Greatest hits on career advice with Peter Yang (Roblox, ex-Reddit)

[Music] hi everyone this is Nel singhal I am your host of the skip podcast this episode is a recording of a conversation I had with an ex- colleague named Peter Yang Peter and I used to work together and he also has a hit newsletter and what he and I talked about is working together on a newsletter article devoted to sort of greatest hits of my skip content both the newsletter that I have as well as some of the podcast episodes from the year and I thought it was such a great opportunity to go through some of the backstory of a lot of the coaching a lot of the content a lot of my thoughts on content that range from compensation to how to think about your next job to how to think about your superpowers to how the climate has changed you know job searching or career management in general so we recorded it and his newsletter is out if you prefer to look at some of the writing but this conversation I thought was a great way for us to go back and forth on a number of topics and maybe catch up on episodes that you've missed in the past so without further Ado I'll introduce Peter Peter thank you for joining me on today's podcast and maybe I'll start by asking you what you've been up to maybe just give a couple minutes on uh you your background and obviously the newsletter that you are uh so successful in sharing with other product managers yeah thanks so much to uh you know I really enjoyed working with you during our time at Credit Karma I thought you were always a very thoughtful and high empathy product leader so it's definitely great to reconnect and learn from you again for sure um but for me you know I've been working at various companies right now uh I'm working product at ROBLOX um uh building uh products for creators and for developers I'm all about the Creator economy so I've been writing and tweeting about it for a long time and that's why my newsletter is also called The Creator economy I I write both about product stuff and also about you know know trying to make it as a creator online that's great well I'm welcome and I'm excited to learn about creators from you on both your newsletter as well as any thoughts that you might have today but I know you had some product management questions and I would love to be able to dig right in yeah so why don't we talk about you know how product folks can advance their career first and you know I'm sure you covered some of this before but when we just start with maybe you can briefly explain what the skip actually means yeah I I came up with a title skip because I think careers are long and people don't tend to think longterm about careers they think very shortterm what's my next job what's my next position I always thought what people should do is they should focus on their skip job they should focus on their skip role they should focus on the skip promotion not just the next one and so skip is an homage to thinking longterm and being a bit more around next next than just next and so that's why I call it the skip because I really want people to be looking past the decision of today you know on on Lenny's podcast and another areas who recently talk about the three stages of a product career why don't we focus on the middle and late stage for old people like like us let's talk about let's talk about the middle stage first you know like a lot of PMS they typically move from managing a product to managing a team curiously you think this is like a must have to advance your career I think the answer is different today than it may have been a few years ago I think that when I first started talking about the different acts of career the transition to leadership was primarily through people manager the answer was look if you really want to get a leadership role and Leadership roles are really where you have the highest impact where you have the highest compensation managing people is sort of a prerequisite I think that what's happened in the industry as we've slowed growth is that the challenge around building organizations has been replaced with navigating product Market fit and ensuring that you got scalable products not necessarily scalable teams small teams are in large teams are a little bit out and so if your entire Focus from a career point of view is how do I quickly can I manage people and then manage managers I think that you'll find few positions available to you so I think what I'm an advocate for is ensuring that at some point you do get that management opportunity because it is a high impact High leverage type situation uh there are fewer opportunities now more than ever and so what I would prefer is people to think about their Builder story what did you build what impacted it have what challenges did you have to navigate to have that build story and I think that if you can say look we came in and we had this challenging feature product turnaround story we had a bunch of internal challenges external challenges in the process of working through it I made these mistakes I learned these things then we started to see some smoke and I was able to get this thing out the door that's the person you're going to hire today and so that's what's really helping your next job and then that's the reason why if your story is I got a little bit farther into my IC career I got tapped to manage I've managed two or three people we all kind of were in the building when we were building stuff but boy growth slowed and now I'm here to get a management job and I'd like to see maybe four or five people we're going to be like well okay that sounds great but I don't have a management problem I have a build problem nowadays and if you're not really appropriate for that it's a bit of a mismatch it's easy to like ignore the build part of it it's like you know I just want to get promoted I want to get manage more people but at the end of the day we're all here like ship great products so let's talk about promotions right like um I'm sure a lot of our listeners and readers are wondering like how do I get promoted faster as a PM uh so maybe start of that but also you mentioned maybe getting promoted isn't as important as you think it is so maybe talk about that too I always handled this topic somewhat carefully because I think promotion is a personal decision I mean some people feel like promotion is a great way to be seen and it's important to be seen in the workplace so what I would say is the fastest way to get promoted is to heat seek into an environment where your superpowers are on display you feel seen and you are your true self at work if you're not seen then it always sort of makes it harder for you to take