The Case for Writing a User Manual
In a prior blog post on how to deal with a difficult sponsor, I mentioned that I had created a user manual. But, I did not explicitly address what a user manual is, why a user manual is beneficial, and how to create one. We’ll dive into these topics in this blog post.
Remote Work Reflections
What I originally envisioned as a 3-6 month vacation from the office would evolve into the default modus operandi for many knowledge workers, myself included, for nearly two years and counting. My thinking on remote work evolved and continues to evolve as I gain more experience. These are my learnings.
How to Tell Your Team You’re Leaving
Being straightforward is especially critical when breaking bad news. This includes sharing that someone is leaving the team. Here are some tips for how to break the news of an employee departure.
Generation Next
The consequences of cultivating a culture of transparency are that, sometimes, the things that come out of your employees’ mouths are going to strike you as ridiculous at best or downright insolent at worst. If you truly wish to practice radical candor with your employees, then you’re a hypocrite if you dish it out but can’t take it.
How to Take Care of Yourself So You Can Thrive at Work
I recognize there are infinity articles on the Internet about self-care and how to structure your self-care habits to maximize productivity. But, I also get a lot of questions about how I manage to stay so on top of things, so I figured there’s nothing wrong with contributing my little footnote to the genre.
When to Say No to Things at Work
For the first five to ten years of your career, you should say yes. To everything. You should say yes so much that you’ll want to throw up from saying yes. Once you achieve a certain career threshold, you need to shift from saying yes to saying no. And, if you thought saying yes was hard, it’s nothing compared with the difficulty of saying no.
How to Demystify the Promotion Process
You know you’re ready for a promotion. But, somehow you don’t have the title. Short of being the first one online in the morning and the last one offline at night, how do you demonstrate your value to the business? I’d recommend pursuing a few specific actions to help demystify the promotion process.
Leading through Crisis
When you become a manager, no one hands you a playbook telling you how to lead through a crisis. Like the rest of us, you just have to do it. Here are some principles that I adopted for my team and me this past year that have helped us navigate a challenging time.
Doing More of What You Love
As long as most of your job description falls into the “love” or “like” category, then you’ve got it pretty good in my book. For those parts that you dislike, there may be ways to minimize those activities and reshape your role to cater more to your strengths and interests.
My Product Journey
I still loved project management, but I wanted to diversify my skills to better position myself in a changing market. Deepening my product management skills required a lengthy process of discovery and a fair amount of hard work. Here are the steps I followed.
Piling On
What happens when you’ve pruned the list but those pesky weeds just won’t seem to go away? Sometimes, there are situations where you’ve done all you think you can do. And, somehow, still, inexplicably, you find yourself with new tasks added to what was supposed to be your slimming to do list.
Pruning the List
We can try every possible hack to become more productive. We can use a Kanban board to visually document the backlog. We can batch similar tasks to knock them out more quickly. But ultimately what we need to do is prune. If we haven’t pruned, we’ll forever be rough around the edges—overcommitted and overextended.