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A UX interview is a qualitative research method where a UX designer or researcher speaks directly with users to understand their behaviors, motivations, pain points, and expectations. Unlike surveys or analytics, UX interviews offer rich, open-ended insights that help you see the why behind the what.
These conversations are typically semi-structured, meaning the interviewer prepares questions but allows room for follow-up and exploration.
Here are a few typical questions:
Youre uncovering patterns, pain points, and workarounds that guide your product team to meaningful solutions.
Hi [name]. This is Alan from DevMatch. We are looking to improve the user experience of our website. Would you be willing to meet with me to test a prototype of our website? It will be a short and easy meeting, about 15 minutes over Zoom. I would love to hear your feedback. Thank you so much!
Hi [name], my name is Alan. I’m a student at the University of Washington studying informatics. I’m currently working on a project and looking to get feedback on my designs on a platform that helps hiring managers do better software interviews.
Would you be willing to meet with me to test a prototype? It will be a short 15-minute meeting over Zoom.
Looking forward to hearing from you, -Alan
Hi [insert name]. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us. My name is Alan and I work for a company called [Company Name].
Today, I will be showing you a prototype of our website and asking you to perform some tasks to test the design. While you are performing the tasks, Im going to try not to answer your questions. If you get stuck, try to see what you can do on your own. When you are done, I will be asking some questions.
I want to emphasize that there are no right or wrong answers and getting your most straightforward feedback is really important. The more honest you are about how you feel and answer, the better we can improve our product for you. Dont worry about hurting our feelings with your answers.
As you work on the tasks, please try to think out loud and share how you feel about what you see. Do you have any questions before we begin?
Lastly, I will be recording this interview so we can look back on it later. The video will only be seen by the company’s team and will not be shared with anyone else. Is that okay with you?
Imagine you are a recruiter that just discovered the website. Using the website, see if you can do the following tasks:
Thank you so much for meeting with me! That was really helpful. I will ask a couple questions now.
Interviewing Users by Steve Portigal
Rosenfeld Media
Observing the User Experience by Goodman et al.
OReilly
Nielsen Norman Group: User Interviews
IDEO Design Kit: How to Interview
UX interviews aren’t about proving your design is rightthey’re about staying curious. The most valuable insights often come from listening without an agenda. If you’re building something for people, you need to talk to them.
User interviews wont give you hard numbers. But they will give you stories, context, and claritywhich are just as critical in designing products people actually want to use.
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They are a way to understand the product and the market better. Customer development interviews are divided into two phases: problem discovery and product validation. Problem discovery is about understanding the customer’s perspective and problems, after you’ve understood the problem, then you create a prototype (or MVP) and then proceed with the product validation.
You must begin with a set of hypothesis, the process of customer development will validate or invalidate these. But the most important part of validating or invalidating the hypothesis is that it has to come from the potential customers, not you.
During this process, you also want to identify your riskiest assumption. What is that one assumption that if it were to fail, nothing else matters?
Now the challenge is that during the initial phase, problem discovery, is that you must NOT talk about you, your problem, or your solution! This is for a number of reasons.
Here are some videos to help drive this point:
There are a few tools out there. Rob Fitzpatrick wrote a book called the mom test, which it defines like this:
Successful teams have reported 100-200 interviews. The goal is to interview until you start hearing the same themes over and over.
Start by creating a spreadsheet like this:
Then go and find potential customers. Ideally you have an idea of who you want to talk to, so start drafting the different types of personas. Nothing fancy, just a blurb of the different types of individuals you’ll find, then try to find them by using some of these resourrces:
Now, go and look at their LinkedIn profiles and see if you have anything in common that might be useful to start the conversation.
This is not the “used car sales person”, you are helping your customers solve problems! Do some customer research.
Build a list of Tier 1 prospects and Tier 2 prospects - Tier 1 are perfect fit and tier 2 are basic fits, spend more time with Tier 1.
This content is coming from /r/Startups, it was a talk imparted by Joe Benjamin (https://twitter.com/JoeBenjamin_)
The goal should always be to book a meeting.
Cold calling works, but it can be time consuming. For certain customer segments it’s critical to make cold calls. Call people who open your emails multiple times if you’re not focusing on cold calls.
Become an expert or known for something you help with. Post a lot about that - 1x a day, 7 days a week. Build your network. Make your profile a landing page more than a resume - header image, tagline, featured section, CTA Spend 15 minutes per day and you’ll see results - engage with popular people in your space Hardest part is consistency.
Don’t be shy. Ask for introductions. There are people who will help. Join relevant communities (Discord, Slack, Twitter) and add value. You’ll eventually get business from it.
Find out what type of persona this is, based on the different personas that we have constructed. Normally, we conduct product validation interviews after we’ve done customer discovery. So you should already have an idea of the problem they have. If not, you have to do your homework and make sure you know they have a certain problem that our demo will solve.
Taken from https://mfishbein.com/the-ultimate-list-of-customer-development-questions/
Depending on how you obtained the interview/how much background you have on the person, you may need to make sure they are within your customer segment, and/or understand more about their demographic. I usually try to keep it to a max of three.
Questions to validate your hypothesis about a problem, or to learn about problems.
If your customer did not talk about the problem you wanted to address, use the below questions to begin validating/invalidating that your customer has the problem you think they have. In addition, it’s often not enough to just solve a problem, sometimes it also needs to be one that people are highly motivated to solve. Some of the below questions can help with that too.
Questions to help generate ideas or to validate your idea. The below questions are intentionally very open-ended. By asking yes or no questions specifically related to your product, customers may feel inclined to agree with you or not be critical. By asking more open ended questions, you can be more confident that they’re giving you honest input. If in response to the questions below, your customers tell you they’re looking for similar to what you have in mind, you might be on to something.
If you could wave a magic wand and instantly have any imaginable solution to this problem, what would it look like? – I’ve found that about 80% the time the answers I get to this question are not very informative – solutions that aren’t feasible or most certainly wouldn’t be profitable. But the other 20% of the time there are some really informative responses that make the other 80% acceptable.
Questions to validate/invalidate your idea.
Questions to help you improve your idea or product.
Questions to ask at the end of an interview. You may also need to ask for their contact information if you don’t already have it.
If I asked you, ‘What is the job of a soccer player?’ would you say that it’s to attend practices, pass the ball to their teammates, and attempt to score goals? No, of course not. You’d tell me why those activities matter in the first place. You’d say, ‘The job of a soccer player is to win games.
So what is the job of a manager? Without understanding this deeply, it’s hard to know how to be good at it. Helping a group of people achieve a common goal. Still, much of the daily work of manager is giving feedback, creating a healthy culture, planning for the future is universal.
Running a team is hard because it ultimately boils down to people, and all of us are multifaceted and complex beings. Just like how there is no one way to go about being a person, there is no one way to go about managing a group of people.
The management aspect has nothing to do with employment status and everything to do with the fact that you are no longer trying to get something done by yourself.
This is the crux of management: It is the belief that a team of people can achieve more than a single person going it alone. It is the realization that you don’t have to do everything yourself, be the best at everything yourself, or even know how to do everything yourself. Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.
Andy Grove, founder and CEO of Intel and a legendary manager of his time, wrote that when it comes to evaluations, one should look at ‘the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved. Obviously, you measure a salesman by the orders he gets (output), not by the calls he makes (activity).