risk it also makes it harder for you not to have resentment if you are your true self in the workplace you just spend a lot less energy doing this recalculation every time you step forward or say something or write an email a true self work means that what your Natural Instincts is the way you appear and that means that the energy spent is around being who you are as opposed to being maybe the person that you think the company needs and lastly when your superpower is on display then your strengths are showing you feel great about it you feel like you are able to leverage those strengths into something that drives impact that will drive fast promotion because the energy is spent correctly you're harnessing your strings and you're turning that into real outcomes I think that the concern around promotion that you you laid out is that I think increasingly if I was given a choice between someone who's very steadfast on speedily going through the promotion levels hey if it takes typical candidates 18 months I'm going to do it in 12 and make that my push and then I had another person who is essentially building a story around what they created and what the challenges work through and they had a quicker and more efficient path to leadership the leadership path is really what you're trying to optimize for and the Builder story is the critical ingredient to get there and it has the environment that we signaled earlier I think that this promotion Pace or even I can't get promoted because of budget constraints or because that role doesn't exist but I'm learning these things are fine to slow down on if you're really getting that promotion store story replaced with a builder story that makes sense yeah cuz promotion can happen I guess at a current company or can happen at another company too yeah absolutely to your point and oftentimes you might see promotions or transitions take place because you leave a company and you move to another maybe higher role and that's where the promotion took place and I think that you also have to realize that promotions make sense for the company because you've achieved the things that the company needs but when you look at leader just because you got promoted at company a doesn't mean that you're going to be a great leader in Company B the Counterpoint also exists just because you're not getting promoted doesn't mean you're not going to be a great leader oftentimes for example soft skills make a huge difference and those soft skills oftentimes aren't in the promotion ladder but it turns out are massively important so if you said look I'm really learning how to influence folks it's preventing me from getting promoted I'm going to punch through if I took this other position I wouldn't need to show that I'll get a bigger role but then you said I mastered the soft skills by learning patience and then it turned out that was a huge career unlock and I became head of product I made 10 times as much money I'm like well did promotion really matter in that case the lack of promotion actually helped you so these are the things that I always look at you just want to look at the whole board and you know there's no right or wrong here but it's very personal to you but just think about more than just the promotion the title and then the comp that comes with it so let's talk about like the end state of a PM's career you know like is everyone going to destined to become like a VP or CPO or like are already pass that PMs can explore yeah when I think about like what's sort of the end goal of a lot of folks I think it kind of falls into maybe four or five buckets I think that as you pointed out the natural course is to just take on bigger scope at more consequential companies you know ultimately seniority is based on what's the biggest problem I can hand you Peter you know I can determine how senior you are which just just essentially I give you a very very very big problem I give you relatively little guidance and you can solve it and through the product management lens the biggest role for the biggest problems are the head of that function the head of product role so that's essentially the most common and usually the pitfalls or that we see are people that need to move from their passion in building products to their passion in building the factory that creates the products it's not the cars it's the factory so what you end up having to do is be very good about first making sure you know how to build products and then being able to take that step back and then being able to systematize that that's what a great header product does and that's what usually people get excited about I think that the second is this sort of General executive general manager type and so this is essentially not the head of product it's the Chief Operating Officer the president the uh CEO of the company these roles I would say are different you know what you end up finding is this is an individual who says well product is a means to an end I'm actually as passionate about building the product as I am around building the business and when you think about the business side you start looking at it wider and so a very sort of common second path for the top performers that I coach they often say look I want to get a wider role and again that might be a general manager of a division or it might be the COO and it changes depending on the scale and stage and the nomenclature and the structure of an organization the third is to say you know it's less about me being passionate about creating and building both the product or the process and it's less about me kind of being passionate about the business I'm more passionate about the creation of new you know the zero to one Journey this is the third and this is the founder journey and I think the founder could live inside of a more structured company the so-called zero to one bets that happen adjacent to maybe a core business but often they're early stage and founder Journeys are super different and often they're emotional Journeys for people in other words it's not that people sit down and say hey I'm trying to decide do I want to found a company or be head of product usually if they can get ahe of product that's the safer gig so it's harder and harder for people to say well no I'm going to give up the income I'm going to give up the prestige and the management of a large team so I'm all by myself and I'm going to go do this thing from the beginning those that do choose that make emotional decisions this is where I can be my best this is the environment where I can show my new superpower this is the itch that I need to scratch so Founders are for that Builder you know person the product