So, ultimately, I’ve taken the approach to not simply follow my personal preference, but to do whatever is more impactful for the company at each stage. Stop coding and delegate when you can’t see the forest for the trees. You want to build something bigger than yourself. I still want to help RevenueCat go public, but if we manage to do it, my responsibilities or title will not be that important anymore.
I asked everyone what a successful outcome for them would look like…and what they would focus on, if they were doing my job. I want to gain some understanding of the choices that were made before I was employed at the company, but not to make any judgements about those choices. I might not necessarily be the smartest engineer in the room, and that’s OK. I know it takes a mixture of skill sets to build a great product. One manager admitted to me she was itching to see results, but admired my ‘maturity’ to do thorough research first.
Highlighted practically all of this, but two I want to resurface for myself: You cultivate a culture of giving credit where and when it’s due. You allow and support your people to make their own decisions within the wide guard rails you’ve helped create, even when it’s not what or how you would choose.
I typically engage students in this model by asking them to draw their own Comfort/Chaos Circle. This is a great activity to get students to check with themselves and communicate where they are with me.
it can be a difficult transition from essential to adjacent. This transition requires learning to deliberately create space for the team around you, and comes down to actively involving them in discussions, decisions, and ultimately substituting sponsorship for repeating the successes that got you to Staff in the first place. When you make a key contribution, feel good about it, and then think about what needs to happen for someone else to make that contribution next time. Be the one to take notes, this helps destigmatize note taking as “low status” and also frees up an alternative would-be notetaker to contribute more instead. If you need a rule of thumb, keep a sponsorship journal and ensure you’re sponsoring others at least a few times a month – if you find yourself sponsoring less frequently than that, dig into what’s stopping you.
Our daily work might be filled with tasks but we should understand and remind our teams of the purpose and long term goals of our work. You don't need to save every feature request or piece of feedback. Important ones will resurface and low priority ones will never get fixed. get to know your users and ask them to explain why they want a specific feature so you find out their needs. Solve the problem – don’t just build the feature.
