Mental models for early/mid-career professionals to stand out and create impact: Episode 2
Actionable principles and perspectives on how to look at the world -- specifically to answer the question: "How do I stand out in my career?"
After my last mental models article about making stronger career decisions, I got more than a handful of people who reached out — even strangers and old acquaintances — saying how the perspectives and principles helped bring clarity to their current professional journeys. “They’re not necessarily perspectives that are mindblowingly unique, but the way you packaged into easily understandable, foundational, and relevant narratives made it easy for me to imagine how this could apply to me. I like how you put together thoughts that are in our heads but that we struggle to articulate.” Messages like this made me think how much information just swirls around in our head in a “data lake” — waiting to be parsed into patterns that we can ingest and utilize as principles for decision-making. But we rarely take the time to do this. The world is a constant barrage of information: we wake up and are on our phones consuming the latest historical information, we live our lives and learn lessons through our relationships and personal failures and successes, we work and we consume information and feedback from data and from our supervisors. We “feel” like we learn because we obviously have gone through experiences — but how much of the things we experience can we actually break down to personal principles for decision-making in the future? Do we take the time to take a step back and challenge our own assumptions, and then iterate them through further decision-making? Are we connecting the dots throughout all of the various threads of our lives? If not — then are we actually really learning in a systematic way?
These are all things that popped up in my my head when watching to an old talk by Chamath about venture capitalists and how the most “bullshit” thing that they talk about is “pattern recognition”. And this happens in the product world too — where I live — where many people praise founders for being extraordinary visionaries, people with an infinite, almost unbeatable, almost serene sense of product intuition — knowing exactly what to build, to who, and at what time. As much as I love to believe that there are extreme visionaries in our world who can just have an unbelievable “spidey sense” of what’s right and what’s wrong— my brain, one that’s trained from being a Mathematics student, knows that this is probably never the case. In data science, there’s a term called “context shift” — when the machine learning model applied to a certain data-set is no longer applicable due to the inherent changes in the context of the new world. Intuition is inherently unscalable. A Product team that only relies on the intuition of one person will have a “bus factor” state of vulnerability when that one person leaves, or that person suddenly starts to become wrong. The worst thing — you can never pinpoint what went wrong if you don’t systematically make decisions made from testable hypotheses and instead just just trust a gut instinct — and so IF you fail, you’re left with the failure and a guess at what went wrong. You can’t pinpoint what actually went wrong and so are vulnerable to the same mistakes over, and over, and over again.
As Ray Dalio stated in Principles: “Experience taught me how invaluable it is to reflect on and write down my decision-making criteria whenever I made a decision, so I got in the habit of doing that. Writing down your current rationale for decisions you make will allow you to get a less distorted view of your perspectives and thoughts later. This will improve your process of reflecting on past decisions and can help you to refine your future decision making.”
And so — my thought process continued: how do we get out of a state of general intuition (a world and a state of mind that is inherently risky and subjects you to vulnerability in the longer term) to a state where we systematically act and make decisions based off of principles that we are not afraid to challenge, ones that we are not afraid to revise and change based out of new information — but principles nonetheless that allow you to have a more systematic and informed way of how you approach the world? Doing so requires us to be more intentional, to try to look and at patterns from our own experiences, to put ourselves in situations that maximize our exposure to failures and thereby learning feedback loops. It requires us to not just listen to our supervisors at work and be obedient (the sentence I hate the most is when older people just say: “Don’t argue. Just do what we tell you to do.”) but form decisions based out of our principles. To test them and to apply them rigorously.
As Elon Musk mentioned, we often reason out of analogy (the “easy” thing to do in consulting, for example, is to go on the company wiki for past cases and just apply the same framework to a problem, even though the nuances are different — the best consultants I’ve worked with never did a plug-and-play of this). It’s just so much easier that way. But it’s harder to get problems and learnings down to their most fundamental truths. However, thinking, reasoning, and making decisions with principles is the only way we can continue in the long-term to truly and systematically learn and improve ourselves to be better continuously and not just by mere fate.
This thought process is what led me to continue building off of the last Mental Models article to write a Part II, and more than likely following versions that will not only be new ways of looking at the world but also revisions off of my past mental models. I will do this to keep myself honest, to share the principles that guide my decision-making, and to constantly push myself to learn and to synthesize my thoughts. As another analogy, many companies expect data to somehow be in some sort of “data lake” ready for analysis — but in reality if you’re not building instrumentation to analyze it, you’re not structuring the metrics you’re attempting to track in a thoughtful manner — the data is useless. These mental models will be my honest, thoughtfully put together view of the world, as much as I know about it. This article is as much for me as it is for you.
