10 things for makers
I just finished up at my last company, where most of my time was dedicated to leading, educating, coaching, and mentoring other people in tech roles doing product work. On exit, I decided to share the top 10 things that I had learned up to that point and shared when I started at the company. I’ve learned a little bit in my time there, so now I’ve updated them, based on that experience.
As I’ve been doing this kind of work for ~30 years now, I’ve collected together some observations and patterns that hopefully provide a bit of insight into what it is like to operate in the tech industry, specifically in the space of “making” products.
Full disclosure, I am no saint, by any means. I myself have succumbed to ignorance of all of these things in the past, as I grew up in the industry. I now look back and think, I’d really hate to have met myself as I was back then, he was a bit of a dick.
As a proud maker of things, and working with others who make things, I wanted to share the top items on my list. (It is by no means exhaustive):
1. It is a kind of magic
Our job (in product engineering) is literally to create something from nothing.
“Nothing”, being: ideas, impressions, maybe a vision or direction, purpose, and a strong will to create something desirable that improves the lives of others.
It is people who make products, not processes.
Like every other “designer” in the world (as opposed to an “artist”), we have to do our work within constraints (e.g., time, money, resources, tools, markets, legal & ethical frameworks, etc.), and we don’t always have all the things we may have needed to succeed at delivering the outcome we may have wanted to deliver.
Thus, it is hard to succeed at creating the “perfect” thing, or even something that actually works, even if we are given that opportunity — which is often rarely the case.
So, go easy on yourself. It takes many attempts to refine, and get this kind of thing right, for even the smallest detail.
2. Don’t go it alone
You will dramatically increase the chances of building complex things that work for other humans, by working with others in close-knit and highly diverse teams, together.
Going alone feels (to a maker) to be the quickest way to get something done, and it is — to a degree. But it is fraught with all kinds of pitfalls, and omissions you can’t see at the time.
We learned long ago in this industry that to design and make something desirable and viable that has general appeal to a large market, requires diverse thinking, and other things that a single person has plenty too many blindspots to. You only get great results when a bunch of people put their minds and perspectives together, trust each other, and risk something together.
Little Secret: Working with other creative people is a pain in the ass (in general), but that’s only because the alternative, of working on your own, is so much easier. When working alone, you don’t have to trust anyone, nor improve yourself to do that. Working with others requires vulnerability, ontological humility, and self-growth.
All good ingredients your customers want to see you put into the products you make for them.
3. The real hard part
After ~30 years of learning a galaxy of things in a multiverse of technologies, I can emphatically tell you that, hands down, that:
Technology is not the hard part about making digital or physical tech products. Working effectively with other people is by far the hardest part.
And it only gets harder if those people cannot (or don’t want to) work together with you (or perhaps feel incompatible with you in some elitist or hierarchical way).
Instead of wasting your time with people who haven’t yet pushed themselves to learn how to work together correctly, go find people who have done that hard work, who do get that concept, and who are adult enough to welcome and nurture you for your unique contribution and perspective as you are, at your age and stage, to their endeavor, — despite what you bring being different to (or even, in conflict with) them.
Teamwork: is about sacrificing yourself to make the team succeed and bringing strength at times and in places when other teammates cannot.
Team Leadership: Everyone in a team has the chance to lead at one time or another, even novices. So don’t buy the bullshit that a team has a single leader who does all the “leading”. That is not a team.
Nor is a team a group of people who work in isolation from each other on their own things, towards a so-called “common goal”. That is a workgroup. Those people are actually incentivized to compete with each other to do their part only, and they will only collaborate when it suits their individual needs to do so.
4. Stop telling me what to do!
You can’t force anyone to do or to learn anything in this game. All you can do is inspire them to do something different, to try something new, or to try to improve what they are already doing.
Yes, you can try and use manipulation, fear, or coercion to get what you want, but you’ll get a far worse or diluted result, as a result.
Instead, show them what the real problem is, or why something needs to be done, and ask them to help resolve it. Provide the context, not the solution.
If you order someone to do something, you’ve just robbed them of the impetus to accept the responsibility for it being done thourougly, well, or at all.
If you are a parent, and you order your teen to “tidy your room!” becuase you can see rats or mold about to happen in that mess under their bed. Then who is the one going back to the room to check it is done satisfactorily, sometime later?
If that’s you, then who took the responsibility for that thing getting done?
Creative people enjoy the actual pursuit of learning. If they can’t do that, they are soon to be leaving you and your project, company, or leadership.
Creative people want to discover the secrets to producing their magic, themselves. But you can’t tell them how to do that. It is the pursuit of this discovery that they enjoy the most, and it is necessary to teach them the hard lessons they need to learn firsthand.
