5 years on the job; 5 essential career lessons

Today I am marking five years of product and business management at my present company. It’s been a period rich with personal growth, experiences that shaped my career, decisions that changed my life’s course, disappointments that made me wiser, and achievements that catapulted my market value.

Most importantly, it was a symbolic opportunity to pause for a moment and gather some thoughts about this personal journey. In the process of doing so, I came across lessons which I would be well served knowing years ago. In the interest of providing value, let me recount five of the most essential lessons. I am sure they can be useful to just about anyone. Even more so if you are considering a career change after years in the same snug and cushy work environment.

Without further ado, let me dive into these lessons. I’ll provide context and examples as we go along.

Lesson #1: When you’ve reached your personal glass ceiling, don’t wait

Everyone has a personal “glass ceiling” at work. I define this to be the best position you can reasonably reach in your organization, subject to your personal preferences, abilities and any enduring constraints. It is always telling to know where you are relative to your personal glass ceiling.

Six years ago I graduated with an MBA sponsored by my then-employer, Intel. Throughout that three-year program, my thinking had evolved to the point where I wanted a business-oriented career as opposed to a technology-oriented one. Alas, I was part of an engineering unit in Jerusalem, where true business roles were few and far between. Formally on a management career path, I succeeded to grow my role into aspects of product management and business partnerships, but this remained a sideshow to my primary role of leading an engineering team. It dawned on me that I had reached my personal glass ceiling within that unit and had to leave it to reorient my career path.

Intel is a mammoth enterprise with countless inviting business openings at any given time. I had calculated that moving within Intel would make the most sense, giving me stability and confidence as I ventured into an uncharted professional territory. Accordingly, I approached management seeking permission to explore opportunities within the broader Intel universe. Confident that I could land such opportunity if given a chance, I sought to do so with management’s full backing. The reaction to my request was compassionate, but inconclusive. My career ambitions were acknowledged and supported, but for the time being I was too essential to be let go. I was told that opportunities would be created by management if I would only hang on for a quarter or two, as we go through operational challenges that require all hands on deck. Permission to seek opportunities was not granted, but the bargain seemed decent enough to accept. In the following three quarters I brought this topic up several more times, and although I received a grade promotion, and was given more vague assurances, there was visibly no progress on any transfer. Nine months into it, still stranded at the same career crossroads, I decided that my grace period had run its course and from here on I would seek opportunities externally. Buoyed by rising economic tides and a trustworthy resume, it wasn’t long until I landed job offers for the type of business opportunities I coveted. As late as it was realized, so it was made clear: I spent the last year blocked under my personal glass ceiling, failing to admit to myself that I was making no progress towards my true professional goals.

Many of you are surely thirsting after some beguiling position or promotion within your companies. Now linger for a moment and objectively analyze if it falls within or outside your personal glass ceiling. It’s not only about your abilities and motivations. If for any reason the conditions for that move are lacking, you may be spending your time on the basis of misleading hopes.

Lesson #2: if you want a change to succeed, create yourself a one-way distraction-free environment

I joined Qualcomm in Haifa (Israel) after decades living in Jerusalem. Changing jobs meant relocating to a part of the country I knew less about than many faraway foreign lands. In about a month, I had to pack my life into a truck and rebuild it in a new place where half of my acquaintances were my job interviewers. As the magnitude of the move’s To-Do list became apparent, I swore not to repeat this ordeal any time soon. The conclusion was clear: I am moving now as if this will be my very last move. Like Cortez, the Spanish conquistador, who burned his army’s ships to ensure the ruthless conquest of Mexico, I employed my own little commitments to make any future change of heart less likely. Some examples of this include telling everyone you know that you are permanently moving, or swiftly switching service providers for things that make sense. The higher the cost of switching, the less likely you are to consider it. To be sure, burning bridges (or ships) should not be part of this strategy!

On the first day of my new job, I woke up in what was still an unfamiliar place, which meant few distractions around me. Staring at my blank apartment walls, the only meaningful thing I could think about was… going to work (or hanging pictures, which happened much later). Such were the next couple of months, allowing me to focus on work in an environment which was mostly hassle-free. Within a short while, Qualcomm’s office felt like a second home, letting me devote time and energy into social and cultural assimilation. Indeed, Haifa had quickly become my new home and identity in Israel.

My second move at Qualcomm came three years later, and this time the scale went from domestic to international. Changing your entire environment at a national level, even to America’s “Finest City” (Qualcomm is headquartered in San Diego), is an unmistakably difficult choice. But once I accepted the negotiated offer, my commitment came with no strings attached. This time around I knew well what awaited me in terms of the move’s complexity. The multidimensional switching costs were steep enough that no limited-term stay alone would justify them. As before, and though my options would remain open, I was intent on treating this move as a one-way street. With no drama or surprises to speak of, the story of this second move unfolded like the previous one. It was a success on all levels, and emerged as such from very early on. Two years later, America is my indisputable home and I consider this move to be one of my best life decisions.

To summarize, career changes are risky, and multifaceted changes carry many additional risks. However, once a decision is made, we can greatly reduce those risks by making a frank long-term commitment to the change. It also helps to nurture an environment where we can bring our very best to address the most important changes first.