So — without further ado — lets’ dig into it. Today’s mental models will be themed across early career success, and what it means to stand out and outperform in them. I find this especially relevant to my current context, having just switched jobs from consulting to my current role at GovTech Edu Indonesia — a public-sector technology company designed to operate like a modern tech company, as a founding Product Manager for our Product Operations team. This role is vastly different than consulting in a myriad of ways, but also very similar in many ways. My mission here is simple: “How do we enable and create systems in our Product Organization such that we are able to continuously, consistently build products that seek to serve our vision to create irreversible change in Indonesian students’ learning outcomes in a way that minimizes failure, that maximizes learning, and that is supported as much as possible by data-driven decision-making?” The setup of this role is different than consulting because I (1) need to think about how to drive organizational and process transformation in a way that is people and incentive-centric rather than theory-centric, (2) no one is advising or telling me what to do and I must learn and push myself constantly on my own, and (3) we are operating in an unproven space as Indonesia’s first ever GovTech initiative. Even in the past two months, I’ve learned an unbelievable amount owing to the nature of this work but also to the colleagues and leaders I’ve met — many who come from different backgrounds and thus have different perspectives that I’ve grown up with in the past — who have allowed me to sharpen my own mental models. Thus, the mental models below illustrate the most important principles I’ve felt have been most crucial to me succeeding as a professional in this role.
I. Influencing without authority is a mindset that is crucial to have even if you HAVE authority — it requires both a sales-driven mindset and a relentless outcomes-driven mindset. This is because we all as people operate in a short-term environment.
The biggest misconception about Product Managers is that we are the “CEO of the Product”. As Product School mentions: “Influence without authority is the skill of driving product development and 'telling people what to do' without formally being authorized to do so. You need to lead and guide, without having the power to snap your fingers and make things happen.” This is one of the most fundamental, important skills that I’ve had to sharpen in my time in this role.
One of the biggest realizations in this role that I’ve had is that most people in life are operating in a short-term environment. They have their own personal problems to solve, and are not incentivized otherwise to pull back unless it really matters personally to them. The problem is: that personal self-awareness of pulling back will only happen if you show them a state of the world where they realize they need to pull back from their status quo. Maybe other consultants will have a different experience with this, but at least as a junior consultant at Bain — this was not a fundamental skillset that I had the opportunity to sharpen. In most cases, the working team was mandated to join by their executives to cooperate in sending data, or engage in conversations EVEN IF they might not necessarily be bought in to act. When you’re working together on the same team — there’s an additional complexity because you’re not only trying to convince through structured insights, but you’re also trying to preserve and even heighten your personal reputation within the organization. You’re trying to get people to trust you, and relationships get built out of outcomes. You can’t just weasel your way through with a deck and leave. You must convince, AND you must deliver. My principle is that this outcomes, data-driven mindset when creating influence is crucial even when you’re later in a position where you have authority. I trust leaders much more if they can back-up requests or decisions with reason rather than an attitude of “because I said so”.
Influencing without authority necessitates not only that you’re a strong salesman but that you provide proof of actionable implementation. There’s not only the part where you show them the state of the world but you make the relentless effort to show them what it takes to get them towards a hopefully brighter future. We’ll dig into this later in another mental model where I argue that strategy / insights are important — but execution is everything. And oftentimes, the timeline or the “execution framework” (whatever that means) is so generic or so devoid of real nuance and meaning that it’s pointless and that people don’t really understand the plan ahead. Remember — people are operating in a short-term environment. “Even if you show me an important problem, if you don’t show me a clear path forward and help bring me towards that future, I won’t have the incentive to change. I have way too many problems already” is the voice that should always be in your head.
I’ve had two of these situations recently — one a half-failure and one a success. In one of the tribes that I was working with, I hustled to get to an analysis of the “current state” of decision-making and prioritization within the Product team to present to the Head of Product. I put on my consulting hat, interviewed people and structured insights in a way that was easily understandable and even actionable to my audience. “Thank you for showing me my blind spots” - was the reaction I got to the analysis. However, when I started to show my “path forward” — I realize now that it was half-baked, theoretical and thus at that point in time failed to get the full conviction necessary to generate buy-in in what we were doing. It took much more iteration and further work in order to start to generate this conviction (this time with a member of the team who worked with me on really building context on what implementation looks like on the ground). What this experience taught me is that analysis is not enough. Executional frameworks and general ideas of the path forward is not enough. If you want to really influence something — think through not only the analysis but also deeply think about the nuances of execution: “How will this look to stakeholders? What are the elements and granular details of these things?” — while you might not have all the answers, you must put in the effort to at least fill in those details in order to have a strong conversation with those you’re aiming to influence.