executive EP is for that executive who loves the function and then the general manager is the one who likes constructing companies as opposed to constructing new Innovations now the the fourth is this sort of investor archetype and that one I think is rare for product people frankly but it does happen a reasonable amount because you you have to move from being passionate about the product and the business to being passionate about the return and so the best investors are very very focused on what's the return that I'm going to see from the portfolio Investments I make not specifically one those that are interested in coaching or building typically will self- select into more of the other boxes but those that are looking at creating a portfolio and going after return and seeing things Market long term that makes sense and then lastly there's this sort of semi-retired advisor type which I don't necessarily put on the docket that's kind of act three when you've done these sort of other more operating roles you move into the hey I don't want to retire I'll stay you know a little bit engaged and that you know that may be another option but usually what I find is the career Frameworks for people that are looking at each of these four are vastly different you know you wouldn't need to get promoted to become a Founder you know as an example being an investor requires a whole different skill set than maybe you know grinding it out in the product Arena yeah I think it's good to take a step back from just the career ladders and think about you know who you really want to be I guess yeah like I probably can never be a good investor because like I I need the rapid feedback loops and investors wait 10 10 years to see what's going on well and you're a builder Peter I mean I think you like building and you like the customer and you like thinking deeply about a particular problem I think that's different than thinking deeply about a space you know looking at it from many many dimensions and being like hey maybe this company won't make it but this other one will that's a harder thing to do when you're so passionate about like you know finding the best outcomes for everything the environment that you join plays as large a role in your success as kind of like your your own skills right you got to find an environment that matches your skills so you had a really good blog post a few years ago about different stages of company that you can join and maybe you can like uh give an updated version of that now that we're in this economy you know it's funny because I've been thinking about about that quite a bit I wrote that was my first piece of content that I ever published on the internet was this idea that I feel felt that people always Define product management the same they sort of say this is what product management is or does and I always thought well boy when you look at the stages of company it's vastly different early stage product management is very much navigating the drunken walk you know how do you get you know as many mistakes out of the system as possible and then fail as fast and then when you finally find product Market fit it actually you flip product management to be much more of a protective function the protection is I have smoke make sure it doesn't go out make sure it turns into fire so now you introduce process you introduce process in the earlier stage and it's quite cumbersome you introduce process now it's perfect because you're protecting you're making sure there's visibility you have customers finally you don't want to lose those customers in the last 10 15 years as as you and I both know hypergrowth has become quite a thing with distribution platforms that exist from Facebook to to Google to Apple you can put things in an app store and all of a sudden Catch Fire overnight and so companies can go from zero to 100 and what took LinkedIn 10 years may take Uber 18 months and so this sort of hyper growth has a vastly different product management function again it's the building the orb building the factory it's expanding a working product line into adjacency and so all the fun parts of product management are on display the crafting pieces the scaling pieces the organization the growth pieces are all there and then you hit to a place of of scale the big Tech so to speak where you have Market leadership and there you're not only managing a scaled environment but you're also having conversations around like innovator's dilemma how do I start over again how do I start from the beginning how do I create something new from the early stages and so to your question these stages have a rapid impact on all the roles within an organization and so often when I talk to people about career and they're like hey I'm looking at company a company B I said well hold on a second let's erase the names for a second what stage of company is most appropriate for you given where you are in your career where will you be seen the most what environment will you get to flow quickly right so that's sort of the framework and I think that the second part of your question is like what's changed because I think that that that article that I wrote now probably five six years ago deserves a refresh for the reasons I mentioned before that hey maybe your goal is to get to leadership which is managing folks well hyper growth ain't so hyper anymore and you know product management has now become more of a builder function again and less of an organizational function so what I would say is that the main difference is my Council in the past was avoid being a product manager while a company is in product Market fit you know you'd much rather be a Founder being the person who has the same risk of whether the company will succeed but not being the founder that to some extent is not a great profile what I would say to you now is I mostly agree with that statement but I do think that people that come in when a company has had a little bit of funding and they are moving very thoughtfully into a space but they don't have product Market fit and you can join and build a builder story you can come in with a relatively small team partner closely with the founders get a meaningful stake of the company but actually carry the company through product Market fit that role is more successful and valuable than if you were to go join an ex Growth Company which was a a large number of your readers and my listeners are in these companies that were highly valued that are privately held that have really struggled to make their valuation work that as it was result means that they're in layoffs they're trying to eventually get back to those days when they were able to