Lesson #3: Avoid deals if the fundamentals are inferior or poorly understood

In business we’re often tempted to trust our gut instinct and go with what feels right. Any interview with Jeff Bezos or Jack Welch will easily reflect that. While there is no denying that subjective judgment plays a key role in successful decisions, this alone is seldom enough. As obvious as it is, in the moment of truth many high-stakes decisions are made with plenty of "gut" and little in the way of substance.

The first business partnership I was summoned into at Qualcomm was with a major tech enterprise. Leaders on both sides used to say that our companies are two industry leaders which must find a way to work together. How is it that we are not developing something together was an often posed question. The decision to enter into a product collaboration was further bolstered by personal friendships that existed at various management levels. The result was an ill-fated project based on plenty of good will but a nonexistent path to market. Guess which of the two had the final say? One year and so many engineering hours later, this productivity torment was eventually put to an end. Negotiation struggles over contract terms helped disguise the banality that true value creating elements were always absent from the deal. In the years that followed I was exposed to similar projects across a range of different companies. A common pattern often emerges: partnerships are established on good vibes and intuition, but as common sense realities begin to sink in, fractures start to appear and rapidly metastasize.

Business schools are not wrong on this one. As tedious as they are, there's a reason why fundamental analyses and business planning are essential. If inherently optimistic flow charts and spreadsheets don't point to success, few concrete things will lead to it. Shortcuts of this kind are never justified. Intuition is no doubt a strategic decision tool, but alone it is never a reliable success indicator.

Lesson #4: The key to most business challenges is breaking the chicken-and-egg paradigm

If you are a business manager your central problems likely follow the pattern of I need both X and Y; X cannot happen before Y; Y cannot happen before X. Breaking this paradigm is always the key to unlocking business successes. A illustrative example is budget and customers: I need more budget for a product to address a new customer segment, but without new customers I lack the budget to develop the product. In real life, there are often more than two interdependent elements. For simplicity's sake, and out of respect to fowl, we shall stick to a model of two, chickens and eggs.

Over the past five years, I have faced such dilemmas myriad times, seeing colleagues both fail and succeed at them. All failures followed a similar path, and all successes followed a similar (but different) path.

Failures are the expected outcome if you focus on X while waiting for Y to somehow occur, or vice versa. For example, you could go on a corporate roadshow begging for R&D budget, but if you haven't developed your market, there will be little supporting evidence to your funding plea. Conversely, you could start seeding the market, take potential customers for dinner, and promise the moon in return for an early contract. However, most procurement departments are more sophisticated than that. Soon enough your buyer will seek tangible evidence that a product exists beyond slides alone.

What successes have in common is an unrelenting pursuit of both X and Y, together at the same time. This often means playing them one against the other and creating a seductive sensation that something great is emerging. Play your cards smartly and your audience will reciprocate out of pure FOMO. This could be preparing a skunkworks demo to elicit customer interest, and leveraging this acknowledgement to squeeze funding for the next couple of weeks. If you've worked for a startup, this must be in your wheelhouse, but often these chickens and eggs are not self-evident. It's difficult to approach such problems effectively without identifying the underlying interdependent factors. Next time you face a difficult business challenge, carefully test if it follows this pattern, and strategize how to advance all its components en masse.

Lesson #5: Be savvy about your company’s core product

In many businesses there is a core product. And then, all other products. For Microsoft, Windows is the core product. For Google, it’s the search engine. For Apple, the iPhone. For Intel, the PC processor. The core product is that which your company is best known for in society. If you think of it, there is literally no future scenario in which the company discontinues its core product.

It’s a privilege to work on the core product. But let’s face it, most employees are not part of this limited club. The larger the business, the larger the product portfolio usually is, and then we have armies of professionals who run all kinds of non-product related activities. So should you care or worry about the core product if your position has little to do with it? If your role involves any sort of business communications with the outside world, the answer to this is a resounding YES.

If only I had known this before going through multiple awkward moments... As it happens, Qualcomm’s core product and source of greatness is its cellular modem. This is a part of the business which I initially had no connection to. Working at Qualcomm, it’s difficult to ignore the barrage of news and accomplishments related to modems. The illustrious modem is all over Qualcomm’s DNA, patent walls, and income statements. Yet I somehow managed to flag this as noise and let it go over my head for more than a year. This was narrow-minded and shortsighted. It wasn’t long before I found myself in after-hours settings with customers and partners, where modem-related discussions organically sprung up. I recall one trip to Latin America where a panel of telecom regulators unexpectedly shifted what was a non-modem discussion to general questions relating to LTE (the 4th Generation cellular technology). It’s one thing to leave specialized areas to experts, but another thing to be unschooled in your company’s core product. On that rainy day in the heart of Buenos Aires, I somehow dodged the bullet, but the penny certainly dropped. I spent the long flight back studying as much as I could about cellular networks and modems. Fast forward to today, and I can proudly hold a reasonably intelligent conversation on the topic.

Unlike me, you don’t have to encounter awkward moments to do what’s right. If your company has a core product, identify what it is, study its history to some reasonable degree, and begin monitoring its course. If you’re fortunate enough to work on that core product, you just received a 100% discount. Good luck!