The second time I had to influence — I was much more prepared and showed not only the analysis but prepared a thought through roadmap (up for discussion) of what it took to get to our ideal end-state — the effort required, the nuance required. I even wrote up a full example of a training document, things that we had to write as part of this project. As a result, the people I had to steer (this time another Head and a Manager) had much more conviction in the plan, could imagine it, and thus we got off to a stronger and more aligned start rather than spinning our wheels multiple times. They were also excited and ready to get going (which is EXACTLY what strong influencing without authority should result in).
II. Put yourself in an environment where you have the motivation to think like an owner - and surround yourself with people who think like owners
“People with founder mentality can’t rest once a problem or opportunity is identified. They take on personal responsibility without complaint, learn and recruit skills as needed, and deliver results despite politics. There is unlimited global demand for founder mentality” - Naval Ravikant
“People have two brains, one when there is skin in the game, one when there is none. Skin in the game can make boring things less boring. If you are an investor in a company, doing ultra-boring things like reading the footnotes of a financial statement (where the real information is to be found) becomes, well, almost not boring.” - Nassim Taleb
Exercised with strong judgment, the skill and personal motivation of thinking like an owner even (and especially so) if you aren’t an owner is something I realized is incredibly important as an early / mid-career individual looking to create differentiated impact. It doesn’t mean just working hard (although that’s important too) but it also means always asking “why” you’re doing the things that you’re doing, challenging the conventional path, and always seeking to solve the deepest problems you can solve in the time that you have with a creative spirit. Oftentimes we often expect that learning is handed to us on a silver platter. We mindlessly get up, get taught at school and study for predetermined examinations for 21-22 years of our lives. It’s why joining a prestigious job (in my case consulting) seems so appealing. You’ll be fed all of the “most relevant business frameworks” and taught how to problem solve across all of these industries, and somehow magically after two years will know more than most people due to the experience. Don’t get me wrong — some places are better places to learn than others, it’s the reason why going to Stanford or MIT if you are able to will net you a significantly more advanced learning experience than many other schools. However, in our modern world, knowledge is available at scale and is democratized in a way such that we are able to learn almost everything as long as we put in the effort. My personal mental model born out of 3 years of entrepreneurship and working at Bain and GovTech is that the ownership mentality — pushing yourself to constantly learn outside of expected sources, applying knowledge within your organization, and being obsessed with solving problems even if they’re not assigned to you or if nobody hands you a structured plan — is one of the strongest driving forces of career success, and is the path that will push you to grow into a person that is differentiated and uniquely desirable in skillsets.
The reason why I say this is two reasons: First, if you only look at conventional ways of applying and obtaining knowledge — the way you “problem solve” is likely to be something that other people can already do. You’re doing this to solve a task and get it over with, rather than to think and figure out the most impactful way to do something. You’re not outcomes-focused (which is what owners care about). Secondly, you limit yourself to the horizon in which you are designated, and do not subject yourself to “the risk” of failing in the attempt to challenge the status quo. You don’t take personal accountability. However, in doing so, you also limit the upside of taking accountability — which is that people develop deeper trust in you in the long-term, unlocking opportunities for growth.
I felt this deeply in two ways — one in my experience at Bain and one in my experience at GovTech. At Bain, the cases in which I significantly outperformed were ones that I had deep personal resonance with, and thus took on a “founder’s mentality”. For a grocery e-commerce case, I spent the weekends listening to podcasts and reading articles about the sector from both local and global perspective, and took it upon myself to “be the expert” in everything related to the market, business, and operational models — hustling and being scrappy to find any information that I could, even from unconventional sources. No one told me to do this, but this knowledge allowed me to synthesize information at quick pace, and thus challenge and build upon ideas that my colleagues had with a level of context that only I had (whereas the conventional way to scout through information was either through basic news scraping / research, or through a handful of expensive expert calls that we could not do too much of). For an AI-hardware case, my founder’s mentality and specific knowledge in the field due to my educational experience in Computer Science, allowed me to share technical nuance on the companies that we were analyzing. While I didn’t initially know much about hardware, I was able to synthesize my past knowledge on deep-learning models, and with a bit of self-studying help explained information to the Partners (for instance how the configuration of a chip optimized for different deep-learning applications e.g. computer vision vs. NLP due to the different neural network architectures for each) that helped them understand the space more deeply. While it was a space that Bain prior to this did not really understand extremely well — this scrappiness to self-study combined with my own intrinsic interest and knowledge in AI resulted in a differentiated impact (in this case the clients being extremely impressed by our team’s work and using the knowledge to invest a significant amount shortly after). In contrast, when I didn’t apply this “founder’s mentality” because of disinterest (e.g. in areas like natural resources) — I just cruised and did what I needed to get by. I wasn’t energized and I knew I wasn’t creating differentiated impact. It’s not necessary that work has to give you this — but I knew I didn’t want to feel this way or be in an environment that minimized / didn’t fuel my personal fire to apply ownership to what I did.