raise money with 0% interest rates they were able to get to those valuation days what I worry about is those positions those product management roles are actually very defensive they're working backwards from a very very heavy headwind while on the other hand if you have a clean structure company that is essentially able to not have to deliver product and a carriable valuation it actually might be a pretty good gig so one change is that earlier stage product management I do recommend and slower growth environments which have not gone through a big Groth actually might be more valuable than a hypergrowth environments that have had that big hit so there's been some shifts in how I managed it mostly because I think things are just growing more slowly X hypergrowth I think is a dangerous Zone probably switch too many companies in my career but like what are some uh good and bad reasons for changing companies best reason to change compan companies is that you feel and you're and you have that data to support that you're growing faster than the company or the project enables you to grow I think that you always want the company to grow slightly faster than you essentially a bit of a magnetic pull to help you kind of move forward when you look at the folks that have been at these big Tech environments and have stayed for long they were able to keep up the pace of growth but the company just was a little bit ahead of them so they were always like oh my gosh just like the company's going so much faster I'm just trying to stay at top of things when people struggle is when they're like look I feel like I've mastered this sort of size of problem I can take the size of problem that you're giving me but I can also take a larger one but I look around and that larger problem just doesn't exist here the problems that do exist are problems that I am not interested in solving and they're not career additive they're helpful to the company but not for me when you are growing faster than your company it's a red line it's time for you to potentially find a faster growing opportunity or one where you can have a wider birth like going to an earlier Stage Company means that maybe you're not just doing product management maybe you're doing a lot of things because you don't have those functions maybe you're doing a little marketing a little business talking to customers Etc okay that's growth but when you're growing faster than your company that to me feels like the company's holding you back now the flip side is you know and I think we talked a little bit about this is like as an example a bad reason is you know you're not getting promoted as quickly as you expect and your frustration is that hey I'm doing great work but the company is holding off on this carrot maybe they're holding off because there's a small amount of feedback that people are saying and you're not comfortable with that feedback and you think it should be ignored and they feel like it shouldn't or the company's just increasingly more budget constrained and so the bar's gone up or the next role isn't available to you in the position and in those examples it's deeply frustrating but is it reason to transition is it reason to leave maybe but I think that if you for example came to me and said hey I just feel like it's time for me to go I've been looking for promotion and I earned it and and it's not available and I said well tell me about the culture like the culture is great you know my manager is actually easy to work with I really like my peers I feel like I'm seen I feel like I don't have to really spend a lot of time translating my thinking and said okay well do you feel like you're learning it's like well yeah I feel like I'm still solving a problem and it's just you know we're sort of halfway done so I'm I can see the next six months I've got some really interesting things and what about your Builder story it's like well I I feel like I'll be able to show version two to version three you know I think that'll be some additive learning you are growing by all measures you're just not being acknowledged by an increase in title or increasing compensation I feel like your goal is to grow yes promotion is important but boy as you and I talked about maybe that'll translate into into the next job so I I always want people to think a little more broadly and not just think about my promotion is blocking me move fast and then that play the game the 12 versus 18 versus 24 months isn't very good long term though I think it is frustrating when you don't get promot it and you deserve it and you know you just have to be thoughtful as to why yeah I think uh people don't realize how rare it is to you know have a good manager good culture good Builder story like how all those things like actually match up it is like a pretty rare scenario from my experience so if you have a good thing it's like probably should keep it around even if you have a few of those good things you know your point is it's hard to get them all I'm like it's sometimes it's even hard to get a few of those things you know hey I like my culture I like the product I like the the people I work with maybe right now is not the best time to pop around maybe you kind of say this year is okay for me to sort of like stay steady Market kind of improves maybe some of these X growth companies go away way they get replaced by the next breed they're much cleaner maybe it works in your favor patience can be a virtue when it comes to career if things are going okay you can tell the kinds of things that I look for versus the kinds of things that I think might be more stereotypical what about what about the listeners and readers who already like like who have already kind of jumped around a little bit too much do you think they can recover from this yeah maybe there's two ways to answer that question I think that if you find yourself in short shortterm tenures I think they are not as helpful from a career point of view but they're also not as damaging as people believe they are in their resume a lot of people come and say to me I feel like I have to be at this next job for a much longer period of time because the last three jobs I've only been able to make work for a couple of years I'm like well if you're an elite candidate you'll get hired there's not a lot of people that are like hey you're in Tech but because you were only able to sort of stay for two years there must be something wrong with you what they'll ask about is what were the reasons well I took some risks and the company wasn't able to work it out you know oh it turns out that the organization ended up folding the position turns out that the manager in the