Sogol Fathian

Author: sogolf

  • Is it all or nothing really?

    I’m watching a series of lectures on how to start a Start Up and on topic of ‘Culture and Hiring’ two themes keep coming up again and again. Take a look yourself (I’m particularly intrigued by min 22:01 onward)

    and this one (again min 17:57 onward)

    So as I understand it the emphasis are:

    • In order to have a successful start-up, founders need to go through a gruelling hiring process and select only die-hard fan. These chosen people are so dedicated that when the time comes to choose between work and seeing their family or work and their health, (you guessed it) they choose work!!
    • Hire super-hero! (those with “ninja” skill-set, “rock star” caliber, “gurus” ). Hire best of the breed, world-class people. Those who come on the job, ready to solve only hard problems.

    I may be naive but I just don’t get it. Maybe it’s because I’m a mom to a 3-year old so it’s incomprehensible to me to choose between a working on a fantastic job in startup or corporate world and not seeing my daughter for 3 years! If you have started a family, in my book there are very few jobs that worth this type of sacrifice (I would seriously consider if I was offered to be an astronaut or a researcher working on a cure for Ebola!) but for every thing else the answer is plain and simple: NO!! If asked whether or not I accept the best opportunity in Airbnb on my last year of life (or even last 10 years of my life) the answer it: Go f#$@ yourself!! What type of flawed question is this? to prove that I have buy-in to Airbnb?

    Why is the picture is always painted as black and white? Why the narrative is not some thing like I can work in a company like Basecamp have a great impact and also enjoy spending time my family?? Why can’t I work somewhere like Balsamiq without being a ninja, rockstar or a unicorn for that matter??!

    I’m all for hiring passionate and hardworking people but I also believe not every one needs to be a super star from and solve hard problem. Set up reasonable expectation and give people room to grow, and you’ll be amazed how ordinary people can change the world.

  • Why do you need to be a hands-on Product Manager?

    Product Management is a hybrid role and depending on where you work, your list of responsibilities vary. You need to have different skill-set to be able to build a product that is valuable, usable and feasible. Also, product manager responsibilities comes from working with multiple teams and within the frame-work of product development. So it’s hard to showcase product manager abilities in a stand alone context. What I mean by that is, a software developer has working code and a designer has portfolio to show for but what is a concrete output of a Product Manager?

    This is why it’s so important to be a hands-on in multiple aspects of the job, not only to demonstrate your skills in a practical way but able to remove roadblock you encounter effectively and efficiently.

    If you are working in Information Technology like I do, your day-to-day responsibilities change depending on which phase of software development life cycle you’re at. In early phase of software development life cycle you need to work effectively with multiple stakeholders but in order to do that you need to be 1) knowledgeable about product/market fit 2) opinionated about what needs to be built 3) be able to justify your opinion.

    If you are working with developers you need to speak their language and be able to understand what they’re saying and what are the implications of their proposal’s for the product will be. Are you able to understand and verify what is said? The same is true when you’re working with designers. When I first started, I worked with a designer who would get on implementing her ideas and I always justified that approach by thinking she’s the expert in her field and I should trust that judgment. I didn’t know about principles of user experience design nor did I about the importance of building customer persona before jumping right in to designing stuff. Now at least I can have an effective  discussion with UI/UX designer and ask questions on why the interface needs to be the way s/he emphasizes to be.

    When time is short and you need to get a product released in a tight deadline, there are so many little things to do. It’s so much more efficient to take on these tasks and free up experts (designers, developers) time to do the heavy lifting. Can you jump in as the copy-writer to change that campaign copy for the last time before it goes out, do you have some Photoshop skills tweak the layout, and write the code for the script to get the data you really want but Business Intelligence team doesn’t have time to do it now?

    All this hands-on experience becomes invaluable if you want to build your own business.  Do you have what it takes to get to that first MVP?

  • Procrastination

    ahh-procrastination

    Procrastination sums up the idea of putting off doing some thing that you need to do. We all are guilty of procrastinating to some extent but some people (including me) are really awful at it. I confess that I’ve had instances of putting the work off and making excuses to the point that looking at the item on my to-do list or even thinking about it hurts (ouch!). Later on, once the morbid task is done I think why on-earth I didn’t get rid of it faster?

    So I know I have to change my attitude about Procrastination. Here are things I’ve learned so far:

    Procrastination is a “keystone habit” which means that changing this habit will have a cascading effect on changing other habits in your life. I learned this from a book called as “Power of Habit“, a very well written with a fascinating topic by Pulitzer prize-winning Charles Duhigg.

    Procrastination is specially a bad habit to have if you’re trying to learn new and difficult subjects. When you put off of doing the coursework required to be done in a week and you cram it in a day, you will not learn as much and forget the concepts. It explains that our brain learns far more effective when we practice and study every day in small chunks over spending a whole day and night on the subject. This one I learned from another book called “A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)“. There is a great course on Coursera on how to learn subject as well.

    Procrastination is bad but “Creative Procrastination” is good!! This basically means putting off things temporarily or permanently when you decided that they’re not important to do. This last one is from Brian Tracy’s “Eat that Frog” book. This one is specially becomes important when you start identifying your goals. Overtime, it becomes evident what are the important task that worth spending time on and what are not. Brian’s book is very easy to read and gave me some good tactics but ultimately I finished it wanting more.

    Now I’m reading “168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think” which delves on the exact same topic of figuring out your goals, finding your core competencies and spending your time only on those. It’s much more elaborate, relatable and provides a lot of interesting context and statistic to justify that I need to take control of my time.

    Finally, Eric Barker has this fantastic blog post that talks about 4 research-backed methods for beating procrastination. My take away: “The Secret To Good Habits Is Eating Chocolate With Friends!”

    Obviously I knew a lot of these things all along but acknowledging explicitly makes me motivated to write down my goals, make plans for them and then track my time to see how I’m doing. I write more when I make a good progress worth sharing again! Next post will be about the need to for being a hands-on product manager 🙂

  • Time Management

    Recently I’ve become very interested in topic Time Management. It all started with Randy Pausch fantastic video which I stumbled upon a few years. It you haven’t watch it you must:

    Although a cliché, time is really all we have and if we want to accomplish ideas we dream of, we have to make time for them.  I noticed that if I don’t manage my time, it’s so easy let the ‘busy-ness’ of daily life brush aside all the stuff that I want to do. I love this quote from him:

    You dont find time for important things, you make it

    I made a few progresses in the following fronts:

    • Managing email: I’m not at in-box zero level but on most days all emails in my inbox can fit above the fold
    • Reading, learning about time management: I read “Eat that Frog” and I’m reading 168 Hours. Both are filled with practical techniques on how to focus on what matters.
    • Using Pomodoro: I started to practice using pomodoro and it definitely helps me reduce frequency of interruptions and increase my focus. But I still haven’t mastered it yet.

    And these are changes that I’m tracking in my daily routine:

    I delve deeper into this very interesting and relevant topic again soon.