💀 Grow or die: How to keep innovating in your career
💀 Grow or die: How to keep innovating in your career
How to avoid stagnation after being successful in your role.
Hello everyone, Fran here! 👋
This week we reached the 100 subscribers mark! 🎉 Your support has put a smile on my face. I’m enthusiastic to keep bringing actionable insights for your careers.
I’m sure you have heard the advice “Say ‘no’ more often”. But how do you know what to say “no” to?
Also the advice “Say yes to everything, try new things”. But how do you avoid burnout?
On top of that, I wrote about aligning your actions in a single direction in The Alignment Strategy: Do work that matters.
How do you keep innovating and up to date? Today we’ll find a strategy to avoid stagnation in our careers, renovating ourselves in cycles.
🏆 Takeaways
How to approach your learning and exploration.
How to make time to explore.
🏰 Once upon a time…
You awaken on a foreign, medieval planet. Alone.
You spin 360 degrees to see your surroundings. Which direction to walk toward? Where are you going to find water, shelter, and food?
The truth is that you don’t know, and you can’t know.
The smartest thing seems to explore your surroundings up to a certain radius and create a map. Make progress in many directions, but you are not going too far.
As you find relevant resources, you index them into your map. You know they exist and where to find them, nothing more.
The more you explore, the easier it is to draw into your map 🗺️. You take as reference your previous knowledge of the area to add new resources.
You seem to remember things better. You are exploring following your curiosity, and curiosity drives you to investigate some of these places.
After a few days, you find an old wizard from that world🧙🏻. Luckily the guy is a wizard so he made you understand that world’s language. He just had maps of all the surroundings and gave you a copy. Such an effort you could have saved by having someone that already walked the path!
With this initial knowledge, it doesn’t make sense to keep going further in every direction. You haven’t found yet a sustainable source of water, food, or shelter. And it seems there’s a desert in one direction… who wants to explore sand?
The time to come and go from the starting point is higher. You are exhausted from dedicating time to all directions. It’s time to prioritize.
It’s harder than you thought. You say goodbye to places you have walked every day. You liked those places, but you can’t be everywhere at once.
It’s the moment to stop exploring and start exploiting, pushing in the direction with more chances of flourishing.
💻 Back to reality
I doubt you’ll end up on a foreign planet. And I also doubt you end up somewhere with zero knowledge, the only ones to experience it are newborns as they explore the world. But you will find situations in which you want to learn something new.
First, create a map. Aim for breadth, not depth. Find yourself and ask others what are the relevant resources. Execute time-boxed explorations in multiple directions.
After some time doing 20 different things, you start to feel the burnout building. The effort of each new initiative grows bigger and it’s not sustainable. Prioritize and drop some of them. Try to delegate and sponsor others into the ones that were making progress.
For the ones that you keep, now it's time to double down and make a profit from the opportunity you found. You have more time to put in more hours. You can optimize processes making more results with less effort.
I wish I had done this explore exercise when I was a student. I committed 1 year to studying hardware because I didn’t do my due diligence in creating a map. If I knew I was going to be toggling LEDs in Arduino, I would have chosen differently. A chat with people who already went through it would have given me a proper map.
I learned my lesson. After my promotion in April this year, I knew I wanted to join an engineering program at Amazon. There are many: design reviews, postmortem reviews, etc. I dedicated my early mornings to reading the wikis of each program and asking some people who were in them. I could make an informed decision.
Now that I’m active online when I see someone who worked at a company I’m interested in, I can ask how their experience was.
I’m constantly building the map for my future self.
🦖 Meanwhile on the foreign planet
Prioritizing walking in a single direction had its benefits! You found a village and people welcomed you. They had wells for water, they had farms with crops and animals. They had warm beds with blankets!
No more exploring in the cold. You could focus on being useful for the village by having a single job, and worry about nothing else…
Well, until the wizard came back with AI-powered robots that imposed a blockchain-powered economy in the village and disrupted your happy farmer life 🤖. You would have known about this technological revolution if you had explored further and found the city, but you stopped exploring.
(Sorry, I took the story way too far).
🖥️ Back to reality again
Once you are delivering results in our role you just have to keep going, right? Sometimes you introduce small improvements and that seems to be enough.
You are playing under the assumption that if you are successful today, doing more quantity, more efficiently, and more consistently the same, you will be more successful tomorrow. ⚠️ But it's not true.
The world changes around us and big innovations happen by exploring, not by exploiting something that is already profitable. You are slowly getting stagnant.
We have 12 movies for Fast and Furious and more movies from Marvel that humanity needs. They are a predictable gold mine for studios. But they are decreasing in quality and revenue little by little. Not to mention that the biggest award-winning movies are new ones, the one that does something different.
If it was hard to drop things to avoid burnout, it’s even harder to stop doing what is working to try something new.
We make most decisions subconsciously. But let’s assume you were consciously deciding each decision in your career: Do you use JSON for serialization as usual? Or do you explore protocol buffers like LinkedIn did to reduce latency?
