My years in the corporate world gave me ample opportunity to analyze why some people would move up the corporate ladder and others wouldn’t.
The successful ones were not working harder and didn’t necessarily embrace office politics.
But they all have an approach and mindset that helped them stand out as more effective and proactive than the average workers.
The good news is that you can easily apply their recipe to success. And, it has many parallels with how successful product teams are approaching continuous product development.
Let me explain:
The best product teams know how to turn ideas into valuable, feasible, usable, and viable products. They do so by materializing their ideas into models or working prototypes. They share these artifacts with their target audiences. Then, they analyze the response and adjust as needed until they get it right.
It’s reasonable to think you would draw positive results if you could apply this very same approach to the next assignment your manager is giving you. Unfortunately, I’ve observed the following unfortunate sequence of events happen too often:
– Your manager gives you a specific task or project.
– You’re on it, entirely focused, and working as fast as you can.
– You blindly deliver the work to the boss, only to realize that you missed some subtleties and the result is not how she wanted it to be.
– You spend more cycles on rework. Everyone is getting frustrated, and trust is damaged.
– Forget the ladder, you won’t be promoted any time soon.
Instead, the successful ones follow the same steps as the best product teams:
1- Ask the manager plenty of clarifying questions upfront.
2 – Work on the structure of the task at hand first, turning the assignment into an outline or a mockup.
3 – Share such artifacts with the boss and collect her feedback.
4 – Leverage inputs to get a better idea of the scope and provide a more realistic timeline for completion.
5 – Keep the boss apprised as they progress. If things don’t go as planned, they break the bad news early on and develop alternatives.
6 – End up better understanding what the manager expects, and deliver on it while limiting costly rework.
7 – With trust established, the boss will give them more prominent responsibilities. They’re becoming the obvious choice for the next promotion and don’t even need to ask for it!
So, remember this parallel with how the best product teams turn ideas into successful products.
Qualify the ideas thrown at you, test your potential solutions, and iterate.
People around you will soon recognize your value-add, and chances are you’ll stand out, grow and climb up that corporate ladder.