Julie Zhuo: recommendation

Transcript context

…And along those lines, it sounds like, oh, sure, I can design my life and design my role. But what I find is if you at least, first of all, know what you'd love and ideally do, and then at least mention that to your manager, it often is a lot more possible than you think. A hundred percent. I think it's so important to be like, we often also have this mental model, like, oh, our managers are a judge and they're going to judge me on whether or not I got it. I did well, I should get a promotion. I should be fired. So there's this sometimes fear that people have, but I think in the very best relationships, the manager is like a guide. It's like, look, the manager has a job. And if you understand your manager's job, which is how to get outcomes, better outcomes from the team. And also you understand what exactly would your manager consider success for the team? It also makes it easier for you to then be like, oh, well, if I do this project, then that clearly seems like it's very direct path to creating value for the team. And that also is a kind of project that suits my skills. It's something I'm excited about. Like you should suggest that to your manager. But the other is true, right? So you would know that if you actually asked your manager, what is your job and what do you consider success to be? And what is your greatest hopes and dreams? And then you might be able to help your own career and yourself because you know that context. And conversely, if you say, hey, manager, these are my hopes and dreams. This is what I think I'm good at. I really want to get better at this skill. I really want to get that VP promotion, but I don't know what it entails. Can you tell me? What does it take? That's a really wonderful conversation as well because then you'll get all of that context. And then you can actually... decide whether you want to do it or not and if you want to then ask your manager for help okay if you see opportunities that are going to help me become a better presenter or increase my communication please tell me even better if you have feedback for me about communication i want to hear it because that's what's going to help me grow in this particular skill And so it becomes this collaborative relationship much more so than this almost like adversarial, like I'm trying to get you to give me a promotion and you're trying to get me to like work harder. Like it's, yeah, like that is not a very good vibe. It reminds me of a guest post by Ethan Evans that I'll link to that has a really good framework for how to actually do exactly what you're talking about called the magic loop, where it's kind of a framework for figuring out what to work on and how to help your manager see you're capable of stuff and earn that trust. this episode is brought to you by posthog the product platform your engineers actually want to use posthog has all the tools that founders developers and product teams need like product analytics web analytics session replays heat maps experimentation surveys llm observability air tracking and more everything posthog offers comes with a generous free tier that resets every month more than 90 of customers use posthog for free you are gonna love working with a team this transparent and technical You'll see engineers landing pull requests for your issues, and their support team provides code-level assistance when things get tricky. PostHog lets you have all your data in one place. Beyond analytics events, their data warehouse enables you to sync data from your Postgres database, Stripe, HubSpot, S3, and many more sources. Finally, their new AI product analyst, MaxAI, helps you get further, faster. Get help building complex queries and setting up your account with an expert who's always standing by. Sign up today for free at posthog.com slash Lenny and make sure to tell them Lenny sent you. That's posthog.com slash Lenny. So along the lines of timeless manager, especially new manager advice, you've shared a bunch. Is there anything else that you think is really important, really interesting, valuable?…

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