The best employees don’t tend to stick around for years and years under a boss who treats them poorly or whom they don’t respect. ‘My framework is quite simple.’ Half of what he looked at was my team’s results. Did we achieve our aspirations in creating valuable, easy-to-use, and well-crafted design work? The other half was based on the strength and satisfaction of my team. Did I do a good job hiring and developing individuals, and was my team happy and working well together? The first criterion looks at our team’s present outcomes; the second criterion asks whether we’re set up for great outcomes in the future. (Chris Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer oh how he evaluates a manager)
Hackman’s research describes five conditions that increase a team’s odds of success:
My own observations are similar, and I’ve come to think of the multitude of tasks that fill up a manager’s day as sorting neatly into three buckets: purpose, people, and process.
The first big part of your job as a manager is to ensure that your team knows what success looks like and cares about achieving it. Getting everyone to understand and believe in your team’s purpose, whether it’s as specific as ‘make every customer who calls feel cared for’ or as broad as ‘bring the world closer together,’ requires understanding and believing in it yourself, and then sharing it at every opportunity’from writing emails to setting goals, from checking in with a single report to hosting large-scale meetings.
Purpose, people, process. The why, the who, and the how. A great manager constantly asks herself how she can influence these levers to improve her team’s outcomes.
If I spend all my time personally selling lemonade, then I’m contributing an additive amount to my business, not a multiplicative one. My performance as a manager would be considered poor because I’m actually operating as an individual contributor.
Your role as a manager is not to do the work yourself, even if you are the best at it, because that will only take you so far. Your role is to improve the purpose, people, and process of your team to get as high a multiplier effect on your collective outcome as you can.
Ever since then, when people say they are interested in management, I try to understand what they find appealing about it and whether that matches what would be their actual day-to-day job.
I learned then one of my first lessons of management’the best outcomes come from inspiring people to action, not telling them what to do.
‘What makes a good leader is that they eschew the spotlight in favor of spending time and energy to do what they need to do to support and protect their people,’ writes Simon Sinek in Leaders Eat Last. In return, ‘We offer our blood and sweat and tears and do everything we can to see our leader’s vision come to life.’
This is an important distinction because while the role of a manager can be given to someone (or taken away), leadership is not something that can be bestowed. It must be earned. People must want to follow you.
Questions to discuss include:
I was surprised when my peers, who used to be so transparent with me about everything, suddenly seemed to share less after I became their manager. They wouldn’t always tell me when they were struggling or annoyed or had a disagreement with another member of the team. If I walked in on two of them venting about something, they’d stop and look at me sheepishly. I found it harder to get a clear picture of what was happening on the ground.
You may not have much support. The life of a pioneer is filled with adventure and solitude.
Use the newbie card to your advantage by asking as many questions of as many people as you can. You might feel the urge to keep quiet and not draw any attention to yourself until you ‘know enough,’ but if your goal is to ramp up quickly, you need to be proactive in your onboarding.
To make the most of having a blank slate, give everyone the benefit of the doubt, no matter what you’re told. Hopefully others will do the same for you. And be up front with people’especially your reports’about the kind of relationship you’d like to build and the kind of manager you want to be. These topics are easier to discuss up front before you’ve settled into patterns and routines. In your first few one-on-one meetings, ask your reports the following questions to understand what their ‘dream manager’ looks like.
Actually, that approach tends to backfire. Few things are more annoying than a new person wasting everyone else’s time because they are trying to prove they know something when their opinion isn’t actually informed.
In your first few months, your primary job is to listen, ask questions, and learn. New managers on my team tell me that the thing they most want to understand is how to calibrate their expectations around ‘what’s normal.’
You feel pressure to do things exactly like your former manager. Because the memory of how things used to be is still fresh in your team’s mind, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you need to preserve the status quo. You may feel as if everyone is looking to you to be just as good at everything as your former manager, even though you’re different people.
Change is a prerequisite for improvement, so give yourself permission to move on from the past.
You will be far more successful aspiring to be the leader you want to be and playing to your strengths than trying to live up to some other ideal.
Your first three months as a new manager are a time of incredible transition. By the end of it, the day-to-day starts to feel familiar’you’re adapting to new routines, you’re investing in new relationships, and you may begin to have a sense of how you can best support your team.
New managers often ask me, ‘How long will it take to feel like I know what I’m doing?’ I reply quite honestly, ‘It took me about three years.’
Managing a small team is about mastering a few basic fundamentals: developing a healthy manager’report relationship and creating an environment of support.
Remember our definition of management? A manager’s job is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together through influencing purpose, people, and process.
What leads people to do great work? It feels like a complicated question but it really isn’t, as Andy Grove points out in his classic High Output Management. He flips the question around and asks: What gets in the way of good work? There are only two possibilities. The first is that people don’t know how to do good work. The second is that they know how, but they aren’t motivated.
Why would someone not know how to do great work? The obvious answer is that she might not have the right skills for the job.
Why would someone not be motivated to do great work? One possible answer is that he doesn’t have a clear picture of what great work looks like. Another possibility is that the role doesn’t speak to his aspirations; he can, but he’d rather be doing something else. Or perhaps he thinks nothing will change if he puts in more effort’there will be no rewards if things improve, and no penalties if they don’t, so why bother?
‘You must trust people, or life becomes impossible,’ the writer Anton Chekhov once said. This is true of all relationships’friendships, marriages, partnerships’and the manager’report relationship is no different.
It’s human nature to want your manager to think well of you. Coming across as a complainer, a failure, or a problem employee seems like one of those obvious don’ts in managing up.
You can avoid being blindsided by developing a relationship founded on trust, in which your reports feel that they can be completely honest with you because they have no doubt that you truly care about them. You’ve accomplished this if the following three statements are true:
The way to earn trust with your reports is no different than how you earn it with anyone else, and requires the following few actions.
Respect and Care about Your Report A few years ago, I attended a management workshop led by a senior executive who had an amazing track record as a manager: In his long tenure, nobody reporting to him had ever quit to take a competing offer. What was his secret? ‘If you take nothing else away from today,’ he told us, ‘remember this: managing is caring.’
If you don’t truly respect or care about your report, there is no faking it. Trust me, they know. None of us are such brilliant actors that we can control the thousands of tiny signals we are subconsciously sending through our body language.
When I was a new manager, I thought that caring about my report meant supporting her side of the story whenever there was a disagreement. When others gave her critical feedback, I thought it was my job to jump to her defense to show that I had her back. As it turns out, supporting and caring for someone doesn’t mean always agreeing with them or making excuses for their mistakes.
What caring does mean, however, is doing your best to help your report be successful and fulfilled in her work. It means taking the time to learn what she cares about. It means understanding that we are not separate people at work and at home’sometimes the personal blends into the professional, and that’s okay.
Invest Time to Help Your Report The most precious resource you have is your own time and energy, and when you spend it on your team, it goes a long way toward building healthy relationships. This is why one-on-one meetings (‘1:1s’ for short) are such an important part of management. I recommend no less than a weekly 1:1 with every report for thirty minutes, and more time if needed.
Your job as a manager isn’t to dole out advice or ‘save the day’‘it’s to empower your report to find the answer herself.
Be Honest and Transparent about Your Report’s Performance. As a manager, your perspective on how your report is doing carries far more weight than his perspective on how you are doing. After all, you’re the one who determines what he works on and whether he should get a promotion or be fired.
Your report should have a clear sense at all times of what your expectations are and where he stands. If he is often wondering, What does my manager think of me? then you need to dial up your level of feedback.
Don’t assume he can read between the lines or that no news is good news. If you think he is the epitome of awesome, tell him. If you don’t think he is operating at the level you’d like to see, he should know that, too, and precisely why you feel that way.