environment was weak and I knew I could get a much better gig well okay these are real reasons so I think that there's an argument to be made that the Optics of moving around quickly actually is not as stereotypical as what maybe we thought about you know in our parents stage the average tenure for tech jobs is like a couple years so if it's really a couple years and I don't think it's a huge stigma I think that the concern though is that most people see the most impact in year three and year four particularly when the thing has is working your medium to late stage career you know when I joined for example meta I knew that it was going to take a couple of years before I really understood the culture in the system and I was seeking a role where I was actually have the time to Lear learn because I really wanted to be here a bit more long term I didn't really want to make this a quick stint I thought well if I'm going to be a leader it's going to take me a while to learn how to be a leader here I made a leader elsewhere but openly know that there needs to be some understanding of changing what I stand for what my tactics are and for me that was actually where I was able to see a lot more value in those later years and so that's what I always hope for people to think about now to your question is there hope for those that are you historically moving around quickly there is hope because every job is a new job and I've seen lots of examples myself included where I was kind of a two and a half year guy for the first you know 14 years of my career and then I've become a 4 fiveyear guy so you know that can change I think a lot of it has to do with what the person's optimizing for so again if you're chasing titles you're chasing a great product great manager something unique well those things come and go on the other hand you're like I want to have Mastery of a skill I want to start with this as a Development Area then move to practicing and then move to mastering or I want to be able to go from maybe being an individual contributor to a manager or manager to an executive or I want to be able to have impact on seeing a stable successful product change or move from number two to number one when you start changing the goal of what you're looking for from career I think that's when you really start to say hey maybe longterm isn't so bad because that first year it's okay it's okay if this is not so great I'm going to stick it out because I'm not looking for something longer and I still think I'm on that through line that's what's the remedy or the hope for those folks got it yeah you're kind of like building your story and you're thinking long term right you're thinking about what really is Meaningful for you to get that next next job I think a few months ago you posted on link thing just like salary table uh par salaries at top tier companies and and you got some pretty spicy comments people were shocked at how much money lot spicy comments yeah yeah you know just to kind of recap like you know it show that senior PMS are making like 500k plus and like directors are making a million plus and uh I guess the first question is you know why do you think cop is so high at these companies like why are they paying people so much yeah that was an interesting post because I learned a lot because what was funny is publicly a lot of people are like this is certainly inaccurate and they would point me to various data sources that are actually quite accurate and they're like look this guy's smoking dope I mean we've got 150k for senior and this guy's saying 500 and this and that and then privately I received dozens and dozens and dozens of notes where everyone was like yep that's exactly the numbers that I see as well but nobody has any to gain by publishing what the top companies the top candidates get we live in a system where relatively small number of folks are able to get those jobs and those that that have them don't run around telling everyone that hey this is what we make now I heard this really compelling story of someone who sat with me and said what's fascinating is he grew up outside the Bay Area he grew up in you know Phoenix and he had moved to the Bay Area mid-stage of career and so he was talking to me about this notion around these numbers and he said you know if I saw this article 10 years ago when I was still in Phoenix I would have thought this entire thing is fabricated and almost certainly foolish there's no way that these are numbers are accurate now 10 years later these are my numbers and so I completely understand it but what was fascinating is I'm the same guy as I was in Phoenix like I didn't go through some massive metamorphosis as a professional the key and the reason why I published these numbers was that it's not the case that only the people that live in a certain area or went to a certain school or have this special super superow are able and eligible to get it many of the people that are not in these areas that are not in these jobs and that are in different regions are fully capable and are even more qualified than those that have it they need to have the opportunity the courage to actually get those roles and that's the reason why I'm so excited to continue to talk about compensation and sort of open up the data for people to understand that for the moment think about the fact that these are the top roles but they don't require skills that you as listener as a reader cannot obtain and that's the story of hope that I'm hoping to drive forward to answer your question why are the numbers so significant it makes sense if you have a multi-billion dollar company the changes that you make the decisions you make in particular on strategy will have an amplifying impact on the overall value of the company and so people get that look if the stock is going to go up because we make these changes we got to make these changes correctly and then they basically pay to find the right leaders and the funny part is in a company of maybe a thousand people how many of those leaders exist in those positions is it 500 of the Thousand certainly not is it 50 of the Thousand probably not if you've been in a thousand person company there may be like 20 people and those are the people that are often in these leadership roles which are often product management positions that are actually tasked with making these important decisions and so what the company does is they say look we'll pay you half Equity half cash turns out that Equity goes way way way up when the company makes the right decision when the company makes that much kind of money that creates this average number of 500 or a million or two million or 5 million and