. The third learning is that your Planned work, more than you’d like, gets stuck in the Backlog. Adding that reality to your Unplanned work being organized into the Planned column, you are over-estimating your velocity, and expectations, resource planning, and communication with your boss need to demonstrate the new reality. It’s actually quite fun to do, even if the outcome uncovers a different reality.
IIUI: It isn’t until it is or it is until it isn’t. In operations, this is painfully tricky. We often operate on a dangerous and sometimes costly assumption. That is, in my experience, I’ve been caught more than once by assurances inside my own company that X will be Y by Z date only to have that work never materialize, which influenced allocation of resources that would have been better spent had I not accepted those assurances. Sometimes, there is simply a delay, but there is also a tipping point, when delay becomes inevitability. These choices are hard, and sometimes they are frustrating, but operationally, I’ve found it essential to stand this ground. Orienting around agility alleviates the pressure here, becoming independent of the assurances, and dependent on the reality.
48 Hours, An Agility Gut Check: As a customer professional, I’ve worked in some very, let’s call them, dynamic environments. More often than not, if engaged at all, Product & Engineering teams are reviewing feature and functionality for upcoming releases many weeks ahead of anticipated release dates. In agile environments, the scope and feature set for these releases can and does change frequently, up to and including that now famous “last responsible moment” which can leave customer facing teams scrambling to keep up or frustrated at the wasted time and effort preparing to support and promote something that is now fundamentally different than presented or never materialized. I’ve long-embedded Lean Agile practices in my customer teams, to augment their ability to pivot to the inevitable crisis or to experiment using discovery spikes in areas surrounding retention, upsell, and cross-sell. I started doing that based on this experience, teaching my teams, and informing Product & Engineering (nicely) that we won’t be training on new feature/functionality until 48 hours prior to release and only when there is a greater than 90% confidence in the release actually happening. I built and organized my teams to learn, document, create materials, and train on releases in <48 hours. We still embedded SMEs in the development process, but we no longer exerted effort and wasted resources to chase the ghosts we could now anticipate in the process.
Don’t Measure, Not Worth Doing: It’s a tenant that bears repeating. If you don’t measure it, it’s not worth doing. Most decision makers got their place of authority and resource control because they trusted their instincts and used data to back up their choices. Sometimes, directional accuracy is all that’s needed. There is some math equation there like impact ÷ resources = data needed but we tend to reverse engineer it. That is, we make choices, then interrogate the data to evaluate those choices. Less often, the data comes first. Increasingly, however, and in my personal experience, the data must be embedded with the choice. Even if acting on instinct, I ensure that the choices I make and there impact are measured longitudinally. Basically, how often did I make the right choice based on my expectation. I use a scale of 1-10 where 8+ was a good choice, 5-7 was neutral, and <5 was a poor choice. I write a simple statement. What is the goal? What are the measures? What is the success criterion? The smaller you can break down the choice, the easier it is to get results without dramatically impacting the ROI of the resource overall. For instance, I once asked 3 people on my team to come up with 10 subject lines to get customers to open an email, and pick the one they thought would work the best. 10 because it allowed them to be creative and kooky and not constrained, then 1 to tap into their instincts. Success criterion was to effectively measure which email got the most opens, sent it to 300 lapsed customers in a specific segment. Was it perfect, no. Did we get actionable results, yes. Did it cost us anything, very little. If you value it, you’ll measure it.