In GovTech, because our team is small and new, and because I’m acting as a founding member for our Product Ops and Strategy team — I naturally am placed in a position where it’s imperative that I know how to self-learn and self-execute. No one’s going to tell me where to look for information, and there’s no “research team” or “expert networks” to be my centralized source of information. To up-skill my ability to lead our product operations practice, I holed myself up for a few weekends to devour books in the realm of product discovery, software engineering practices, data, strategy, and leadership. I placed skin in the game and invested $2000 for a Reforge account, and apply the knowledge day-to-day in my job. An example is one project I’m currently leading to transform our product organization from being data-informed to being data-led — which involves coordinating with the Head of Data Analytics to shape up the accountability matrix of “role of Data” in the organization, enable data to be used more through practice-building, and helping design workshops to up-skill the data capabilities of the product organization. While I love data, I’ve never been involved in this type of data organization-building work before. However, the mindset of an owner means that “you just have to do whatever it takes to figure it out”. So in the span of a couple days before presenting my proposed “plan of attack” to the Head of Data — I read through Lean Analytics, synthesized best practices in defining metrics and instrumentation from personal interviews with LinkedIn connections in data science and through research, built a matrix for the “role of Data” in our Product Development Process based on more research, and started proactively inviting them to our implementations of discovery practices so that they start “getting the right seats at the table”. The funny thing is no one’s pushing me to do this, my supervisors are only giving me guidance at a very high-level, and in reality I could probably get away with less effort and still get credit. I notice at GovTech that I just care so deeply, that I want to do everything in my power to make sure that there are great outcomes — and so this mindset pushes me to greater heights and to learn more in the span of a short period than I ever have before. I don’t care about credit, or getting a good rating — I just deeply care about outcomes and ensuring that we create impact. That makes all the difference.
However, while personal ownership is crucial, surrounding yourself with people who also think like owners becomes a force multiplier for your own growth because you have a community that will challenge and empower your perspectives because of their own burning desire to get to the right outcomes. They push you to learn and consume knowledge — to get to the edge and frontier of the idea landscape. They don’t stop at just “the rough idea” — they want to know the nuances. These are the type of people who will make you a better person in the long-term. My colleague Budi constantly quotes first principles from books that he reads, that he connects to the vast collection of his mental models. My boss Rangga is a voracious learner, and likewise exhibits a tremendous growth mindset. My fundamental mental model has evolved to not only having personal ownership in what I do — but to seek an environment that encourages this personal ownership either through its processes (AKA not a company that would turn down you exploring ideas because it’s “not needed”) or with the people who also take this personal ownership. This is one of the biggest reasons I am tremendously enjoying my time in both GovTech and Cornerstone — because I am surrounded by people who echo this ownership mindset.
This mental model tells me that I naturally want to avoid environments in my career where learning is made a “complacent act”, something that is “expected as part of the job”, or there is an expectation for performance to be clearly defined across a set of narrowly defined skillsets. The reason why is because these environments don’t push me to think like an owner — something I know personally that drives me beyond anything else. I also will look for environments where there is an inherent growth mindset within people — not just to succeed in the job, but to be better people: to be more intellectually sharp, to be clearer, to be kinder, to be stronger. My natural gauge for this is to ask a simple question to people: “How do you spend your free time?” If the answer is mostly about complaining and getting away from their work — I’ve learned that I personally need to stay away. People with ownership mindset know how to intentionally step away from work when they need to (“hunting like a lion”) — but they also are obsessed with the intricacies and nuances of their work, and are committed to getting 1% better everyday (or to the tune of that). And when they are out of work — they tend to be happier, more free, more inspiring, more enjoyable people to be around. Those are the types of environments I will seek.
