Tag: technology

Before I became a manager of people, I worked with a gentleman whose work style I didn’t really love. He would push the cross-functional team in ways I felt were unnecessary (read: highly public!), drifting from the “praise publicly, critique privately” mindset that I had accepted as a hallmark of a great leader. By the time I left his organization a few years later, my perspective had shifted significantly and I came to appreciate the clarity with which he led.

The team I was on then was very good at getting things done that our business partners asked for. We were shipping and congratulating ourselves for great “say do” ratios and delivered work. But we weren’t great at connecting that back to the business value — and that’s where there was a tremendous disconnect.

I’ve been doing a lot of reminiscing lately — trying to find parallels between what’s happening in the world today and what I’ve lived through. As they say, those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it.

And recently, with all the hype around AI, I’m reminded of feelings I felt early on in my career as a Web Developer. But, let’s start at the beginning. I knew I wanted to work on websites way before I took a class on them. I taught myself how to do basic HTML / CSS and even started making websites for local bands in high school as a very minor side hustle.

When I took CS 201 (building your own compiler – often a make or break for CS majors vs folks who would instead take it as a minor), our professor joked about how this class was likely irrelevant for many of us. I knew that was true for me so, once I had the opportunity to take electives, I packed in as many courses as I possibly could to learn the ins-and-outs of web development. In doing so I picked up Javascript, Perl, Shell Scripting and really started to understand how the underpinnings of that customer experience was served from a technical perspective.

Before YouTube shorts and Instagram reels had a stranglehold on attention on the internet, there were websites we’d go to that would feature animated comedy shorts (think Homestar Runner). Most of these were built using a scripting language called “ActionScript” and you had to use a tool called Flash by a company called MacroMedia. And I remember feeling woefully inadequate that I hadn’t mastered “Flash” as we’d refer to it as developers. I had initially worried that the entire internet would turn into these experiences and I just couldn’t cut it.

I’ve been having trouble even starting to write about this topic because it’s such an interesting topic and something I’ve learned quite a bit about over the years — and continue to grow and learn about as I take on new teams!

As I’ve advanced in my career, I’ve gone from feeling like I need to learn every new technology or programming language (and getting overwhelmed and feeling inferior by the impossible feat) to realizing it’s impossible to know everything well. In the spirit of ruthless prioritization, I have to prioritize what it is I choose to know deeply (where I get in the weeds) and what I choose to only know at a surface level (usually relying on or deferring to the expertise of someone else who is in the weeds).

This approach to staying on the surface works really well when you can to defer to a colleague who you respect as an expert on their work (e.g. I understand we use XYZ technology but for any additional detail, talk to my colleague Jane in Engineering). And often times, a colleague will see this for what it is: trust that you will mind your own business because they’ve got their area under control!

It gets much more difficult when you need to do this with people who might report directly into you. Stay at surface and don’t know enough about their work? You seem out of touch (and isn’t it their job to “manage up” anyway?). Get in the weeds about everything they are working on? Now you are the dreaded micro-manager.

So how do you decide when to go deeper? There are tactics I’ve employed over the years that can help.