I’ve recently hit the 5-year mark at Microsoft as a Technical Program Manager/Product Owner. As I reflect on how my professional experience changed me, I realized how helpful it would have been for my career if I knew a few years ago what I now know. I’m penning down my learnings with the hope that it may help someone else out there to learn from my experiences.
If the below post seems too long, please scroll down to tl:dr summary of the learnings 😊
Learning 1: It’s your responsibility to convey your career aspirations.
Think of a scenario where you have worked hard all year long. You landed a very important feature. You’ve received a lot of appreciation from the leadership. You can feel your impact in the air, and naturally you expect a promotion out of it. Come your time for annual review, you were not given a promotion. You are very upset about this result and your manager was surprised at why you were upset as you never once expressed that you were aiming for a promotion. Have you ever felt it?
Now, think of another scenario where you are dealing with a very demanding family situation which is taking up a lot of your physical and mental resources. Your manager offers you a very visible project that you can lead, and you turn it down as you are currently not able to take it. A few months later, your family situation got better, and you are now willing to take on more challenges. However, you just got to know that the next highly impactful project was given to someone else on the team.
In both scenarios above, what would you have done differently for a different outcome? As Mark Manson says in his book “The subtle art of not giving a F***”, you are responsible for your situation. It is your responsibility to communicate to your manager what your expectations are. You can do great, impactful work but that doesn’t directly translate to your career aspirations if your manager isn’t aware of what your aspirations are. You may not be ready to take on a project at one time, however it is your responsibility to communicate why and what has changed recently to the folks you work with. Having honest career conversations with your manager and skip-level is super important. Don’t assume that people know what you want, you need to clearly articulate what you want. These conversations can be quite awkward to begin with, but you start to get comfortable with them as you keep having them.
Learning 2: Get comfortable with taking and giving feedback.
Feedback is an important part of the growing process. As a professional, to build scalable and comprehensive solutions, one needs to be open to taking feedback – there is simply no way around it. We all come from various cultural, economic, and social backgrounds. We all bring our unique perspectives to the table. Naturally, we all have different sets of opinions, suggestions, and solutions to solve any given problem. Even though it may seem overwhelming at times, the feedback from people you work with is the safety net for you to build better solutions.
There hasn’t been a single feature that I led at Microsoft where I didn’t receive feedback from my working group to make changes to the solution I’ve proposed. I say this proudly because I could drive success only with the help of my awesome working partners and their perspectives. Regardless of how much hard work and research I put in proposing a solution, someone else will have a different perspective that I missed – which usually helps me in building more comprehensive solutions. That is why we have a team – to build each other up. My team members give me feedback not because they think they are better than me, but because they think differently than I do. The more you seek it, the more you learn, the stronger you grow.
As overwhelming as it is to take feedback, it’s even harder to give constructive, timely, and actionable feedback to others.
You see, where I come from, I was always told to not say anything if I didn’t have anything good to say at all. Pleasing people is the most important thing in the world, and It’s not ok to hurt someone’s feelings by telling them what you really think. If you do have something to say to a person, the way to do it is either to gossip behind their back or wait till you are really frustrated so you give them a piece of your mind. However, neither of these options are healthy or productive if you wish to continue to have good/honest relationships. I’ve had quite a few challenges early in my career where I knew I had to give feedback to make things better and if I kept quiet, I knew I would be setting myself/ my team/ my project up to fail. I have had to learn the art of giving feedback on the job with the help of my managers/mentors. They gave me tools based on their experiences and suggested learning resources to get better at providing balanced, honest, personable feedback to folks. (I highly recommend the book Radical Candor, authored by Kim Scott, in this context if you haven’t already read it).
I now consciously put effort in providing actionable, timely, and honest feedback to the people I work with. There are times the feedback can be hard for folks to hear in the moment, however delivering it in a kind and personable way helps big time!
Learning 3: Be Curious, courageous, and confident.
Have you ever been to a meeting where you had a question pop up in your mind, and you didn’t ask the question because you thought it probably was quite stupid? And someone across the table asks the same question 5 minutes later, and everyone appreciates the thought. That question triggers a very thoughtful discussion, and you are probably slurring swear words to yourself for not having the courage to ask that question 5 minutes before?