Admit Your Own Mistakes and Growth Areas No one is perfect, and managers are no exception. You will make mistakes. You will let people down. You will have moments where you say the wrong thing and make the situation worse rather than better. When that happens, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that because you’re the boss, you can’t admit your shortcomings or weaknesses. Instead, apologize. Admit that you screwed up, and take meaningful action to do better in the future.
A while ago, a well-respected manager I worked with sent a broadly distributed note that implied a particular team wasn’t working fast enough. The frustration in his tone was obvious, and because of his seniority, the note had a demoralizing effect. Someone informed him in private that he was missing important context on how the team was operating, and that the tone of his note wasn’t helping. Immediately, he followed up with a sincere apology. People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel, goes the popular saying. I’ve forgotten the specifics of that email, but I still remember the difference that apology made.
Bren’ Brown, research expert in courage, shame, and empathy, proposes that there is enormous power in expressing vulnerability: ‘Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.’
‘There is one quality that sets truly great managers apart from the rest: they discover what is unique about each person and then capitalize on it,’ says Buckingham, the renowned management consultant who has studied hundreds of organizations and leaders. ‘The job of a manager is to turn one person’s particular talent into performance.’
Don’t let the worst performers dominate your time’try to diagnose, address, and resolve their issues as swiftly as you can. This is counterintuitive because your strongest reports aren’t likely asking for your help. Going back to the lemonade stand example from Chapter One, if Toby is selling thirty cups of lemonade an hour and Henry is selling only ten cups, you might feel compelled to spend a majority of your time with Henry to improve his output. But if coaching Toby gets him to even a 10 percent improvement, he’ll be selling an extra three cups. You’d have to help Henry do 33 percent better to get the same result, which will probably be much harder to achieve. Good CEOs know that they should double down on the projects that are working and put more people, resources, and attention on those rather than get every single project to the point of ‘not failing.’
There is a certain archetype of the brilliant lone wolf who, though he regularly puts others down, manages to come out the hero because he is simply heads and tails more capable than anyone else. It’s a romantic notion in popular media ‘Sherlock Holmes, Miranda Priestly, Tony Stark’but in real life, these people are not who you want on your team no matter how talented they are.
Stanford professor Robert I. Sutton described this phenomenon in his now famous book The No Asshole Rule. He defines an asshole as someone who makes other people feel worse about themselves or who …
I once worked with a particular individual who was creative and prolific but who was so wrapped up in his own opinions that if you disagreed with him and you were less senior, he’d dismiss you as being terrible at your job. While he could have been a source of inspiration to others, his teammates went out of their way to avoid him because, as one person put it to me bluntly, ‘He makes you feel like an idiot.’ A huge amount of time was spent dealing with the frayed relationships in his wake. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to recognize the aura of toxicity that this person created. But as an inexperienced manager, I didn’t always see it clearly. He does a lot of impressive work, I thought to myself. What I later realized is that the team actually becomes better off when brilliant assholes leave. Yes, you’
The second thing I learned is that it is possible to find people who are just as talented and’
YOU don’t ALWAYS HAVE TO MAKE everybody happy.
After my fourth meeting with the other manager, he said to me in exasperation, ‘you’re trying to save a situation that isn’t worth your time, my time, or your report’s time to save.’ He was right. The two of them had very different values and working styles, and they’d both be happier if they weren’t on the same project.
The turning point was when I realized that this cycle wasn’t just hard for me, it was even worse for my report. The person I was trying to help would feel stressed out because he knew he wasn’t doing well, and my ‘help’ felt like the Eye of Sauron watching his every move.
Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch argues that protecting low performers only increases the damage when, inevitably, a manager is forced to let them go.
I’m often reminded of the wise words of my friend Robyn Morris: ‘Perhaps it’s you who shouldn’t be his manager, not the other way around.’
The best feedback I ever got came from my former report Robyn. Once, when I asked him what I could be doing better, he took a deep breath and said, ‘Julie, sometimes I get the feeling that when I’m doing well, you’re on my side and the two of us are great. But when I’m not doing as well, our relationship suffers, and I don’t feel that you trust me as much.’ He proceeded to share a few examples of things I had said that made him feel this way, delivered with kindness and honesty. This single piece of feedback transformed my entire perspective on management.
For a leader, giving feedback’both when things are going well and when they aren’t’is one of the most fundamental aspects of the job. Mastering this skill means that you can knock down two of the biggest barriers preventing your reports from doing great work’unclear expectations and inadequate skills’so that they know exactly where to aim and how to hit the target.
Below, you’ll find the four most common ways to inspire a change in behavior.
Imagine that you decide to hire a trainer to improve your workouts. Does she immediately ask you to do some push-ups before giving you any pointers? No. The first thing she’ll do after introductions is sit down with you to discuss your goals. Then, she’ll tell you what you should expect from training and how you can make the most of it. Though her advice won’t yet be specifically tailored to you, it’s what she thinks you need to know given her experience training others. It may seem counterintuitive, but the feedback process should begin before any work does.
During this phase, make sure you address the following:
Task-specific feedback is most effective when the action performed is still fresh in your report’s memory, so share it as soon as you can. Unless the task is significant, like a high-stakes presentation, dropping a note via email or chat within the day can work just as well as giving the feedback face-to-face.
At its best, task-specific feedback becomes a lightweight, habitual part of your day, and your reports benefit from getting small doses of coaching in everything you see them do.
Share Behavioral Feedback Thoughtfully and Regularly When you zoom out and look at many examples of task-specific feedback for a report, what themes emerge? Does he make decisions quickly or slowly? Is he a process wizard or an unconventional thinker? Does he gravitate toward pragmatic or idealistic solutions?
you are making a statement about how you perceive that person, so your words need to be thoughtfully considered and supported with specific examples to explain why you feel that way. It’s best discussed in person so the receiver can ask questions and engage in a back-and-forth with you.
Collect 360-Degree Feedback for Maximum Objectivity
Every quarter, for each report, I send a short email to a handful of his or her closest collaborators asking: a) What is X doing especially well that X should do more of?, and b) What should X change or stop doing?
‘If the first time he hears that he’s not meeting expectations is during his performance review, it’s going to feel terrible,’ she said. She went on to explain that because our reviews are meant to summarize performance from the past six months, if Albert was indeed not meeting expectations for most of that time, I should have told him that much earlier.
you’ve Just Assigned a Challenging New Project to Your Report Because this project is high stakes, you’d like to keep a close eye on how it’s going. If you frequently drop in and ask for an update or give unsolicited feedback, you risk making your report feel disempowered. He’ll be constantly checking over his shoulder, paranoid that you’re just around the corner.
Managers who pop in out of the blue and throw down new requirements can breed resentment with their team (just Google the term ‘Swoop and Poop.’)
Your Team Has Set a Goal to Launch in October Let’s say your team learns in June that they’re unlikely to be ready in October. Would you prefer for them to tell you shortly before launch or right away? I don’t know any manager who would choose to know later.
That was when I realized it was I who misunderstood: George had heard the feedback. The issue was that he didn’t see what was complicated about the way he explained things. And if he couldn’t see it, he couldn’t fix it. I might feel accomplished in pointing out the problem, but that’s not the point if it doesn’t actually help him. The mark of a great coach is that others improve under your guidance.
The question that should always be in the back of your mind is:
I’ve read thousands of reviews written by reports about their managers, and the most common response to the question ‘How could your manager better support you?’ is simply ‘Give me more feedback.’
At the same time, watch out for only ever giving task-specific feedback. The second most common ask from reports is: ‘Give me more feedback related to my skills and my career trajectory.’
(I’ve been told, for example, that I’m prone to rambling, which can make it hard to understand my main point, and that my friendliness can mask the seriousness of a tough message.)