III. Speak the language of the people around you — accomplish this through genuine curiosity and humility
In my role in Product Operations — given that it’s a connective tissue role, I naturally have to think through and coordinate amongst not just product managers, but also engineers, data scientists, designers, and business people in the organization. The single most important thing I learned from a simple exercise in my first month of talking to 30+ people across functions across the organization — is that everyone, while aligned to a same mission, has a different way of expressing themselves built through their background, upbringing, incentive structure, and unique worldview. Engineers are naturally technical, and express their worldview in terms of implementation and clear details. Business people love frameworks and using jargon. Researchers and data people love it when you are hypothesis-driven and can talk about various methodologies. The way that these various functions were trained and grew up as a result of their education and work experiences shaped their mindset and way of communication. Even if you might actually be saying the same thing — the way it’s communicated might sound super different. For example — when talking about product ideation and strategy — a business person might want to use an issue tree to diagnose the problem, a product person would then say “why don’t we try an opportunity tree-map to understand the problem-space”, an engineer might want to map out all the dependencies of the problem they visualize in their head, and a designer might want to sketch out the user journey. Everyone’s kind of saying the same thing, which in essence is: “We need to figure out where the problems really are and where to prioritize” but everyone’s approaching it from a bunch of different ways. This is why frustrations happen, and functions end up being siloed from one another because they don’t understand why the other person thinks in a certain way. And especially when they’re not necessarily trying to say the same thing — for example a business executive wanting a task to be done at a certain date, and a product manager trying to fight back saying that it’s not possible because not enough conviction has been built yet — this can result in blow-ups. And it’s caused because EVERY role and EVERY function has their own biases and blind spots caused by the nature of the space that they occupy.
I’ve learned how to speak the language of other people around you — especially those who are different than you —is a superpower and is an extremely rare ability. And by language, I mean both the actual language (in which I need to definitely keep working on…) as well as the “nuances of communication”. To do this, my mental model is that you must have genuine curiosity as well as genuine humility. To start with curiosity, this means that you push yourself to learn deeply about the lives and the communication styles of those who are different than you. It’s genuine because you embrace the nuances and you don’t shy away from exploring them. In the case of an example at GovTech, even though I was never a software engineer (although I did study computer science) — I push myself to learn concepts that they care about. I do this through reading books like “Software Engineering in Google”, exploring different agile/sprint methodologies and implementations, and not being afraid to dig into and learn about new technical concepts. For design and research, I picked up books like “User Story Mapping”, “Lean UX”, and “The Design of Everyday Things” to start to understand their mental models. This genuine curiosity is key to standing out because most people will not invest the time to do this. Because it’s a rare thing— when you’re able to communicate across lines, the result is something like the below (which occurred when I was speaking to an Engineering Manager about events-tracking):
The other aspect beyond genuine curiosity is genuine humility. Let’s say you’ve tried to learn independently about another function as best as you can but there are still gaps in knowledge. In conversations with these people — if these concepts come up and they impede your ability to engage in fruitful discussion — have the humility to be able to say: “Hey I’m sorry — this may be a dumb question — but can you please explain that to me? From what I know about this, what I’m hearing is X, but can you help me fill in the gaps?” This type of question structure is useful because it first shows that you’re making an effort to think about the space, but you’re also humble enough to admit that you have gaps in knowledge. Often insecure people will try to compensate for their lack of understanding by using big words or jargon. Don’t be this person. The best person I know at doing this is my colleague Claire, who is an amazing person at building trust because she asks questions and synthesizes her knowledge through making sure that she has a deep understanding of it. As a result, people know she has genuine humility and seeks to learn even if she might not have prior knowledge about a space. Through doing this systematically and applying both genuine curiosity and genuine humility — you will improve your ability to speak the language of others and hence also accelerate your career growth (which is highly dependent on your ability to work with people).
The funny thing is that this skill is especially relevant working at GovTech — as we have to deal with government officials who have their own culture and way of working. Instead of criticizing the way of doing things which ends up causing harm to the process — the best way is to adapt and understand that language is not something that can be changed with a snap of the finger given that it’s a representation of someone’s history and unique context. Seek to understand rather than to impose.
IV. Small, systematic, methodical steps for meaningful wins: impatience with actions, patience for outcomes
“It is possible to make very significant progress against the biggest problem in the world through the accumulation of a set of small steps, each well thought out, carefully tested, and judiciously implemented. It is the body of knowledge that grows out of each specific answer and the understanding that goes into those answers that give us the best shot at, one day, ending poverty.” — Esther Duflo, Poor Economics
I love this quote above — detailing out the work of JPAL (Poverty Lab) to make small, systematic progress towards completely eliminating poverty through building the most complete source of knowledge on evidence of the impact of interventions. The research studies they do are small in scope, but cumulatively impact national policy and public-private initiatives that contribute towards large-scale change. I love this quote because it encompasses the slow nature of meaningful change. You have to be determined and resilient if you want to actually change things irreversibly. The second reason I love this quote is because it eliminates the need for academic buzz-words like “social impact” or “transformation”. You can use these words — but understand that change requires you to be systematic, methodical, thoughtful, action-oriented, structured. and ambitious to be in the game for the long-haul. This mentality is echoed through Chamath’s quote below:
"I think that the fail fast approach works in consumer internet business, but that fail fast mentality doesn't work for anything that really matters. Consumer internet businesses rely on exploiting psychology. But failing fast is not how you solve diabetes, it is not how you use precision medicine to cure cancer, it's not how you educate broad swathes of the world's population. It's taking a point of view and being methodical. It's hard. If it works, by the way, it's where all the money comes. If you look at all the value in the next 50 years, it'll be in those hard things. The competitive pressure is non-existent. For example, now you have this weirdly academic narrative about climate change. What is undeniable is that large parts of the world will be subsumed by water, that food supplies will decline. These are conclusively known to be true. But nobody is trying to really solve it because people don't usually have the ambition to go after it, and capital markets don't reward that kind of decision making."
