A Cumulative Pile of Successes

The most resilient person, appreciating multicloud, the bicycle as favorite product, and getting used to failure.

Monday, January 6, 2020

On Monday, January 6, 2020, I shared a link to an episode of the Coaching For Leaders podcast featuring Neil Pasricha with host Dave Stachowiak. Neil described his first professional role, working at Proctor & Gamble. He had graduated from Queen’s University in 2002, one of the top business schools in Canada and, at the time, a job at Proctor & Gamble was one of the top marketing jobs you could get. Neil felt like Charlie Bucket winning the golden ticket. 

But he was horrible at the job. He had been expecting to spend his days creating PowerPoint presentations and instead was asked to create spreadsheets to analyze trucking, gasoline, and a million other variables to determine how much to increase the price of mascara.

As a high achieving adolescent, he took his failure to be his own fault rather than a factor beyond his control. He worked late, came in on weekends, and started grinding his teeth. A few months in, the company wanted to put him on a performance improvement plan. He couldn’t handle the notion of being fired, so he quit nine months in.

He catastrophized this event. He thought, “If I can’t work here, at the best company, with the most supportive culture, kind people, and a lot of structure, I can’t work anywhere.” He thought, “If I can’t do marketing, my highest mark in business school, I certainly can’t do finance,” and, “If I look for another job, they’re just going to call P&G who will say ‘This guy is horrible.’”

He pictured the worst-case scenario: he thought he would go bankrupt and thought his life was over as a working person. He calls this, “pointing the spotlight at yourself”. High achievers have a tendency to think, “It’s all about me and I’m terrible.”

He was a low-resilience person. He wrote his new book, You Are Awesome, about resilience because he identified himself as lacking it. Like most of us these days, he grew up without famines, wars, and other sources of societal stress. He got the gold stars and participation ribbons and didn’t have the tools to handle failure.

He didn’t see for years that the P&G blow actually was his first lesson in resilience. As he says in the quote, we look at successful people and think their lives were a string of successes, but the most successful people are those that have also seen the most failure.

He cited Cy Young, who has won the most games in baseball ever. He also has the most losses. Nolan Ryan, who has the most strikeouts, also has the most walks.

Dave talked about his first full-time role as director of a center that helped students learn math and reading skills. He was average at the job and the culture wanted people to show a lot of initiative. He struggled, got passed over for promotions, and the feedback he was given was that he wasn’t moving fast enough, wasn’t taking initiative, and wasn’t meeting deadlines. Like Neil, Dave dropped out and started his coaching business.

Neil says that Dave’s and his own feelings of incompetence are a result of the spotlight effect. The spotlight effect is the feeling that we’re being noticed, observed, and judged more than we really are. Nobody at P&G probably even remembers Neil, but the spotlight effect had caused Neil to feel that everybody had watched him fail.

To help reduce this effect, Neil asks himself three questions: 1. “Will this matter on my deathbed?” 2. “Can I do something about this?” And 3. “Is this a story I’m telling myself?” For example, if you fail a biology test, the story you might tell yourself, “I failed my parents.”

Dave asked whether Neil is now comfortable with being uncomfortable. Neil had thought that he had reached a point where he was finally comfortable with being uncomfortable, but when he left Walmart to take his side hustle full-time, he suddenly felt uncomfortable again. He says you have to treat it like yoga. You have to keep learning it until you learn it.

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

On Wednesday, January 8, 2020, I shared a link to an episode of the On Call Nightmares podcast featuring Corey Quinn with host Jay Gordon. Corey started his on call career in what he called an “abusive” environment. One year in, a new manager was dropped in and the first thing this manager decided was that he wasn’t going to be on call himself. The number of people on call dropped from four to three and then another person left. So Corey was on call 50% of the time and he could never schedule his life around it.

At the end of that time, Corey swore he would never put himself in this situation again. When he started the Duckbill Group, he decided that anything he did would be “business hours only”.

Jay asked Corey what in 2019 most excited him in the world of cloud. Corey said that it was the awareness by the providers that building the fastest, most exciting, far fetched, far flung technologies was not going to be what won them the hearts and minds of their customers. Instead, he saw the large providers speaking to enterprises about migrating from data centers to cloud environments.

They talked about Microsoft’s advantage in selling the cloud to enterprises. Corey says one of Microsoft’s big advantages in cloud is that they have forty years experience apologizing for software failures. Explaining these failures to non-technical audiences is something Microsoft excels at and Google and Amazon have had to learn.

Jay brought up that the embrace of managed Kubernetes was a big trend in 2019. Corey says that his objection to it is that if you run everything on top of Kubernetes, you’ve abstracted away what you’re doing from the cloud providers’ built-in primitives so much that it becomes challenging to do workload attribution of cost. Programmatically figuring out which workload is the expensive one is surprising difficult.

