Laura Schaffer: recommendation

Transcript context

…So you have this new exciting role and I thought it'd be fun to start to chat about career growth and just how you think about career growth. I know you have a framework of how you think about your own career growth and clearly it's worked out, so I'm curious to hear about it and see how it could be helpful to folks that are listening. So yeah, can you just tell us about how you think about career growth? Career growth is definitely not a straight lineup, but there's definitely some frameworks and methods that have worked really well for me. And I think to dive into it, it's first good to just talk about the one that I most typically see people use to try to grow their career and why that can be a little problematic, which is that I see most people try to work really hard the job that they have within the role that they have at a company. Do whatever you can to grow there, show your manager all these things. I see people keep spreadsheets, it wins. So it can come up with performance reviews. Maybe you try to get better advocating for yourself, maybe try to get peers to notice or your manager's peers. And that's all good. It's all stuff. But the problem with it is that you're limited to what your manager's ability is to advocate for you, to promote you. And you're also limited by the explicit trajectory of your role at that company and where the there's room for that or not at the company. And then often that perception can sometimes be a little bit in contrast to what your perception is. And also other things that happen, your manager leaves and then you have to restart with someone else. So the method that I use tries to take that power back a little bit. And something that I learned really early on in my career, I was very lucky to learn by accident, was at a company called Bandwidth, which is my first real job. And Bandwidth is now a public company and they've done all kinds of crazy amazing things. But I joined when it was just 50 people and I actually joined in sales and I was just hungry to make it succeed and grow and bright eyes and everything, first real job. But I realized after a few months of being in sales that I was often repeating the same thing over again, using the same thing to sell over and over again. And it's like, gosh, this isn't ideal for the customer because [inaudible 00:08:04] call me and ask these questions and get these answers and all this stuff. And it's not ideal for the company because they're paying commission on this every time. That's not going to be efficient for our growth. And because we were small, I was able to catch our GM and I was just like, "Hey, I've noticed this pattern where I'm repeating things over and over again and they're asking the same thing. I think we should put that online. I think we should make that available so they can just see it and then buy it," because we had an online checkout process. And I was expecting him to be like, "Oh, well, I know it's important but for this [inaudible 00:08:46] another, we need to do it this way, and obviously you've thought all about it." And thinking, "Oh, I'm going to come in this new person, he's just going to help me understand what I'm missing here." There's a little bit of that that I was expecting. And he goes, "Wait a minute, tell me more about that. What do you mean?" is new person, he's just going to help me understand what I'm missing here." There's a little bit of that that I was expecting. And he goes, "Wait a minute, tell me more about that. What do you mean?" And by the end of the conversation he was like, "Hey, why don't you go do that? Why don't you go build that experience? Why don't you put that stuff in a self-serve flow?" And we called it e-commerce manager and it was like got a growth before this growth, this is like 2010. And that moved me into a totally new position. And the main learning that I had from that was, which really took life at Twilio and absolutely worked for me there and I'm happy to talk about that too. But the core that learning was, your executive team and executive teams at companies are often very sharp, but the nature of their day-to-day just does not link them with customers. And that means that over time, especially as a company grows, they often lose access to some of the best insights and in the heartbeat of the people who they're providing value to in contrast to folks that are closer to the problem. And so that means that your superpower is in really pulling those insights in and bringing them to life, staying close to the customer. There's not a single leader or executive that isn't going to be stoked to hear about valuable customer insights that highlight problems they might not be seeing. And there's a lot of those. So especially when they align to North Star metrics, those ones are the powerful ones. That was the way that I grew my career at Phil and I'm happy to share that journey too.…

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