The reason why this mental model is so important is because in an overly generalized way, we’ve been conditioned as consumers in the Internet age to be impatient. We expect near-zero latency on everything that we do, we react and comment on content in social media to expect a response immediately. We want things faster, and without friction. Modern entrepreneurship (or at least the worst parts of it) is about the glory of fundraising and getting to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
However — change that matters is anything but fast. In GovTech we see this extremely clearly as we’re not only trying to solve an educational problem, but also trying to shift mindsets in the way that products are built in the government to alter the definitions of what it means to be user-centric, we’re aiming to transform processes that have been long-standing for decades, we’re working with partners that have been doing what they’ve been doing the way they’ve been doing it for decades. Patience as well as resilience is important. Being impatient with outcomes will burn you out faster with less to show for. However, this doesn’t mean that you act slowly. You’re operating at lightning speed and you’re doing everything you can — you just have to have a mentality that you’re not going to see “sunshine and rainbows everyday” or have announcements every 5 days where another metric milestone has been hit or another thing will be launched.
This mental model is present outside of work as well — in my passion for sports. In both running and powerlifting (both the sports I played heavily), training is not going to be amazing everyday. But you have to show up. The consistency over the long term is what eventually compounds into greater and greater results (which often only show up in the long-term — which a lot of people are impatient for). A famous powerlifting coach Joey Flexx always states that “staying in the pocket is the key to success in the long-term”. While most amateurs enjoy maxing out or grinding to the tail every time they are in the gym in order to show off on social media — the best athletes stay in the pocket and just make sure that they show up consistently, never missing a beat.
This mental model implicates that while it’s important to have a North Star to aim for, you have to fall in love with the process rather than the fame and glory. It applies not just to work but anything that’s meaningful to go after. If you’re in a relationship, the little things are what matter over the big celebration. If you’re trying to transition to a new job (let’s say you’re trying to break into software engineering), the 30-minutes you set everyday to practice is going to help much more than a 3-hour grind when you’re tired to study at the end of the week. In my job in GovTech where I am responsible for building systems — the “ultimate outcome” or “change” might not be so obvious but what I can focus on is the little steps that I take everyday towards that. The North Star guides you to make sure you’re not going towards the wrong path — but ultimately we have to keep in mind that any meaningful change takes time.
In terms of career choices, what it means is that I will avoid companies that exhibit a focus on vanity metrics vs. communicating a deep understanding of their vision and how they plan to get there. Being proud and celebrating the small wins is super important, but you can generally tell if vanity metrics are all that matter if this is all the company puts out there. If the process and the “how” is unclear — this is a sign that they probably are not on a strong path.
V. Energy is everything (“100%”)
“100%”.
That’s the quote I’m best known for — to the point where I was self conscious about it at one point in time but realized that I should embrace and love this part of me. If you look at every review, recommendation letter, or reference that anyone has ever written or said about me — you’ll always the same resonating words: “positive”, “boundless energy”, “inspiring”, “extroverted”.
This mental model is not that deep — but it’s just a simple realization that the energy I bring also affects others that I interact with, and it pushes them to be better. My toughest boss at Bain told me in our last chat that the thing he thought I did the best in was “even in hard days, you always put a smile on your face”.
And so the implication is: I’ll keep smiling bright and bringing the hype :) And you should too. We underestimate the positive externalities that this brings.
VI. Strategy is nothing without execution; both are important but if you’re going to focus on one thing, focus on execution (and invest in using strategy as a decision-making tool that is easily understandable)
“Great execution can make a moderately successful strategy go a long way, but poor execution will fail even the most brilliant strategy. All the consultants in the world can’t fix that problem. I trust executives with strategy more so than so-called strategists because executives are informed by real-life dynamics. They are on the firing line, are responsible for results, and have to live with their choices. You will become a better strategist as your execution improves.” — Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake (Amp It Up)
Good strategy is important to succeed — but without good execution — it’s rendered completely useless. Strategy sounds really sexy, which is why a lot of people try go to into consulting, but the reality is that “good” strategy doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be thoughtful, give a frame for the team to make effective decisions, help align the team towards a common goal, and be sufficiently needle-moving — but good strategy does not need to be perfect to be useful. More important than anything, good strategy is contextual on your execution. In an interview with Advance Intelligence Group, the Group Strategy Director Maya Lewis told me: “Strategy shouldn’t be this top-down exercise. At its best, it’s a tool for execution and empowerment, and ideally relays back the learnings from the bottom to the top. Everyone should own strategy.”