As a parent, ideally, you want your kids to be kids and to make mistakes through trial and error - and then, learn from them. What you don’t want is: those trials to be so severe that they kill or cause permanent damage to your kids. Fair enough, so you protect and forbid from those things. But most things do not have that potential.
Unless you are an expert (and patient enough) at guiding them from step to step (on a well-defined path), all along, watching the light bulb go off (which some people can do very well). Then, the best you can do is arm them with knowledge of different ways/techniques to try and give them the confidence to try something different safely that leads them to discover the next step to get there.
If you are not getting this kind of inspiration yourself, in your work, then you are probably not learning. It's time to move on.
5. Ideas are overrated
Most of my ideas (and most of yours), no matter how good they are, or how well informed they are, no matter what experience you or I have, no matter how much you know (or think you know), those ideas are probably not going to just work in any market.
Even if your ideas do happen to work (to some degree) in a given market, then the chance that the idea is delivered (as envisioned) fully the first time around is inversely proportional to how confident you were about your idea working in the first place.
Resist ideas taking hold of you, and then being owned by them!
“People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people” — Carl Jung.
Dabble in and entertain all ideas by all means, but understand that making them work well in specific markets takes many focused iterations, driven by actual evidence.
Much of what you think works (or should work), counter-intuitively, does not, and that is usually due to your overconfidence in a specific area.
6. Development?
Product Development and Software Development are different in almost every dimension — other than the fact that they both involve writing software!
I’ve written at length about this apparent “paradox”, both from the business angle and the technical angle.
Programming languages are the only common factor across all software companies — but the business models and contexts that they are used in are always very different. What follows from there on how things are actually done, and by whom, is a direct result of the specific context you are in.
You need to recognize the different contexts and act accordingly.
Programmers (or even worse, ex-programmers) seem to be THE most careless people of all at conflating these contexts. Assuming they are the same. (probably because they see the programming language being the only factor in common).
7. Know what you don't know
There will always be someone better than you at everything you do - learn to live with it.
I used to think that I was a great programmer after my first 10 years as an engineer, until I worked with the engineering excellence teams at Microsoft, and there I immersed myself with some of the best in the world — it blew my mind that there was so much more than what I had encountered, and that I would probably never reach the level that some of those people were operating at.
You quickly learn that there is so much more to learn than what your own experience has shown you, and what extents others may go to that you may not wish to go to. It is your choice to compete against it, learn from it, or quit doing it altogether.
Fortunately for me, I did the hard thing, and kept with it and in my last 20 years I’ve learned things that most programmers will never learn before they give up.
An excellent technique to proceed here is to practice ontological humility and find out what others see that you don’t.
p.s. You can absolutely live and prosper in a world where you are not the world’s best at something. The world is a very large place, why not move to find that out yourself?
8. You are not there yet
You don’t really know much until you are 35 years old.
And, if you haven’t become a parent by that age, then you still have a long way to go in your pursuit of taking responsibility for others, and developing your own humility around others.
Many people accept that your prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until your mid-20s. (sorry to the 21 year olds!)
Many people in tech industry (particularly developers) think that they are operating at a “senior“ level after just five years in the workplace! (whereas, they’ve only just become “advanced beginners”).
Many of those developers then give up working on the tools after 5–10 years and seek higher-paid management roles, or adjacent roles long before they can really learn the secrets of their craft. They may have only just become “competent”, and, as such, maybe frustrated that there really is no perfect and “universally right” way to do anything in their job. That’s very intimidating for them. Then, they seek positions to control others like them, on the same journey. Even worse, many of them hold others back to only what they learned up to that point. What else is there to learn after all? I also talk a lot about how that specific aspect sets back a lot of tech startups, by hiring competent programmers, as underqualified and omnipotent CTOs.
As a result of over-confidence (specifically) in our industry, far too many tech people are “dying in ditches” that they seem to want to defend far too early in their careers (only based on their experiences of what they think is right and wrong).
How are you dealing with the Dunning-Kruger effect in your career?
I’m going to caution you, to pick your battles carefully (before that age and stage in life), after which you can enjoy the uncertainty of knowing that what you think you know or have experienced probably isn't as generally useful as you might think anymore.
9. Learn to learn more
If you want to learn more, then you have to surround yourself with people who will challenge and stretch and teach you more than you could learn yourself. It will hurt, and you will grow.
Try to identify when you are becoming the “expert beginner” and do the hard things to make sure you are not “that person”.
10. Presenting your ideas
If you present anything to any people, remember your first priority is to entertain!
Only, then might you be lucky enough to inform or teach them something new!