Jay talked about Hashicorp’s rise in 2019, providing tooling around cloud agnosticism. Corey said that one of the best conversations he had on his own podcast, Screaming In The Cloud, this past year was with Hashimoto. Hashimoto argued that Terraform provides workflow portability rather than workload portability and that one is worth pursuing and the other one is not.

Jay said that this was the first year that Amazon talked about multicloud. Corey says they talked about hybrid but still avoided multicloud. As he says in the quote, Corey believes that every cloud provider hates multicloud until they realize a large customer is going to go with a different provider, then multicloud is wonderful.

Monday, January 13, 2020

On Monday, January 13, 2020, I shared a link to an episode of the Build podcast by Drift featuring Craig Daniel with host Maggie Crowley. Their topic was “What does Drift look for when hiring product managers?” Craig says that the product manager role is unique in that you don’t have direct reports but you need to be able to influence the engineering team, the designers, and a slew of stakeholders that includes customers.

Regarding technical skills, Craig says they look for systems thinkers with the ability to break down a problem, articulate their breakdown, look at data and combine that data with qualitative research.

Maggie asked about hiring for associate PM roles and Craig says it goes back to a core principle that a person’s aptitude and attitude outweighs their experience. Craig defines aptitude as a combination of ability to learn and curiosity. These people are those who can grow faster than normal.

Maggie added that these people are paying attention to the world around them, are asking questions of the tools that they’re using, and are not just assuming things are the way they are.

Craig told the story in the quote about an APM that said their favorite product was a bicycle. He says he wants to work with people that, when they go out for coffee, are thinking about how inefficient the coffee line is.

For more experienced hires, Craig is looking for results. Sometimes there are good people who were in bad companies or joined a startup prior to product-market fit that never got off the ground. If they don’t have results, you want to see outputs: shipping things, building partnerships, and media coverage. People who are successful in product are those that can build coalitions, roll up their sleeves, do the hard work, and get stuff done.

Maggie says that PMs can be afraid to be accountable for the end result. It is easy to say, “I wrote my one pager,” “I wrote the spec,” or “We stuck to the timeline.” There are so many excuses that you lose sight of the fact that you need to be accountable for results.

Regarding the interview process, Craig says Drift’s process consists of a design leader interview, a product team interview, an executive interview, and something called, “The Who method.”

Craig himself is looking for fit. This is not culture fit. It means, “What is this person great at, what do they want to do, and what do we have available or can make available?” To get at fit, Craig asks about their superpowers. If they’re at a company with, say, five product managers, what would everyone say they are the best of the five at? What are they worst of the five at?

He also wants examples of truly exceptional work. This tells him what they think exceptional is, what their emotional intelligence is (are they a braggart?), and what their value system is.

Craig says he has made a lot of mistakes over the years hiring PMs and, as a result, has learned to be more systematic about it. You have to have a practical part of the interview where you have the candidate go to the whiteboard, break down a problem, or tell the interviewer about work they’ve done in the past. A particularly good practical problem is to have them talk about a product they use everyday and describe both what’s great about it and what needs to be improved about it.

They talked about the Who method (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345504194). For example, if the candidate tells you they were responsible for a half-a-million user product, the Who method lets you find out how much of that was their responsibility versus something they are just taking credit for. He talked about an aspect of the Who method called the threat of reference check. You ask the candidate, say, who their previous manager was, and then say, “When I call your previous manager, what are they going to say about you?” 

Wednesday, January 15, 2020

On Wednesday, January 15, 2020, I shared a link to an episode of the Hanselminutes podcast featuring Bryan Liles with host Scott Hanselman. Scott started out by asking Bryan what he means by “a complete engineer”. Bryan says he has rules for everything and rule #1 is that there is a competition out there but you are only competing with yourself. You can watch what other people do and you can emulate them, but don’t compare yourself to others.

Regarding being a complete developer, he says you have two aspects of being a developer: 1) writing software for money and 2) providing an impact to the world. That impact may be helping other developers level up, providing a role model, or simply doing no harm.

Growing up, Bryan’s dream was simply to have a better life for himself than his parents had. Now, he wants to show people that his life was not a fluke but is a result of preparing himself for opportunities. The world Bryan wants to live in is one in which we’re trying our best and we’re also looking out for the people that come after us.

Bryan talked about his recent project Octant that is a console for showing what’s going on in your Kubernetes cluster. He says that often we start to make a product and we start listing a bunch of features we want it to have. He says this is like that friend that talks too much and tells boring stories that go on for too long. We all prefer the friend who tells simple stories and it is the same with software products: you need to start off simply and solve one problem at a time.

The interview ended with Bryan’s three pieces of advice that he gives to all black males that he meets. First, he says to ignore the advice that says you have to be the dumbest person in the room. That works when you have privilege and you have a safety net. Instead, be the smartest person in the room, but don’t tell anyone. Second, opportunity is rare, so when it comes, be ready. His third piece of advice is in the quote.