Once you have a good enough strategy — stop trying to reach perfection. Strategy should not be sexy. It should be elegant and understandable. You especially don’t need to over-invest in making a beautiful Powerpoint deck (which is also because it’s easy to be “emotionally invested when things seem perfect” when in reality strategy is just a strong hypothesis). In fact I argue that you should scrap decks and instead invest in writing. Due to the nature of writing — it forces you to communicate through nuances and it exposes any gaps in your own thinking. It forces you to articulate your own assumptions. One of the strongest partners at Bain I worked with — Tom — utilized writing in this way. Strategies should be communicated through a narrative format. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos scrapped PowerPoint and for important things, forced people to communicate in the form of a 6-page memo. “This is the best thing that I did for the company”. Bezos continues:
“The reason writing a good 4 page memo is harder than 'writing' a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what's more important than what, and how things are related,” he writes, “Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.”
Your acid test in good strategy is when everyone in your company (or your team — whatever the strategy’s scope is) is able to articulate the strategy in a clear way, without jargon. Once you have a strong enough strategy to empower execution (and ideally through writing), focus your damn heart out at making sure there’s great execution. As Slootman mentions, if your company is failing it’s likely not because of your strategy but it’s because of your poor execution. Make sure that you focus on the “system of execution” (which I’ll write about more in-depth in the following mental model) that you’re building throughout your company and be ruthless in eliminating and revamping things that are inefficient or do not add value. It doesn’t mean you’re trying to create a factory with zero unpredictabilities — but it means you’re focusing on building great leaders and up-skilling the capabilities of employees, it means you’re instilling discipline into the things that matter, and it means you’re relentlessly also investing in rooting out any sort of bad behavior (e.g. misogyny, racism, general jerks) that many times cause the efforts of the company to plummet even if they had the best strategy. Great execution is a competitive edge that relies on strategy as an input and a tool.
What this mental model implicates is that strategy is cheap without nuance, and it’s cheap without execution. If I’m writing on anything strategic, I should spend most of my time articulating on the nuances and uncover my own hidden assumptions and biases over trying to be fancy. If I’m rushing for a presentation without having had the time to articulate my thoughts in writing (even in a quick and dirty way) — I’m probably not ready to present. What this mental model also implicates is that strategy is nothing without execution — and that it should empower great execution. If everyone on the team articulates the strategy in a different way — you’ve done it wrong. And third, it implicates that I should over-index my time in building up strong executional practices rather than worrying about whether the strategy is perfect. In terms of career choices, this also implicates that it is unlikely for me to take an “internal strategy” position IF the role implies that the person in that position OWNS the strategy rather than being in a force multiplier position to HELP ARTICULATE the strategy from the individual teams on the ground (which is the hard part because you have to connect all of the dots). A company that has strategy overly centralized in the hands of a few people is likely one that is disconnected from reality.
VII. On great execution: building systems gives you continuous leverage, but it must be designed with the right incentives in mind
“When startups are small, they invest in engineering processes -- like code standards, post-mortems, or automated testing. Though they have these robust systems for iterative improvements, they lack robust systems to deliver the next big thing, and struggle to develop them. We can think about the systems that scale product delivery like a pulley system that lightens the “manual” effort for each boulder. This makes your efforts to deliver innovative product at scale more reliable and less arduous over time.” — Andy Johns, Former Growth at Facebook, Twitter, and Quora
At the beginning of a company’s journey — we do things that are inherently unscalable. We put in a LOT of manual effort, and the grind is what really matters. Companies start and take-off generally off of an initial product-market intuition, but as a company continues to grow this intuition is not reliable to help the company reach new heights. I saw this at Cornerstone — the startup non-profit that I run, where the first idea was something that we could run with and scale, but what happens after that? How do we approach building products to keep accomplishing our vision? If we rely on one person to be the source of ideas — there’s an inherent “bus factor” and that person might not always be right. At the same time, decision-making should not be too decentralized and free-form as resources are expensive and it’s wasteful to pursue things that you do not have conviction over. Hence, this is where building systems is a powerful way to help create leverage over time. To define systems — it comes down to an almost automated set of processes, cultures, and best practices that build discipline and consistency in the habits of everyone. It sets a high standard for the way we do things. At GovTech, I see this as especially relevant as we’re venturing outside of a period where we were driven mostly by Nadiem’s vision and existing programs into having control over our destiny and outcomes. Because the effort of GovTech was so monumental at the start — each team was fighting tooth and nail everyday to get by to just another day. “We were just trying to survive and push through to the next day” is something that I heard echoed from a team lead. As a result, the interconnection and the “way” every team did things was different all across because every team was trying to figure its own way of getting by. One team might approach the sprint cadence in one way, and another team might approach it in another. A design review might be done in a certain way in one team vs. the other. The whole approach and philosophy to product development might be completely different from one team to the other. This is fine when it’s a one-off task that needs to be done, or when the team is still early and trying to hustle to survive (as Paul Graham mentioned to his early startups - “do things that don’t scale”) but this way of life needs to eventually adapt. This is for three reasons: (1) as the organization scales, inconsistencies in systems and mindsets cause additional costs in terms of time spent trying to figure out where things are and how to accomplish certain tasks, and (2) back to our point about “speaking the same language” — knowledge sharing becomes harder because we get steeped in our own biases and beliefs — especially if a team has done something one way for a long time, and (3) systems inherently are methodical methods to accomplish a goal; in an early startup you’re running based off the founder’s fuel and intuition but in the long-run individual teams will have to develop their own ability to create impact and innovation in order to create not just incremental progress but also needle-moving wins.