then that means that well if that person's going to leave and they're going to be attracted by another company well that company has to pay that too so if the best people to get those jobs end up being needing to move in Market they're not going to make a financially bad decision I'm not going to say if I can make a million dollars here I'll work for your company for half a million dollars because that's what you pay they're just going to be like thank you but no thank you what happens is the market is essentially set to the impact that it can have because Equity is such a big piece of it Equity starts to grow when it gets liquid and that's what kind of drives the numbers and the way that I've described yeah I mean just just kind of like continue to thread I mean I think having this data out there is very great for transparency yeah people look at this data and they're like you know I'm I'm like a director at another company right now I'm making less than a senior pm and I think it's good to realize this kind of stuff I think titles are sort of relatively valous in our industry because there's no standardization most companies that are early they literally Make Up titles there's the extremes everybody's a VP and then there's some companies where nobody has a title and everything in between if you're title chasing you're chasing you know a rainbow because that title changes based on the structure of the company but what size of problem that you could can go after is kind of the key calculation when you say to me that there's a director that's making less than a senior PM well a senior PM is someone who's really can practice the craft of product management who has shown the ability to deliver and do that within some reasonable size of ambiguity that's the definition within most structured larger later stage environments and for that let's say that we pay them somewhere between 250 and 600 you know maybe 4 or 500k okay now a direct ctor that is essentially doing product management for the first time but thrust into it because they were a good engineering manager they were the one of the first employees is actually not going to be able to get that senior PM job that I just described from my point of view maybe it does make sense that the senior PM is paid more but I'm a director I'm like well what are you actually directing you're directing a company that has a product that has yet to exist and find product Market fit and you're not really managing many people and those that are being managed aren't actually that hard to replace now I'm being extreme but I'm saying that sometimes you could take one person and move them easily into One Direction and another and the market tends to be smart about this if someone comes to me and says I have a choice between a senior PM role which seems like a much more Junior title than a director at an earlier Stage Company and I'm like well you got both opportunities my guesses are going to pay something similar actually because both of them require similar skills and the market tends to attract for the same job it tends to pay roughly the same amount what tends to be different is the mix between cash and Equity hey I'm a director at a company that's earlier stage the company's giving me half a percent of the company but they're paying me onethird of what I could make in a later stage environment and I'm like yeah so you would have to believe that you can make up 2/3 in the equity or more and then maybe on a level basis it's roughly the same amount of money but if you just throw out the equity I'm like well I'm never going to make any money on this equity and I'm making a third I'm like well why would you take that job job if you get the other job my articles talk a lot about this sort of title and in fact the table that you're referencing actually shows different companies and different title structures and how the directors at a late stage may be equivalent to a VP that exists at a midstage which might be equivalent to a c-level job at an early stage and then to your point if your goal is to get the biggest title then you would take the biggest risk and you would come in early but maybe that's like a terrible decision for you career-wise but that would be what happens when you title Chase and so that's why title and comp and all these things are so connected and so difficult to kind of use sort of generic kind of guidance around so so before we move on to our last topic like do you have any advice for like negotiating cop especially with all layouts going on and like still pretty tight job market no matter how tight the market is I think that you know you should be always paid fairly if you don't feel like you're paid fairly then you'll end up in a resentment situation and then they'll lead to short ten years so I think the way to get paid fairly is to know your band So based on the level and skill that you have what is the size of problem you know I tend to sort of say Hey you know I can quickly have a conversation with you Peter for example and I'll probably generally know okay you bucket into this level of seniority and perhaps that's a director here at a VP here and perhaps a C Level here whatever it might be and then I know that those pay roughly the same amount maybe that pays like a million bucks and if that's going to pay a million bucks CU you're an elite candidate and I'm like okay well then I'm going to try to make sure that if person gets that offer and they're in that range then I'm going to be pretty happy and if they're getting an offer that's significantly off of that range or their expectations are they should be paid more and because their past job they were paid more then I'm going to basically be nervous and I'm going to say look you know you you you were paid a lot but maybe you were overpaid in the past what about that does that make sense now or you're getting this offer but this doesn't really make sense now of course the question is like how do you compare these early and late stage and you kind of have to do this expected value you have to put some value against the equity and put that together and so knowing your band is sort of the first thing the second kind of pro tip is you know try to get some choices because if you think that you know hey I have my current job this is what I do and this is what I've made and I have this other opportunity I'm trying to decide between stay versus go it's not a great decision better decision is I've talked to a few folks and these are the two or three offers and they may be quite different hey one's a late stage one's a little bit more rich Ry one's a little bit little slower growth but I'm like oh what's the