Well, you have a bunch of deadlines and projects to deliver. Exploring something new endangers the delivery. You may end up working overtime to go back to the old approach. You may need to convince more people about it as I wrote in “How to get traction on your proposals as a software engineer”.
For most of us, exploring is not on today’s agenda. It’s not on any day’s agenda.
⚙️ You need a system
Humans are biased. We value more a reward in the present than in the future. We are not able to identify when an action brings a positive or negative outcome. Life is not binary. Everything is a grey area.
A good framework is the one Jeff Bezos applied when deciding to create Amazon. Jeff was clear on his decision to leave his well-paid position at the investment company D.E. Shaw & Co. to start an online bookstore in Seattle. Even his boss advised him to think a bit more carefully about what he was aiming to do at age 30.
His framework? The regret minimization framework. He knew he would regret more at 80 years old if he stayed at his job than if he tried founding Amazon.
That sounds very romantic from Jeff, but I don’t want all of you to quit your jobs and pursue some dream project in hopes of advancing your career.
The innovation you want in your career is innovation that will benefit your employer too. These companies want to balance this explore vs exploit tradeoff at the company level. They can’t follow the romantic idea of leaping into the void to explore a wild dream, even if from the outside it seems to be what Meta did with AR/VR.
What I have found is that decisions are supported by data, not by feelings of regret. If you want to justify dedicating engineers to a project, bring data. How do big tech companies justify the projects they launch? They develop systems to get this data.
🧪 A/B testing
Companies test multiple changes in prod in parallel. Google did a notorious “41 shades of blue” test. Yes, they tested 41 different blues to pick the best one. Medical researchers try experimental treatments in controlled groups of patients.
In these tests, some option is worse than the other. The damage done by the bad options is capped because the control and treatment groups are relatively small.
An A/B test starts by defining a hypothesis, the duration of the experiment, and success criteria. It takes some work upfront to define all of these.
Try mini A/B tests in your day-to-day actions. For a week you can go to all meetings having read the agenda, any linked doc, and with your questions prepared. Then the next week go completely unprepared. During both weeks write down after each meeting a score in some areas, such as how useful you were in the meeting, how useful was the meeting for you, or if someone complimented or reprimanded you.
The hypothesis is that you are more useful when you have read everything, but attending the meeting may be less useful to you.
You can find either a better balance between going 0% prepared or 100% prepared. Or you could use these results to stop attending meetings where your upfront preparation was enough. Now you can go to your manager and bring discussion topics around the data you collected these weeks, not around feelings.
🌟 Google’s 20% rule
The idea is to have people dedicate 20% of their time to exploring the things they thought would benefit Google the most. Everyone has to provide some outcome, like a presentation with the team of the learnings.
This method started great ideas that became Google products, like Gmail, Google News, and Adsense.
Even when trying to systematize it, it's said by ex-googlers that you are essentially putting in overtime. It’s hard to balance all the other pressures in your other 80% time.
"I've got to tell you the dirty little secret of Google's 20% time. It's really 120% time" - Marissa Mayer
You don’t need your company to force exploration time. It’s your responsibility. And that’s good because it’s under your control.
A fine balance can be 1 hour of your time and 1 hour of your company’s time for exploration every day.
, now a Staff engineer at Instagram, shared his method to accelerate his promotions: Pursuing multiple workstreams in parallel, usually 1 or 2 outside the main workstream. In his words:First, I worked a lot of extra hours which allowed me to pursue multiple workstreams at the same time. I often had an extra workstream or two in flight outside of my main work.
Here’s an example of how these extra workstreams helped drive my promotions:
Senior (L5) Promotion - One of my extra workstreams turned into a cross-team initiative with massive impact. This was on top of my main project work which was already meeting L5 expectations.
Staff (L6) Promotion - The main workstream that got me promoted was one I found by working extra hours on top of my normal commitments.
🎯 The explorer strategy
You own your career growth and you own your exploration.
Create a system to balance the explore-exploit tradeoff. It’s a cycle. The benefit is not in pushing only one but alternating between them.
You won’t be able to stop delivering to explore, and you shouldn’t focus only on delivering without learning and growing.
Have a backlog of ideas to explore further, and put stop-loss conditions to avoid continuing on unprofitable ideas. Plan exploration in spikes, and time-box them.
From the outside, you will seem lucky that you are constantly having good profitable ideas and advancing your career. But it’s not luck, it’s a deliberate effort with a system.
👏 Weekly applause
This week my friend Alex Zajac recommended this newsletter on LinkedIn! I’m delighted to be next to great newsletters I admire. I have tried to thank already the people who contacted me through LinkedIn. If this is the first time you hear from me: THANK YOU ❤️
Alex writes a weekly newsletter curating the most relevant AI news of the week. Even if you are not into AI, reading his newsletter helps build the map. You can find it out here.
Thanks for reading until the end. This post was super fun to research and write. I wanted to try something different from the “do ABC post“ post and make it fun. I hope you got actionable insights to avoid a stagnant career.
— Fran
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Very engaging post, loved every word!
Really awesome post, Fran 👍