Ed Batista, an executive coach and instructor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, explains that part of the reason feedback doesn’t stick is that the recipient often views the conversation as a threat, so his adrenaline-fueled fight-or-flight instinct kicks in. When feedback is given, Batista writes, the listener’s ‘heart rate and blood pressure are almost certain to increase, [accompanied by] a cascade of neurological and physiological events that impair the ability to process complex information and react thoughtfully.
When people are in the grip of a threat response, they’re less capable of absorbing and applying your observations.’
The best way to make your feedback heard is to make the listener feel safe, and to show that you’re saying it because you care about her and want her to succeed.
Make your feedback as specific as possible. I was assuming that his definition of complicated and mine were the same. This is rarely the case, so my feedback ended up sounding vague. Which aspects were complicated? What was said, exactly, that led to people being confused?
Clarify what success looks and feels like. Even if your feedback is specific, heard, and understood, it can still be hard for the other person to have a clear picture of what they should aspire to.
Some years ago, at a design review, my manager Chris told us that our proposed designs showing a registration form felt too ‘heavy.’ One of the designers in the room suggested that we change the outline stroke of the form field boxes from blue to gray and that we put a little more space between them. ‘It’ll feel lighter and more breathable,’ he said. Chris thought about it. ‘Think of the lines at Disneyland,’ he finally said. ‘you’re actually waiting in a really long line, but because you’re going from one small room to another, it doesn’t feel like the line is overwhelming. That’s what I’m going for.’ Instantly, we had a clear sense of how to improve the flow’break the one long form into a series of smaller ones.
Suggest next steps. Often the easiest way to help your report translate your feedback into action is to share what you think the next steps should be. Be clear about whether you’re setting an expectation or merely offering a suggestion. Also, beware of overdoing this’if you’re always dictating what should happen next, you’re not empowering your team to learn to solve problems on their own. A softer approach is to ask your report, ‘So what do you think the next steps should be?’
We get upset or emotional. Someone says something that pisses us off and all of a sudden, we’re seeing red and want to give them a piece of our mind. The best advice for prevention? don’t engage when you are upset. We regret the things we say in anger, and while bridges take months or years to build, they can be burned in an instant.
(I have a few questions about your latest work’do you have a moment to walk me through it?) might seem like an attractive opener (and is how I used to begin many of my critical feedback sessions), but it’s the scared manager’s choice. you’re afraid of upsetting your report or you’re not sure if your opinion is 100 percent right, so you phrase your concerns as ‘questions.’ While it’s healthy to approach giving feedback with a curious mindset’what’s the other side of the story?’don’t lose the plot. At best, framing your worries as questions feels disingenuous, and at worst, your report will miss that you’re actually concerned, which means nothing will change.
The best way to give critical feedback is to deliver it directly and dispassionately. Plainly say what you perceive the issue to be, what made you feel that way, and how you’d like to work together to resolve the concern.
As a new manager, I read advice that the best way to deliver critical feedback was in a ‘compliment sandwich,’ where you start out with a positive observation, then slide in your suggestion for improvement, then close with another pat on the back, as if the only way veggies can be palatable is if they’re surrounded by a bunch of marshmallows. I find this ineffective’lobbing over a few superficial words of praise to temper a hard message comes off as insincere. Plus, the thing you actually want them to pay attention to might be lost.
I’ve decided to go with somebody else to lead this initiative. Own the decision. Be firm, and don’t open it up for discussion. I failed at this many times in the past because I hated being the bearer of bad news. So I’d try to position the decision as something we were making together. ‘I want to discuss the leadership role on Project Z,’ I’d say. ‘I’m concerned that you won’t have the time for it. you’re already doing so much on X and Y. So I think it’d be good for somebody else to lead Z. What do you think?’ The problem was, if nothing my report said could convince me to change my mind, it’s insincere to act as if she had had a say.
‘Actually, I do have the time for it’? Or if she brings up a slew of other reasons why she’s the best candidate? I’d only be scrambling to give her another excuse, which would make her feel unheard.
Ultimately, what I’ve learned about giving feedback’even the most difficult feedback’is that people are not fragile flowers. No report has ever said to me, ‘Please treat me with kid gloves.’ Instead, they say: ‘I want your feedback to help me improve.’ They tell me, ‘I’d like you to be honest and direct with me.’
‘Feedback is a gift.’ It costs time and effort to share, but when we have it, we’re better off. So let’s give it generously.
Being a great manager is a highly personal journey, and if you don’t have a good handle on yourself, you won’t have a good handle on how to best support your team.
‘Ask any new manager about the early days of being a boss’indeed, ask any senior executive to recall how he or she felt as a new manager. If you get an honest answer, you’ll hear a tale of disorientation and, for some, overwhelming confusion. The new role didn’t feel anything like it was supposed to. It felt too big for any one person to handle.’
When the sailing gets rocky, the manager is often the first person others turn to, so it’s common to feel an intense pressure to know what to do or say. When you don’t, you naturally think: Am I cut out for this job?
Let me tell you a few facts about me: I’m more comfortable in small groups than big ones. I care deeply about understanding first principles. I am more articulate in writing than in person. I need time alone to reflect and process new facts before forming an opinion. I skew toward long-term thinking, which means that I sometimes make impractical short-term decisions. And at the end of the day, nothing gives me more satisfaction than learning and growing.
The world’s top leaders come from vastly different molds’some are extroverts (Winston Churchill) and some are introverts (Abraham Lincoln); some are demanding (Margaret Thatcher) and others remind you of a favorite relative (Mother Teresa); some leave a room breathless with their vision (Nelson Mandela) and others prefer to avoid the spotlight (Bill Gates). The first part in understanding how you lead is to know your strengths’the things you’re talented at and love to do. This is crucial because great management typically comes from playing to your strengths rather than from fixing your weaknesses.
There are some useful frameworks for understanding your strengths, like StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath or StandOut by Marcus Buckingham. If you want to do a quick version, jot down the first thing that comes to mind when you ask yourself the following questions: How would the people who know and like me best (family, significant other, close friends) describe me in three words? MY ANSWER: thoughtful, enthusiastic, driven What three qualities do I possess that I am the proudest of? MY ANSWER: curious, reflective, optimistic When I look back on something I did that was successful, what personal traits do I give credit to? MY ANSWER: vision, determination, humility What are the top three most common pieces of positive feedback that I’ve received from my manager or peers? MY ANSWER: principled, fast learner, long-term thinker
The second part of getting to an honest reckoning with yourself is knowing your weaknesses and triggers. Right beneath your list of strengths, answer the following:
Okay, now that we’ve got our lists, the next part’
(There’s even a term to describe the cognitive bias where people who aren’t actually very skilled have a tendency to think they’re better than’
Calibration matters because it doesn’t do me any good to think that I’m one thing when the’
To develop our self-awareness and to calibrate our strengths and weaknesses, we must confront the truth of what we’re really like by asking’
Ask your manager to help you calibrate yourself through the following two questions:
I’ll pause here and acknowledge that asking for feedback is hard. You might have read the suggestions above and cringed when thinking about doing them. It took me years before I got comfortable asking for feedback from others (outside of formal reviews where I had to).
takes a certain amount of confidence to ask for critical feedback. For me, the breakthrough came when I realized I needed to change my mindset. If I saw every challenge as a test of my worthiness, then I’d constantly worry about where I stood rather than how I could improve. It’s like stressing out more about your exam grade than about whether you’re actually learning the concepts being taught.