“Everything your organization relies upon to produce and maintain code should be scalable in terms of overall cost and resource consumption. In particular, everything your organization must do repeatedly should be scalable in terms of human effort. If costs grow super-linearly over time, the operation is clearly not scalable.”
However, processes need to strike a balance between creating leverage and being too prescriptive. This is what’s described by Marty Cagan as the following: “Process is a lot like religion. People get fanatic about their favorite processes, and it’s very difficult to reason with a fanatic.” This is why designing systems is much like designing a product. You can’t just dump process and expect people to follow it through immediately. My teammate Zahra captured it in the following way: “If I were to step into an employee’s shoes — if you just throw your expectations on the way to do things to them, especially if it’s a big ask, they’re going to be overwhelmed and end up never adopting the expectations.” And if you mandate it — then you can create a toxic culture that’s overly religious (going back to Marty’s point about “process people” being zealots that think that their way of doing things is the only way of doing things). Just like product development — my mental model in developing systems is to think of the following steps:
Discover: Explore the problem space where are people meeting challenges and how? Let’s prioritize on the most impactful one.
Design: Let’s design a cheap, efficient MVP systems change that allows us to test through our ideas and concepts
Experiment and learn: With a small group of people (let’s say 1-2 teams), we work together to go through a small-scale implementation of a systems change, and collect feedback for what works and what doesn’t work
Revise: Using the feedback, we then revise the systems change and make a decision whether or not it’s worth to roll-out at scale
Build and launch: We scope out the edges, make everything ready to launch through preparation of documentation and tools
Launch: We then roll-out our systems change, and help monitor and implement these changes on the ground if there’s any special attention needed (although we try to create something that is as self-serve as possible)
Iterate and improve: Based on feedback over time, we make changes and improve the system — updating the organization through asynchronous means
Sustaining: Embedding this as a culture and muscle within the organization in the long-run
If you’re able to do this methodically over time — scrapping the things that don’t work and amplifying the things that do — you are able to reduce mental load and thus prevent the organization from being overwhelmed by process. One other principle we have used throughout this process is “make shit easy and useful”. Systems and thereby behavioral change are steeped in “status quo switching costs”. If you want to be able to overcome this, make it as easy as possible for people to switch by identifying all of the points of friction, and then through the process above make sure that you’re really honing in on making something that is useful for people.
What this mental model implicates is that systems thinking is the secret sauce for scale. However, it cannot be adopted in a religious way — and must be developed in a way that is methodical, that builds consistent conviction through value and usability, and reduces friction points for people involved. I will be testing this mental model out a LOT over the course of the next few months — so I’ll definitely be keeping you all updated on this. What I like about this mental model is that the systems-development approach as outlined above applies so hand-in-hand with the empathy we have to have as a product organization with our users, but also enables us to move fast if we have enough conviction and data. For example, introducing Discovery Planning requires us to go through the multi-stage process because we needed to build conviction about the problem space and the solution space (in designing a system that added value to our team). Thus, it’s a longer process of implementation. However, introducing a PRD Template is easier (and we probably don’t have to spend too much time on experimentation) because the problem and solution space is clear, and there’s not much friction in introducing this habit to people.
VIII. Coffee is fucking amazing
I just started drinking coffee a couple months ago and it has undoubtedly changed my life for the better. Enough said.
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