Career tips #1: On influence and outputs
A series of thoughts now published into writing pieces
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Career decisions are never easy. It’s a mysterious box where you’d hardly predict the outcomes, also like a game you have to play to figure it out. In this series, let me share some of the hard-earned lessons during my career so far.
It’s always a learning process. I’d appreciate any comments and feedback for the series. Thank you.
Find areas of influence
Most of the time our jobs are defined by the JD, but in reality, the scopes will change over time. So instead of waiting for the assignments, you could proactively ask to do extras — things that deliver impact. The idea behind this is to show more value that you can contribute and that proactiveness is usually highly appreciated.
The formula will usually be:
What are your current scopes now?
What — if given opportunities — would you like to do more?
Are you keen to make it happen?
I’d encourage everyone to take a step back and reflect — just write it down your ideas that you’d like to work on, bring it up to sense check with your managers if that’s worth the efforts, and if yes, just jump into it.
Let’s say you’re a marketer, and your daily role is to manage social media platform with KPIs, metrics, and reporting performance. And your list of possible involvements could be:
Consumer research - understand the latest consumer trends and nuances for customised campaigns
Partnership development with social partners to expand the reach
Experiment and test new tools that drive better efficiency
Streamline the current process to save costs
Or any other issues you think you can help get it fixed in your company
You’d pick one or two above - finding out more details. Let’s say you’d like to work on consumer research, you’d need to go deeper:
Social media trends 2023
Which touchpoints are mostly used these days?
How channels such as Tiktok influences our users now and what can you do about it?
Demographics that are relevant now - have we targeted them all? which segments are not yet?
How is AI used in social media? what are the pros and cons - should or should not our company try it? if Yes, how?
One caution, though, is to assess the feasibility of the tasks.
How long will it take?
What blockers if any that you’d need to resolve? Especially when it comes to product changes, it could take months.
Do you need any budget to kick off? Roughly how much?
Who will you be working with in order to accomplish this?
Anything else you foresee that will happen when the project starts?
Then you discuss with your manager to either change the angles, finalise the topics and start diving.
What is new stuff you did this year vs. last year?
One of the interesting ideas I heard recently is to compare this vs. last year in terms of the new challenges that you tried yourself on. Let’s say the ballpark is 15% new stuff and you going beyond this is very nice. But remember — we don’t talk about the quantity but the quality of those whereby those new experiences help you learn professionally and personally.
Make sure you don’t deliver half-baked outputs
It’s tempting to rush through the work and just submit it. Many times, if I could recall, that result in the work that needs to redo. It gives not so good (translation: very damaging) impression to our managers.
While deadlines always chase us, it’s good to avoid the premature submissions through:
1. Careful planning
If you know that you’d need to send over the report by Friday and today is Monday, you should start working on it now.
How to work on it? You may wonder. Start with laying out the structure of the report/assignments - what are the components, which parts will be more important than others, any possible difficulties that you’d predict will happen.
So let’s say I have a 10-page presentation to share on the topic of driving user growth. I’d start with by breaking it down into:
Objective: how to solve stagnant user growth in X months?
First 2 slides: talk about the current landscape of user growth and the painpoints it entails
The next 6 slides: talk about the various solutions to address the stagnant growth, the pros, the cons, the costs, and other remarks
Final 2 slides: summarise the overall user growth story with the final proposed recommedations to help boost user growth with minimal costs
As you can see, the most important work to prepare is 6 slides, where you’d analyse and propose solutions. I’d imagine most time will be spent here.
The challenges could be that I’d need some time to do research, maybe test some product features. The challenges could also be that I will be off for 1-2 days for travelling. Either way, I’d need to start early.
2. Iterations based on feedback
Let’s aim to get the first draft ready in 2 days. Now by this time, it’s Wednesday. You can share the first draft with your peers (your manager, your teammates, colleagues from other related departments such as marketing, operations).
Seek feedback for improvements. Always think about iterations - work that go through multiple checks before finally arriving at its destination. The feedback you get will help you fine tune the work in hands. Select what you deem reasonable and discard what is not.
The above is an example but you get the idea.
Basically the framework will be:
Start early
Structure the work
Get the first draft out
Seek feedback
Improvise and fine tune
Finally submit
I wish I had learnt of this lesson early in my career when I started my first job.
🔥Links for this week
Thank you for reading till the end. I’d like to have a simple ask: if you find this helpful, please consider sharing it with your networks. That’d give me a huge boost of motivation when more people get to learn of this newsletter. Thank you in advance.