Note:Yes
If you’re not sure what your ideal environment looks like, ask yourself the following: Which six-month period of my life did I feel the most energetic and productive? What gave me that energy? In the past month, what moments stand out as highlights? What conditions enabled those moments to happen, and are they re-creatable? In the past week, when was I in a state of deep focus? How did I get there? The
To figure out what your triggers are, ask yourself the following questions: When was the last time someone said something that annoyed me more than it did others around me? Why did I feel so strongly about it? What would my closest friends say my pet peeves are? Who have I met that I’ve immediately been wary of? What made me feel that way? What’s an example of a time when I’ve overreacted and later regretted it? What made me so worked up in that moment?
don’t Beat Yourself Up for Feeling Bad One of the worst parts of being in the Pit is the double whammy of struggling with something and worrying about the fact that you’re struggling with it. Why is this even hard for me? your internal critic might wail. If I were smarter or braver or more talented, I’d be fine. By feeling guilty about the way you feel, you’re creating even more stress for yourself.
Recognize that everyone in the world goes through hard times, and give yourself permission to worry.
Repeat After Me: ‘The Story I Have in My Head Is Probably Irrational’ Remember how we’re all biased? Part of the reason bias exists is that our brains are wired to take shortcuts so we can arrive at faster conclusions. That’s why stereotypes exist.
Close Your Eyes and Visualize Brain imaging studies show that when we picture ourselves doing something, the same parts of our brain are engaged as if we were actually doing that activity. Why does this matter? Because we can trick ourselves into getting some of the benefits of an activity simply by closing our eyes and imagining it in our heads. Australian
Imagine a time in the past when you took on a hard challenge and knocked it out of the park.
Ask for Help from People You Can Be Real With
Admitting your struggles and asking for help is the opposite of weakness’in fact, it shows courage and self-awareness.
Inspired by that conversation, I started a journal called Little Wins. Every day, I’d jot down something I did that I was proud of, even if it was small. Sometimes, I’d celebrate a 1:1 where I gave someone helpful advice.
Practice Self-Care by Establishing Boundaries
You can’t do your best work unless you physically feel your best, so take care of yourself. It’s always worth it.
The answer is predictably boring. I practiced and got better.
Management is a highly personal journey. We are all at different points on our path. Some of us start out stronger at certain skills than others. I was an introvert with a tendency to freeze up or ramble in front of large groups.
How you can be most effective will depend a lot on you: your strengths and growth areas, your personality and values. It will also depend on your organization’s goals and culture’a small lemonade stand with a few employees needs different things than a large organization with tens of thousands of people.
Whether you need to improve your communication, get better at execution, become more strategic, or work better with others, set a lofty goal for yourself: How can I be twice as good? Then maximize your learning through the following.
Ask for Feedback
After an entire chapter on the importance of giving feedback to your reports, surely this comes as no surprise: if there is a secret sauce to self-improvement, it’s to ask for feedback from other people all the time.
The only hurdle you need to overcome is yourself’can you remember to ask frequently enough? Can you be humble and self-aware enough to hear it openly and then respond with real change?
Remember to ask for both task-specific and behavioral feedback.
If you lead with, ‘Hey, how do you think my presentation went?’ you’ll probably hear responses like ‘I think it went well,’ which aren’t particularly helpful. Instead, probe at the specifics and make it easy for someone to tell you something actionable. ‘I’m working on making sure my point is clear in the first three minutes. Did that come across? How can I make it clearer next time?’
Always thank people for feedback. Even if you don’t agree with what’s said, receive it graciously and recognize that it took effort to give. If others find you defensive, you’ll get less feedback in the future, which will only hurt your growth.
Regardless, the person most invested in your career isn’t him; it’s you. Your own growth is in your hands, so if you feel you aren’t learning from your manager, ask yourself what you can do to get the relationship that you want.
Can you imagine a star athlete trying to hide his weaknesses from his coach? Would you tell a personal trainer, ‘Oh, I’m pretty fit, I’ve got it under control,’ when she asks you how she can help you achieve a better workout? Of course not. That is not how a coaching relationship works.
Share your personal goals and enlist his help: ‘I want to learn to become a better presenter, so I’d be grateful if you kept an eye out for opportunities where I can get in front of others.’
Make a Mentor Out of Everyone
Sheryl Sandberg, in her book Lean In, cautions against treating the notion of a mentor as something too precious. Nobody wants to be asked, ‘Will you be my mentor?’ because it sounds needy and time-consuming. But ask for specific advice instead, and you’ll find tons of people willing to help.
Whatever the skill, don’t be afraid to ask, ‘Hey, I’m really impressed with the way you [do X]. I’d love to learn from you. Would you be willing to grab a coffee with me and share your approach?’
Keep in mind that since you’re asking for a favor, it’s well within people’s rights to say no because they’re busy or unsure of how to help. Thank them anyway.
Set Aside Time to Reflect and Set Goals
When you’re racing full steam ahead and the scenery is zooming past you, it’s hard to comprehend the entirety of your journey.
A study from Harvard Business School shows that we learn more when we couple our experiences with periodic reflections. Even though people prefer to learn by doing, ‘participants who chose to reflect outperformed those who chose additional experience.’
Personally, I like to schedule an hour on my calendar at the end of every week to think about what I accomplished, what I’m satisfied or dissatisfied with, and what I’m taking away for next week.
I then jot down some notes in an email to my team, as an easy way to keep up the habit.
Take Advantage of Formal Training If you have the opportunity to get formal training, take
It might seem obvious that formal training is helpful, but it also rarely feels urgent or necessary.
When you invest in your personal learning and growth, you’re not just investing in your own future but also the future of your team. The better you are, the more you’re able to support others.
Be Explicit about the Norms You Want to Set If you want everyone to participate in your meeting, sometimes the easiest tactic is just to say that directly.
At a growing organization, hiring well is the single most important thing you can do.
The most important thing to remember about hiring is this: hiring is not a problem to be solved but an opportunity to build the future of your organization.
One exercise I do every January is to map out where I hope my team will be by the end of the year. I create a future org chart, analyze gaps in skills, strengths, or experiences, and make a list of open roles to hire for.
Even if things change’your organization restructures, an employee abruptly leaves, priorities shift’you can modify your plan as you go along so that there’s always a clear picture in your head of what your team should look like.
At the end of the day, you are the person who ultimately owns the team you build. Successful hiring managers form close partnerships with the recruiting team to identify, interview, and close the best people. A great recruiter brings her network as well as her knowledge of the recruiting process’how to source and pitch candidates, how to guide them through interviews, and how to negotiate offers. A great hiring manager brings her understanding of the role’what it needs and why it’s exciting’as well as her time to personally connect with candidates.
Describe Your Ideal Candidate as Precisely as You Can It’s the hiring manager’s job to identify when a role is open and what kinds of people would be the best fit.
Write the job description yourself and be specific about the skills or experiences you are looking for.
Develop a Sourcing Strategy Once you have a good sense of the kind of person you want, it’s helpful to sit down with the recruiter and brainstorm where to look for your ideal candidate.
Sometimes, unusual patterns can lead to amazing candidates. Patty McCord, the former chief talent officer at Netflix, describes how her recruiting team noticed that a surprising number of their top data-science leaders shared an interest in music. So in addition to searching for r’sum’s with the typical data-oriented keywords, they also began looking for people who played piano or guitar. ‘[We] concluded that such people can easily toggle between their left and right brains’a great skill for data analysis,’ McCord writes.
Deliver an Amazing Interview Experience
By working in tandem on the interview experience, we avoided common mistakes like leaving days or weeks in between next steps, asking candidates to repeat themselves over and over, or giving them conflicting or confusing information.