band that you're being seen as becomes very apparent and then you can say well if the Market's saying this that one seems like a good job but it's a compensation outlier so we should be pushing on that but we can make a credible point that hey I've got some other offers and these are the numbers and that's the reason why I'm pushing on it so anytime you get a market sense it validates your ban but it also gives you some negotiation power when people come to me and they say well well I'm just starting process with this company that's really good but I have this offer I'm like you screwed up you Ed things incorrectly you ended up getting offers in series like you should have timed it and had a crescendo and brought them all into the same place and then the third thing I would say a big kind of miss that people make is I think people spend a lot less time thinking about tenure and a lot more time thinking about comp and so what I've said to a lot of cpos is they're sitting there dying on the hill to get that 2 million versus say one a half million and I sort of say look man I think you're probably going to be able to push it and get this comp but I have a real worry that the job that you are turning down that's like 1.2 instead of two that's a three-year gig the one you're in they fire the last two predecessors within two years you're not going to make your second year anniversary which job is going to pay you more well it turns out the other one is going to allow you to have a lot more impact you're not running around with your hair on fire and looking over your back all day long tenure matters and I as I previously said sometimes people think less about hey can I succeed in the role that I've been given and eventually get the impact in year three they're trying to maximize everything biggest job best comp right now go go they show up they're like this job sucks and I'm barely able to survive and a year afterward they're like coming back that is not a great comp chall you know yes you can increase comp it's a terrible career and it actually reduces your income so that's the three things that I'd point out I really like that last Point actually because you know like cpos usually have a pretty short tenure so I think it really matters but even at the lower levels I think like entering at a slightly lower level means that you can exceed your expectations and like get good reputation in the company and Excel as opposed to coming slightly over your head and let's cover the last topic which you being running about recently which is the the shadows of your superpowers maybe just talk about what this means brief as we get into leadership and management and later in career I think that is increasingly hard to find development areas and improve them and there's just a bunch of reasons why not the least of which is they're subtle if they were glaring weaknesses someone would have pointed it out even the less skilled managers would know if you have fundamental Flaws by the time you get to some degree of success most of those things are sort of not apparent and your manager often are not as skilled in managing other Executives or other leaders because the skill of managing managers is actually quite a rare skill and oftentimes you have gotten to a place of success where even the light subtle feedback that's perhaps inconsistent that feedback is easily dismissed and frankly maybe dismissed by your manager and your peers and so what happens is you end up in this challenge where people come to me and they're like I'm really feeling like I've struggled to have the impact that I'm supposed to have at this stage of career they might have had a series of short tenures they might have had trouble getting promoted to say an executive or VP role and there's sort of something that's happening but that's unsaid and it's not that they're bad they're actually successful so they're just sort of plateauing that's where this sort of notion of Shadows of superpowers is emanated from because what you're looking for is some language and some understanding of well where would subtlety exist holding you back that you could not easily find and what it usually would sit is that well what if it was sitting adjacent maybe a side car to a strength area well sometimes when you're strong in something it actually creates a counter you know that lightness has a Darkness to it but that darkness is subtle and it only appears in occasional areas and when brought up they're like well yeah that's because this person is this to have this light but the problem is that those dark those Shadows can hold you back and lead to some very very challenging work but they're so hard to find and work on because every time you try to work on them you're confronted with this bright light of strength and the last thing you want to do is take your strength down in an attempt to try to go after some perceived inconsistent weakness and so you end up getting stuck this is the reason why that article went viral and this is the reason why I think this is such an interesting area of coaching and development let's say you have someone who is you know cares a lot about customers wants to get done you know cares a lot about like Quality Craft and so on and then yeah he's been doing pretty well and then he's getting this feedback about like oh you need to slow down a little bit you to like tie it to a long-term Vision you to bring people along with what you're doing how would you coach this person without knowing the specific scenario I think that the the teup that you're given is pretty strong I think what I'm hearing is this person is precious about the product that they're building they're essentially very focused on the craft they're very focused on what's being delivered to the customer at the degree of detail and at the degree of decisioning that allows them to be opinionated and we've seen many great examples of great products where there's subtlety and detail and just thoughtfulness and usually there's folks like this behind it who just care and breathe products so then the question is well why would that be a challenge and I think that when you have a taste that makes it special you tend to use I a lot as opposed to we a lot right when you use I it's essentially like this is the thing that I want to build because I care about this and that I want to fuse my soul into the product that's there the challenge though is that the goal is not to build the thing that you want the goal is to build the thing that the customer wants and so the first observation is well what happens when you're not quite right then the question is well we need to adjust but the thing is that if