Growing in seniority at Feather

At some point it’s part of your job to make yourself valuable

If you want to grow in your career, you typically go through a few phases. This looks at transitioning from just “doing good work” to having more impact than just being told what to do.

Phase 1: “Doing the work you’re told to do”

At Feather, the person who hired you had to clearly define your role. They also had to define a success roadmap for your first months at the company. During that phase, you can just focus on “doing good work” by following the success roadmap.

The time spent on this phase depends on your seniority level when hired. The more senior you are, the shorter you will be in that phase.

What we mean by “doing good work”:

• Getting stuff done effectively
• Communicating well
• Prioritising well
• Being responsive and helpful - thinking one step ahead where possible
• Most important: wanting to improve and continuously improving on how you work

Phase 2: “What work is the highest impact work I could be doing”

After a while at a company - depending on your role and your seniority - you must develop a sense for what your highest-impact work is. We expect you to start prioritising high-impact tasks while keeping everyone in the loop.

Examples of high impact tasks:

• I am doing a task that adds very little value but takes a lot of time, so I suggest a way to decrease the scope of the task or find a way of automating it or not doing it
• I spot a task I could be doing that creates huge value compared to the rest of my work, and should be doing. I find a way to start doing it, prove the value and then deprioritise something else.
• Most important: I start getting a sense of “business value” of the work in the company. A great place to start is time saving for yourself, but also try to spot things outside your current work.

The three above work together, and you will more and more become the author of parts of your role description.

Phase 3: “What work is the highest impact work my team could be doing”

When you reach this phase, you already know how to prioritise the highest-impact tasks for yourself. Your responsibility is to coach your peers to have the same mindset as you.

We expect you to:

• Bring your perspective of business value to the table, and help others see pieces of their process they could improve like you are doing for yourself
• Spot new opportunities and pitch them to the team, get buy in and create something new and valuable beyond just the scope of your own work
• Most important: You have to build your reputation over time in the company to be a trusted voice that has business value sense. The way to get here is to keep iterating on you business value sense, but also getting a feel for what type of problem takes how much effort from who. Yes - you’re almost acting like a mini product manager for all types of problems.

Notes on startups vs corporate, small company vs big company

The bigger the company that you are at, the longer you can go by following what people tell you to do and work your way up. You can be in Phase 1 for 10 years no problem. Some people spend all their life there.

One perk of being at a startup is authoring your role. By doing so, you can grow your career much faster than in a big company.

But not everyone sees it as a perk. Working in the abstract can be stressful, and not every role requires this. Unfortunately if you want to grow fast, this is a key piece. Everyone at Feather can do these things, we will notice, and we’ll give you more responsibility.

Ultimately, you need to put yourself into a position where you are delivering value to the company. That is your responsibility.