Show Candidates How Much You Want Them
When you decide to extend an offer, it’s as much your job as it is the recruiter’s to make the candidate feel that you want her to say yes.
After I deliver an offer, I try to check in with the candidate every other day to let her know that I am thinking about her and that I’m excited to welcome her to my team. I ask if she’d like to talk through any questions, and sometimes we’ll do lunch or dinner to discuss the role in more detail.
The more senior the candidate, the more critical your involvement is in the close because that person likely has many options, and you are looking for her to play a leadership role within your team.
There are three reasons why a handful of interviews isn’t ever going to be a perfectly reliable predictor of someone’s success. The first is that it’s impossible to re-create the actual working environment of a team in a thirty-minute or hour-long meeting. Most real-world projects are complex, spanning many people and taking weeks, months, or years to complete. An interview can only hope to simulate how well a candidate does on a smaller problem in a fraction of the time.
Second, interviewers bring their personal biases into the evaluation. We’re swayed by first impressions and whether what we see fits our understanding of what a ‘great’ candidate looks like. A Harvard study found that when American symphonies implemented ‘blind auditions’‘that is, the interviewers listened to a candidate play from behind a curtain’it improved the probability that a woman would advance from preliminary rounds by 50 percent.
Seek Out Trusted Recommendations
The trustworthiness of your two-hour interview pales in comparison to the testimony of someone’s tried-and-true experience working with that person.
Get Multiple Interviewers Involved The best practice for interviews is to have the candidate talk to multiple people who know what the role needs, with each interviewer asking different questions so that the group emerges with a well-rounded perspective.
**Reject Anyone Who Exhibits Toxic Behavior Remember how assholes are the one thing you shouldn’t tolerate on your team? Be on the lookout for warning signs in interviews: **
The science supports this: A 2014 report of hundreds of public companies found that those with the greatest ethnic and racial diversity in their management ranks were 35 percent more likely to have financial returns higher than average. A study of 2,400 companies found that organizations with at least one female board member had better outcomes than organizations with no women.
Do Your Research When Hiring Leaders Hiring a manager or senior contributor onto your team is a big investment, and bad leadership hires are disproportionately more disruptive because they affect more people. If you bring on a new manager whose values aren’t aligned with yours, he will hire people that you may not think are a good fit. If he turns out to be a crummy collaborator, you’ll be dealing with a line of complaints out the door.
It’s wise not to rush into leadership hires, and instead make sure you know what an ideal applicant looks like. The easiest way to do that is to talk with as many prospective candidates as you can, including those who may not want the job but know the role well.
Create a Culture That Prioritizes Hiring Well If your team is growing to the point of needing more managers, the responsibility of hiring must become shared. Eventually, you won’t be in every interview, nor be the deciding vote in every debrief. That simply isn’t sustainable at tens or hundreds of hires a year.
The origin story of every great company reveals a common theme: The path to success is never a straight line.
It’s not about having the single, brilliant, lightning-flash insight that suddenly wins the game. Instead, it’s about consistent planning and execution’you try what seems like a good idea.
do it quickly. You keep your mind open and curious. You learn. Then you scrap what failed and double down on what’s working. You rinse and repeat, maybe over and over and over again.
Process. Many people think of it as a bad word because it conjures up images of filling out paperwork or waiting in line. But process isn’t inherently good or bad. Process is simply the answer to the question ‘What actions do we take to achieve our goals?’
Though it’s common to hear words like help, improve, or enhance when talking about goals, they don’t paint a clear picture. If someone on the team fixes one bug, does that ‘improve’ the experience? Of course. Does it contribute to helping people connect with others through their shared interests? Sure. But would our team be happy if that’s all we did in the next six months? No way. Because of the huge amount of subjectivity in words like help or improve, they don’t do much to create a shared sense of purpose.
An inspiring vision is bold. It doesn’t hedge. You know instantly whether you’ve hit it or not because it’s measurable. And it’s easily repeated, from one person to the next to the next. It doesn’t describe the how’your team will figure that out’it simply describes what the outcome will be.
I tell my team that I’ll know they did a good job describing their vision if I randomly ask five people who’ve heard it to repeat it to me and they all say the exact same thing.
As a manager, it’s important to define and share a concrete vision for your team that describes what you’re collectively trying to achieve. An
Craft a Plan Based on Your Team’s Strengths
Just as your management style reflects who you are and what you’re good at, so too should your plans take into account your team’s unique capabilities.
Focus on Doing a Few Things Well
As Koch writes, ‘Few people take objectives really seriously. They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined.’
The best way to practice prioritization is to order any list you make by importance. Make sure that the things at the top are taken care of before you venture further down the list.
Effort doesn’t count; results are what matter.
In the words of Apple visionary Steve Jobs, creator of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad: ‘People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.’
Define Who Is Responsible for What
When ownership isn’t clear, things slip through the cracks.
asked them to work together to come up with a solution. In my head, I thought that their strengths would complement each other well. The problem was that they had widely differing opinions about what to do. Because I didn’t define how I wanted them to work together or who ultimately had decision-making authority, they argued in circles, each trying to convince the other. Progress slowed to a halt.
Break Down a Big Goal into Smaller Pieces
Have you ever heard of Parkinson’s law? ‘Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.’
Nothing worthwhile happens overnight. Every big dream is the culmination of thousands of tiny steps forward.
Then work with your team to set realistic and ambitious target dates for each milestone. Keep in mind the planning fallacy: our natural bias to predict that things will take less time and money than they actually do.
Ask people to set and publicly commit to their weekly goals’this creates accountability.
The best plans don’t matter if you can’t achieve them accurately or quickly enough to make a difference.
I understood why the multiweek cadence was so important. It was short enough that you didn’t lose much if any single idea failed. And it was a repeatable process that maximized learnings in the long run.
The most brilliant plans in the world won’t help you succeed if you can’t bring them to life. Executing well means that you pick a reasonable direction, move quickly to learn what works and what doesn’t, and make adjustments to get to your desired outcome.
Speed matters’a fast runner can take a few wrong turns and still beat a slow runner who knows the shortest path.
Lists of projects or tasks are prioritized from most to least important, with the higher-up items receiving more time and attention.
There is an efficient process for decision-making that everyone understands and trusts.
The team moves quickly, especially with reversible decisions. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says, ‘Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.’
After a decision is made, everyone commits (even those who disagree) and moves speedily to make it happen. Without new information, there is no second-guessing the decision, no pocket vetoing, and no foot dragging.
When important new information surfaces, there is an expedient process to examine if and how current plans should change as a result.
Every task has a who and a by when. Owners set and reliably deliver on commitments.
The team is resilient and constantly seeking to learn. Every failure makes the team stronger because they don’t make the same mistake twice.
Balancing Short-Term and Long-Term Outcomes
Define a Long-Term Vision and Work Backward
Yogi Berra once said, ‘If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.’
My manager Chris often reminds us, ‘It’s not a good idea to design where your kitchen outlets should go when you haven’t yet settled on the floor plan.’ In other words, start by understanding the bigger picture. What problems are you hoping to solve with what you’re doing? How do you imagine people will get value out of your work? Based on that, what are the most important priorities for the team now?
Talk about How Everything Relates to the Vision
One of the most useful tools for improving process is the practice of doing debriefs (also called retrospectives or postmortems).
Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, once said: ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.’ Every challenge is like crossing such a river.
At first, this can feel disorienting, like you’re losing control. But empowering your leaders is a necessity. One of the biggest challenges of managing at scale is finding the right balance between going deep on a problem and stepping back and trusting others to take care of it.
