Practices to get clarity into your roles and expectations
This article is part of my series to share experiences I’ve been through with my team as a product leader. If you didn’t read the former articles I recommend to do read them first.
Part 1: A product leaders experiment: Building a weekly writing habit by sharing learnings made
Part 2: The one skill a product lead should focus on first
Part 3: The hardest skill a product lead should practice
Part 4: The one thing you have to expect as a product lead
I was recently asked what my last relevant learning has been. I responded immediately with “learning how important working communication is”. I was amused because I realized that this is also the topic of all my articles, written so far, have in common. Today will not be an excuse. Last time I explained the importance of written communication. I want to extend on this topic. Another area where written communication can help you is roles and expectations.
In the startup world, fancy roles and titles are flying all around. There is no engineer at all but we need a CTO. We have no product manager or designer but a Head of Product of course we need. C’s, VP’’s, Heads — it’s easy to get some nice sounding titles into your CV by serving some startups for a while. Most of the time the reason is lack of cash. If we can’t pay enough we pay with titles and shares. I know you have a smile on your face right now because it sounds familiar to you.
I was no excuse. When I founded my first startup I have been the tech guy in the team. You name it, I was CTO from day one. Nice start into my work life. A few years later I started working as a CTO for another startup. Guess what there has been no engineer at all but a lot of coding to do. I also started to hire the first engineer. A few weeks later the next and with every new employee I realized that I had no idea how to lead those guys. I had no other choice but to teach myself. I was reading as many books as possible. I watched conference talks, read blog articles, and exchanged with other leaders.
Slowly, slowly it was working. I made my lessons. Failed so many times but somehow, over time, I found my flow. It was a mix of my learning addiction and my strong gut feeling in the hiring process. I surrounded myself with great engineers. Without those great personalities, I would never be where I’m today. They have been demanding. Questioned me all the time. They have pushed me continuously to find better ways to improve the team’s performance. They also have been supportive whenever I failed and gave me the trust I needed to succeed together as a team. I would bet that sometimes they felt like guinea pigs. I was testing all these frameworks and best practices together with them. As mentioned in former articles. It took me a while to understand the underlying principles of all those frameworks out there.
Why do I tell you this story? Because it’s easy to get a title or role assigned. But it isn’t easy to fill this role and to stand to their expectations. In most startups, the founders have no idea what the role of a specific title is about. We need someone who builds the product. He needs coding skills. So let’s call him CTO. Never forget to add the suffix “hands-on” to the title. When you see this you can already expect that they need all but a “C” role.
Last year I talked with a startup that was searching for a CTO. I wanted to learn more about their challenges. After I understood what the problem was, they want to solve, it was obvious that they needed a senior developer much more than a CTO.
What’s the problem? It’s just a title you say.
It’s more than this. It’s a responsibility and a commitment. As long as the specific person knows what is expected and can fill the role — all good. If not, there is still a chance of success when the founders know and help the person to fill the role. Most of the time both, the person with the shiny title and the founders have no idea. This is where it starts to get wrong.
Imagine you hired an engineer and made him your CTO. More engineers join the company. Over time it gets obvious that there would be a much better choice than engineer number one to become the CTO. Good luck handling this situation.
Get Kevin Lücke’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
A similar problem exists also with roles. What is a product manager? What a product owner? Are they the same? What about a project manager? Recently I talked with a product manager who told me about his daily job. I’m still not sure if he was a product owner, an engineer, or a media designer. I recognized that he had no idea what a product manager is.
The same patterns you can find for all kind of roles and titles. I’m not sure if this is a startup only problem. But at least it is something well know in the startup scene.
The lack of expectations is the common thing all examples share. It starts with job descriptions copy pasted. It later ends with lack of guidance and coaching during the daily work. An alternative approach I recommend is thinking about a role independet from titles or role names. Focus on what you would expect from a specific person. Write it down and make explicit how doing a great job would look like.
A great mentor, I had, told me that it’s even better when you ask your employees to write down their expectations. Seeing their definition of great work will help you to manage and communicate your own expectations too. It’s time consuming. But is there something better than having a team who knows exactly what you expect from them and how to reach it?
One tool you can make use of, is the role canvas explained in the book “The Team that Managed Itself: A Story of Leadership” by Christina Wodtke (Radical Focus). It helps you to focus on the problem you try to solve and you need help with. It works best in collaboration with the team. Identify where you need help with and translate it into expectations.
Another nice technique is the “energy audit”. I read about it in “The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building”.
“It is important to maximize your energy. You perform best when you are doing things that energize you. Your goal should be to spend most of your time (75–80 percent) doing things that energize you. If you do, magic will occur.” — The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building by Mochary, Matt; MacCaw, Alex; Talavera, Misha
In the book they explain that all your tasks belong to one out of four zones:
Zone of Incompetence: Tasks that other people do better than you (e.g., fix your car), and you should outsource if they don’t give you joy.
Zone of Competence: Tasks that you do fine, but others are as good as you (e.g., clean your bathroom), and you should outsource if they don’t give you joy.
Zone of Excellence: Tasks that you are excellent at (i.e., better than others) but don’t love doing. They refer to this zone as the danger zone. Many people will want you to keep doing these things (because they gain significant value from you doing them), but this is the area that you should move away from.
Zone of Genius: Tasks that you are uniquely good at in the world and that you love to do (so much so that time and space seem to disappear when you do them). This is where you can add most value to the world and yourself. This where you should be driving toward spending most, if not all, of your time.
When you and your team combine the role canvas and the energy audit you can reach a level where most of the time your team is able to work in the Zone of Genius. You will identify the tasks you have to hire for. To get them done, but also to increase the overall team productivity. Usually people think that there is no one else who could do and love the tasks. The truth is that for every activity that feels un-fun to you, there is someone out there who not only excels at it but also loves it. Even the “horrible” tasks.
Another advantage of those practices is the ability to grow healthy as a team. There are so many startups hiring more for headcount than for the real need they have. Avoid this as much as possible.
You will identify the capabilities your lack of. You are then able to define clear expectations, write them down and hire for them. You can use those expecations to coach and to develop your team. When the team grows you will realize that you can’t manage them all on your own. It’s time to think, together with the team, about what you would expect from leader positions. A grade level plan was something me and my team used to do so. We started to define specific career levels and what we would expect from each level. We started to plan them with bulletpoints. After we realized that we don’t have the same understanding we wrote down what we meant to make it explicit. The process helped the team a lot and personal growing was speeding up by far.
And what about those fancy titles? When the time comes to give titles to people you will recognize it and it will feel right.
As always I’m curious to learm more about your own experiences. Don’t hold back and share them.