you're so focused on being right being accurate to your own thinking you don't have any real space in its ability to essentially say well maybe I had to put something out there but not be so focused on getting it perfect just because I want to get some signal and then the second thing that sort of is very related is that you have to ask yourself is Building Product a single or multiplayer game if you're working in a company and it's not your company the answer is it's a multiplayer game you can't succeed unless the entire team comes along and when it's a multiplayer game the question is would you the product crafter want to work with yourself if you were in the team would you want to be part of that team game and I think that that's the challenge is that you know Founders struggle when they go to the single player they start a company because they want to do it exactly the right way way and then they struggle to scale because they're so into the details at the same time it's so necessary to be opinionated to find product Market fit but they have to shed that that becomes their Shadow when they become successful that prevents their superpower from really adopting you have to make it a team game when you join a company it's not your company it's the customers company it's the founders company it's the executive so you have to make it a partnership but it's this understanding that people have to recognize is what's the cost of being precious and you have to find a balance of gripping the steering wheel a little more Loosely to allow the car to go to a common destination not just a destination you're 100% convinced is right and then swerving to the next and all the team coming along whether they like it or not how do you address this weakness without sacrificing superpower I think that when I've seen it address I think about half of it is understanding the problem of what the goal should be so what I mean by that is you get to a stage where you say I think the goal is not to build the thing that I want I think the goal is to have the team build the thing the customer wants and I have a very important role in that when you kind of come to that conclusion the person maybe leans a little bit back on their superpower and has to essentially find a way to edit their superpower not to say okay great well then I won't say anything it's like no you don't want to pout you don't want to hide your superpower you want to adjust your superpower hey I have a point of view it's a strong point of view but it's loosely held in the process of being loosely held I want it to be influenced but that mindset is oh okay the goal is to build the thing that we should get to and I have the ability to not necessarily win the product decision but implant my opinion when it matters and when you have that mind set you're like oh I can be opinionated but not always be the winner of every decision and then I think that you also sort of go through this idea that hey I think you Landing the product the way you want is actually a tactic not necessarily the goal and then when you build something that works and the team is part of it and they see more success sometimes they get they get feedback they don't get the feedback that hey you're too precious and you make it hard for us to be seen but then the moment they adjust like the first week hey what do other people think maybe we should go a different direction maybe it's okay for us to get some customer feedback and ship this maybe the way we want people come out of the woodwork and say I feel so great about that decision thanks for giving me a chance to hold the ball and you're like huh I had no idea that that was actually important to people to me when they start getting a little bit of positive feedback when they didn't get it before and they start realizing that the goal might not have been the same thing it might have been the goal when they were early earlier in care and not today that's when the Shadows are finally cast in the light I also think like just like being public about your shadows just like hey you know I have strong opinions but you you should disagree with me if that's genuine exactly I think I love your point signaling what you're working on and signaling that your style is maybe not as much in cement as maybe it comes across because sometimes people's language is more maybe tighter than they needs to be and then they to your point I need to signal that it is okay to give me feedback in this Arena permissioning actually can really make a difference in this case awesome ni this is an awesome conversation you know just for my readers where can people find you online yeah for sure well so I you know typically spend time on LinkedIn just because I feel like a lot of the professional audience a lot of the folks looking for career are there so you can easily you know find me there skip podcast and Skip newsletter are going to be areas that I think most of the folks listening to this or watching this are going to get aware of and then obviously I respond to emails going into both of those and then I'm also on on Twitter SLX you know you can DM me there too so these are all areas that you know I love uh to hear from folks and and give me feedback on other topics that you're struggling with even if it's a superpower and a shadow or compensation questions or any of the great great discussions you had and maybe Peter I'll ask you the same question for my listeners and my readers where can they find you and your content and your your substack yeah same same places like LinkedIn and uh X and also my blog is on Creator economy. that's great well I mean I'm so glad we had a chance to connect thanks for doing a little bit of a Q&A with me I think that it'll be helpful to sort of hear some of the content in one episode from some of the past notes as well as you know to get your point of view on some of these really tricky career questions it's really a pleasure to see you again thanks for listening to this skip if today's episode resonated with you please consider leaving a review or sharing it with the people you know who want more out of their career you can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Spotify YouTube or wherever you currently listen you can also follow my newsletter on substack and if you have questions or feedback leave a comment or send me a note on LinkedIn RADS or Twitter I try to get back to each one directly as always I'm Nel and this has been the [Music] skip [Music]

Channel: The Skip

Views: 1,511

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Id: -BcCHEXAVVk

Length: 50min 31sec (3031 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 01 2023