Be aware of this dynamic in your interactions with others. Are your suggestions being taken as orders? Are your questions coming off as judgments? Are you presuming that things are rosier than they really are because you’re not hearing the full story?
At each extreme, you’ve become a sitcom clich’: Dive in too much, and you’re the micromanager. You ask your reports to run every decision by you.
you’re constantly checking in with people, asking for status updates and diving in to the minutiae of tasks. Did John correct the last statement yet? When is the China
shipment coming in? I don’t like the shade of blue on this packaging. You have a reputation for prowling behind people’s desks and giving your opinion about what’s on their screens.
Even if you get results, your style is stifling. Talented people leave because they can’t stand working for you. They don’t feel that you give them trust or breathing room to operate. And they’re not learning because they don’t get a chance to solve problems on their own. Rumor has it that what you really want is an army of robots to do your bidding.
At the other extreme, if you step back too much, you’re the absentee manager. Some of your reports appreciate the independence, but most wish they had more support.
When things get rocky, your team feels like the Wild West, a place with no rules because there’s no sheriff in town.
Your hands are pristine because you rarely roll up your
sleeves and get into the nitty-gritty. You don’t make hard calls or proactively push things forward. Over time, you lose credibility as a leader because. Well, you don’t do much.
And your reports aren’t learning because you’re not coaching or challenging them. People whisper that maybe you aren’t really there at all’you’re simply overhead.
Of course, in the real world, we’re rarely at the extremes. But we do tend to lean one way or the other based on our values.
There is no greater sign of trust than handing your report an intricately tangled knot that you believe she can pull apart, even if you’re not sure how.
The key, of course, is that you need to actually believe your report is capable of solving the problem.
Tell everyone else that she should now be considered the owner of the problem. Doing so creates accountability, but more important, the public declaration empowers the delegate.
Note:Yes!!!!
For example, imagine a CEO asking an employee, Elaine, to be in charge of managing the company’s finances. To be effective, Elaine needs everyone to respect the budget she sets and provide the financial information she needs. Will Elaine have an easier time if the CEO tells the entire company, ‘Elaine is our chief financial officer,’ or if he privately asks her to do this without letting anyone else know?
One-on-ones aren’t for the manager’s benefit; they should be about what’s helpful for the other person.
The historian Yuval Noah Harari, in his bestselling book Sapiens, theorizes that the one unique trait that made the human species the most successful in the world is that we are able to share the same vision in our heads, which helps even complete strangers work together.
To create a shared vision of what’s important, ask yourself two things. The first is, What are the biggest priorities right now for our team? Then, talk about those with your reports
As Antoine de Saint-Exup’ry has been attributed as saying, ‘If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.’
Once, as I was working through those questions with a report we’ll call Raphael, I turned to the words of Andy Grove: ‘The subordinate did poor work. My associate’s reaction: ‘He has to make his own mistakes. That’s how he learns!’ The problem with this is that the subordinate’s tuition is paid by his customers. And that is absolutely wrong.’
A friend of mine gave me the gift of another clarifying question. He asked: ‘Assume the role was open. Would you rather rehire your current leader or take a gamble on someone else?’
The rule of thumb for delegation goes like this: spend your time and energy on the intersection of 1) what’s most important to the organization and 2) what you’re uniquely able to do better than anyone else.
From this, you can extrapolate that anything your report can do just as well or better than you, you should delegate.
This is a classic example of short-term versus long-term trade-offs. If your report presents you a problem that you can easily solve, it can be difficult to resist saying, ‘I’ll take care of it.’
One summer, a new intern took down the Facebook service by accidentally introducing a bad error into the codebase. As everyone worked madly to fix the mistake, I caught a glimpse of his ashen face. I’m sure he thought he was going to be fired.
He wasn’t. His manager apologized instead for not setting him up better. Other engineers took accountability for not catching the error beforehand. The entire team then participated in a postmortem to understand why the failure happened and what changes could be made to prevent similar issues in the future.
Once you’ve identified the values you want to nurture within your team, the next step is to develop a game plan to help those values flourish.
Our radars are fine-tuned to spot instances where someone in a position of authority says one thing and does another. This is one of the fastest ways to lose trust.
If you’re not willing to change your behavior for a stated value, then don’t bring it up in the first place.
This report shared her feedback with me directly. She gave some good suggestions around communication and prioritization. At the very end, she included this bullet: ‘You rarely ask me or others on the team for feedback, and I’d love to see you do more of it.’
If you say something is important to you and you’d like the rest of your team to care about it, be the first person to live that value. Otherwise, don’t be surprised when nobody else does either.
A group of people working in unison is a wonderful thing to behold. Done well, it ceases to be about you or me, one individual or another.
Instead, you feel the energy of dozens or hundreds or even thousands of hearts and minds directed toward a shared purpose, guided by shared values.
We will build something that will outlast us, that will be made stronger by all who become a part of it.
leadership training courses (Crucial Conversations is my favorite), articles and books that I turn to again and again (like High Output Management and How to Win Friends and Influence People), and, most important of all, my colleagues.
]]>Pod Smallest unit in Kubernetes. Can contain one or more containers.
A sidecar is a container that runs alongside your main container in the same Pod in Kubernetes. It typically provides supporting functionality to the main application.
Install kubectl:
curl -LO "https://dl.k8s.io/release/$(curl -L -s https://dl.k8s.io/release/stable.txt)/bin/linux/amd64/kubectl"
sudo install -o root -g root -m 0755 kubectl /usr/local/bin/kubectl
Install minikube:
curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64
sudo install minikube-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/minikube
kubectl proxy --address='0.0.0.0' --disable-filter=true
minikube dashboard
https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/install-kubectl/ https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/start/
]]>Build an image:
docker build -t alango/node-hello .
Run the image:
docker run -it
--rm -d -p 8080:80
--name hello
-e WHO="laura" alango/node-hello
“ssh” into the container:
docker exec -t -i 7c21fb1cad24 /bin/bash
Push images to Docker Hub:
docker tag local-image:tagname new-repo:tagname
docker push new-repo:tagname
Starting a shell inside the container:
docker exec -it b403b7b43afe /bin/bash
List all containers.
docker ps
Rebuild + recreate only that service (don’t touch others):
docker compose up -d --no-deps --build <service>
Deploying to Azure:
index.docker.io
Create a container:
az container create --resource-group enterpos \
--name mycontainer \
--image mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/aci-helloworld \
--dns-name-label aci-demo-alanboy \
--ports 80
az container show \
--resource-group enterpos \
--name mycontainer \
--query "{FQDN:ipAddress.fqdn,ProvisioningState:provisioningState}" \
--out table
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/container-instances/container-instances-quickstart
Create a container:
az container create
--resource-group enterpos
--name mycontainer
--image mcr.microsoft.com/azuredocs/aci-helloworld
--dns-name-label aci-demo-alanboy
--ports 80
az container show
--resource-group enterpos
--name mycontainer
--query "{FQDN:ipAddress.fqdn,ProvisioningState:provisioningState}"
--out table
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/Welcome.html https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/ecs/home?region=us-west-2#/getStarted
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/container-instances/container-instances-quickstart https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/Welcome.html https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/ecs/home?region=us-west-2#/getStarted
docker stop: Stop a running container (send SIGTERM, and then SIGKILL after grace period) sh[…] The main process inside the container will receive SIGTERM, and after a grace period, SIGKILL. [emphasis mine]
docker kill: Kill a running container (send SIGKILL, or specified signal) […] The main process inside the container will be sent SIGKILL, or any signal specified with option –signal. [emphasis mine]
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-optimize-docker-images-for-production https://docs.docker.com/develop/dev-best-practices/
]]>2 types of entrepreneurship
IDE. Innovation Driven Entrepreneurship SME. Small
Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.