If you have ever felt this way, repeat after me for five times – “there are no stupid questions”. You are just as smart as the rest of the people in that meeting. The worst thing that can happen is if you have a question/idea that’s not worth considering, others will explain why that’s not a good idea. Even in this case, you are coming out of that meeting with a better understanding than before. There is no shame in not knowing. The more you ask, the more you learn, the more clarity you’ll have.
When you work in the tech industry, you know that you are surrounded by incredibly talented people. It’s quite natural to feel the imposter syndrome, and you will need to fight it very consciously. Every single person you work with brings their unique value to the table, including yourself. You have got to be confident and courageous to speak up. Never let go of your curiosity to research and build better understanding.
Learning 4: You will fail, and it’s ok.
I come from a south Indian middle-class family. Growing up in Hyderabad in the nineties meant that your worth is measured purely in academic success. My worth was constantly measured by comparing myself with the children of folks in my parents’ social circle. While this thought process was believed by most parents back then to be the most effective way of motivating their children, it added immense pressure on children to keep succeeding. For me (along with lots of my friends that I grew up with), this pressure of succeeding resulted in fear of failure. Fast forward to adult life, the fear of failure is something I personally carried with me for a long time (and I still carry it with me to an extent). How did this fear affect me? I was so afraid of failure that there were times I hesitated to not try. I used to not bring up any ideas in a meeting, fearing that someone might shut it down and it would be a failure on my part for saying it. I used to not push myself out of my comfort zone fearing that I may fail.
I love Tony stark – the genius, playboy, billionaire, philanthropist (and Iron Man). Yes, that guy. After being held captive in an Afghan cave, he devices an armor with limited available resources. The very first armor design helps him barely escape from enemy territory. Did he stop his innovation there, heck no! He innovated newer versions of it with added features, and he kept on iterating till his very last battle with Thanos. If Iron Man, a Marvel fictional superhero with his abundant resources couldn’t get the design of his armor perfect and right the first time (or even the second time), how are we real, normal people expected to solve our problems with perfect solutions without failing every time?
Failure is inevitable. In fact, the more you try avoiding failing, the more you fail – it’s a paradox. When there is no way to avoid it, one might as well get comfortable with it. Once I’ve come to that realization, I have consciously started to propose my weirdest ideas in meetings, take on high visibility projects, pursue new ideas. I have failed multiple times when I wanted to do something new, learned from it, and made progress because the notion of failure doesn’t scare me anymore, I know that any setback will be an opportunity for me to learn and grow.
Internalizing the growth mindset is one heck of a tool to deal with life where failure is just as much part of it as success is.
Learning 5: Focus on building relationships
With the recent layoffs in the tech industry, how many of you are/know someone personally that got impacted? As I look at the sheer volume of the layoffs across the industry, I can’t help but realize that most of those who impacted (if not all of them) are just as smart and talented as those who are still holding their jobs. Regardless of what level you are at, how impactful your work is, how smart you are, the companies will continue to operate if you are gone tomorrow. Everyone around you is replaceable, including yourself.
So, what needs to be your priority in your professional life? If you ask me, if you must choose one thing that you can focus on, it should be building good relationships. Years from now, you may forget the domain knowledge you’ve acquired, the projects you’ve landed, but you will remember the people that had the most impact on you – both positive and negative. You will remember that manager who coached you so you can fulfill your dreams, that mentor who helped you navigate through a difficult situation, and that person who screwed over your career.
We all spend most of our active time with the people that we work with. My suggestion is to prioritize building relationships with them. This requires putting in conscious time, effort, and genuinely caring about others at work. Dedicate time for mentor/mentee conversations. Proactively reach out to others in the organization for chats to build relationships. You can spend as little as 30 mins a week reaching out to someone and take an interest in their life and work (not in an awkward stalker way, you know, in a nice way). And if it clicks, you can probably turn that into a regular cadence (of course be mindful of others’ time as well). Not only will this help you build your professional network, but it will also make your experience in the company more meaningful as long as it lasts.
If you are looking for the tl;dr summary, here it is:
Be your own advocate.
Speak up about your career aspirations.
Talk about your limitations.
Initiate career conversations with your management chain
Give and seek feedback continuously.
Internalize growth mindset and reflect on the feedback received to improve.
Provide feedback that is timely and actionable in a personable way.
Be confident and never let go of curiosity.
Failure is imminent, and it’s totally ok to fail.
Get to know more people, care about people, help people.
If you have managed to read through the entire post – Thank you for reading what I’ve got to say, I hope it’s helpful 😊Please let me know what you think.
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