Does a startup actually need a business plan?
Academic exercise? vs actually get things going.
Money tends to flow to where opportunity is.
10-20-30 rule.
10 slides, 20 minutes, 30pt font.
Simple tax structure, personal tax returns legal extension of YOU! your personal risks
Identical to sole propiertoship in terms of legal liabilities.
Limit personal liabilities. Corporations bear the legal responsabilities not the owners.
C-Corporations, flexible for investors.
Double taxation.
Some have create “Pass-throught corporations” S corporations and LLCs (US)
Passes to owners and share-holders.
We are story tellers Storytelling is what connects us to our humanity. It is what links us to our past, and provides a glimpse into our future. Since humans first walked the earth, they have told stories, before even the written word or oral language. Through cave drawings and over fires, humans have told stories as a way to shape our existence. Things happen to us – the elements of a story – but as humans, we have unique perspectives, which shape how a story is relayed. Storytellers learned early on that people like to hear stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end. We seem to be drawn to stories that have characters that look like us – or at least share characteristics we can relate to. We also desire to be drawn into the storytelling, and enjoy when a story builds up to a thrilling climax, followed by a satisfying conclusion. We want to use our imaginations, and sometimes don’t, and prefer to passively have a story told to us. Many of us enjoy being moved by a story, either emotionally, or viscerally, like in a good action film. [1]
https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY?t=2326
Happiness = Reality / Expectations
People are predictably irrational.
If you are speaking, you are selling.
Good salespeople solve customers’ problems.
The right mindset.
Solution vs a Product.
Genuine desire to help people.
Pushy over-agressive… sales is a noble profession.
The number one job of a sales professional is to: solve a customers problem.
Standard Sales Training
All this before you win the trust.
Three S’s for a salespersons mindset when selling to the customer:
Mindset self-evaluation:
The mind of the buyer:
Think about the position of the buyer, by positioning yourelf when you are the one in the buyers seat. People buy from people they trust, they trust people they like, and thye like people they connect with.
Don’t launch too early into the “pitch” presentation; you by-pass the customers trust process, it send the brain into a mode of skepticism and judgement.
The customer in in resist or run mode from the get-go. There is so much selling and marketing out there, that users are in a resist mode. Defense mechanisms are high.
Advertising a general sales message in hopes that a customer will take note and purchase your product.
Who is the ideal customer.
Refer you to other potential customer
How do we find this ideal customer. Start by creating personas or profiles.
Understand your customers issues. Research your customers issues! Unover issues when you are talking to the customer. Don’t think you know the customers problems. Understand the customers problems trough their lens, not yours.
The four I’s
Buying motivators:
Awareness + Motivation + Ability = Change
Barriers to accepting change:
Why How
Psychology vs Biology
teach the panel something new about the product or market.
something that the rest of the panel does not know.
walk the user over the experience…
you are the expert at whatever you are doing in your company.
you need to have a hook. in the first 15-20 seconds of what you are saying.
the ones that were really interesteing, INTERESTING problem…. as well as interesteing solution!!!!! they articulate interesting solutins, but not interesting problem.
traction. very early idea stage… walk ttrough the user experience.
Easy mistakes: -areticulate what problem are you solving, and the solution. -people have more traction than they think they have; not showing the user experience. Show it!!! -showing that the solution is achievable. -end: if i took a picture in the final second, it should be a picture of you smiling holding your product. dont make it to complex… to hard to memorize. -not high energy!!!!
slogan:
corporation llc
-Patents -Copyrights -Trademakrs -Trade secrets
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-is-storytelling-important-What-would-you-say-to-inspire-provoke-or-dissuade-young-storytellers
]]>2 types of entrepreneurship
IDE. Innovation Driven Entrepreneurship SME. Small
Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.
Does a startup actually need a business plan?
Academic exercise? vs actually get things going.
Money tends to flow to where opportunity is.
10-20-30 rule.
10 slides, 20 minutes, 30pt font.
Retail, service, manufacturing, distribution or internet business?
What industry does it belong to?
What products or services do you sell?
Who do you see as your potential customers?
Describe your basic overall marketing and sales strategy?
Which companies and types of comapnies do you condier to be your competition?
New products/services. Improved features/services and added value. New or underserverd markets reached. New/Improved delivery or distribution method. Methods of increased integration.
Examine each area of your business.
Be honest and be tough.
How economically healthy is your business industry? Explain how your industry/sector is sensitive to economic fluctuations. Are the forecasts for your industry or sector positive? Is the industry or market chaning rapidly?
How formidable is your competition? Do one or two competitors dominate the market? Is market share widely distributed, making it easier to get a foothold? Is there a competitor with “deep pockets” who can drive you out? What barriers to market entry will your future competitors face?
How close are you to sources of supplies? How reliable are your suppliers and distributors? Are you dependent on one or two suppliers or distributors? Are your suppliers/distributors well-established and dependable?
Does your business entail unusually difficult operation problems? If so, describe them. Will personel be hard to find, retain or train? Is manufacturing particularly complex? Must you make substantial initial capital expenditures? Will you need to maintain large, expensive inventories? Does new technology exist that will help you reduce costs? Do the principals have the expertise necessary? Will ongoing training be required? Will it be costly to retain additional experts? Are there rapid technological changes that will affect costs and competitiveness?
Describe any financial problems you anticipate Is overhead usually high, thus putting extra pressure on cash flow? Will credit be hard to establish? Are profit margins narrow, making the business vulnerable? Will you have to carry a large amount of debt?
The values that form the basis for authentic leaderhip are derived from your beliefs and convictions, but you will not know what your true values are until they are tested under pressure.[1]
Leadership principles are values translated into action. Having a solid base of values and testing them under fire enables you to develop the principles you will use in leading. For example, a value such as “concern for others” might be translated into a leadership principle such as “create a work environment where people are respected for their contributionbs, provied job security, and allowed to fulfill their potential”.
Leaders cannot succeed on their own; Withou strong relationships to provide perspective, it is very easy to lose your way. It starts with habing at least one person in you r life with whom you can be completely yourself, warts and all, and still be accepted unconditionally.
Embrace discomfort.
Always considering what my manager cares for. Do I work for a bigger cause, or do I work for him/her?
I can be very pushy and demanding. Especially with my own managers.
The idea: Treat your managers as your customers.
Everything you do, do it with kindness. If you say yes, do it with kindness, when you say no, do it with kindness.
I can be very pushy and demanding. Especially with my managers.
Always considering what my manager cares for. Do I work for a bigger cause, or do I work for him/her?
It’s been difficult for me to stop considering alternatives and something definitive
It’s been difficult for me to take it easy and be more flexible
My habit of being “Stand-offish” has annoyed people I have tended to be moody and self-absorbed I have been too uncompromising and demanding with others. I’ve created problems with others by being bossy and controlling When I’ve debated with friends, I’ve tended to press my arguments forcefully. I have gotten into trouble with people by being too intrusive and interfering.
Luck is opporunity meating preparation.
Understand my privilege. See how i feel about various social identity dimensions.
I don’t know what it’s like to be you and you don’t know what it’s like to be me.
"There is not a day that goes by where I am not reminded that I am Black"
We cannot choose to have a privilege, we can choose to share it.
Remove obstacles & provide resources.
Be someone that is prepared.
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/diversity-wins-how-inclusion-matters#
[1] Discovering your authentic leaderhip. Bill George, Peter Sims, Andrew N. McLean, Diana Mayer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://twitter.com/shl/status/1394651350667907073?s=09