The Single Piece of Advice that You need to Grow Professionally

Do you want to advance in your career? Silly question - Yes. All of us want to advance in our careers. We all have read scores of articles and books on the topic and this is, indeed, one of the most important category of Self Help books outside of may be “How to Get Rich”.

There is ton of advice available to help you grow fast in your career boiling down to some of the below mentioned popular pieces of advice -

• Get a good mentor

• Work Hard

• Work Smart

• Ta da ta da ta da

I have been following a number of people I admire - on Twitter and there seems to one thing common to all of them.

All of the wildly successful folks got to ride on a rocket ship. I am, defining a Rocket ship as a company which ended up growing multiple times Year on Year for a lot of years.

Think of Facebook of 2006, Amazon of 1995, PayPal of 1999 and closer home - Flipkart of 2009.

To give you some examples:

These are Some of the best Product people globally -

Lenny Rachitsky - Lenny was one of the first employees in Airbnb’s Growth team

Shishir Mehrotra - Grew Youtube after its acquisition by Google

Shreyas Doshi - First PM at Stripe (Worked at Twitter, Google and Yahoo before that)

Julie Zhuo - First Design Intern at Facebook

All of them are wildly successful and can add immense value to any business. They have one thing is common and which is that all of them got to ride a rocket ship early in their career. They bet their careers on fledgling companies by identifying that they are rocketships/or by luck.

Why is riding a rocket ship important

Any business is basically a set of hypothesis which are tested by the executive team by shipping product in the market.

The circle of testing the hypothesis is

1) Create a hypothesis 2) Build product to test the hypothesis 3) Ship the product to the market 4) Get User Feedback 5) Create another Hypothesis

Here, the most valuable part of the exercise is getting User Feedback and altering your hypothesis basis that.

Lets take a concrete example: I am thinking about starting a Fitness blog and the Hypothesis is that “A lot of 18-24 year old boys are interested in Fitness and want advice for the same” (Step 1). I launch the blog with great content (Step 2). I distribute it through Fitness Influencers to their followers (Step 3). I see a lot of users are frequenting the posts related to Body Building (Step 4). I change my hypothesis to “A lot of 18-24 year old users who are following fitness influencers on Instagram are interested in Body Building” (Step 5). Now, my content strategy is going to reflect the new hypothesis as we are going to double down on this sub segment of the whole Fitness market.

Now, when you are on a rocket ship - You are testing tens of such hypothesis and getting tons of user feedback on the same to create new hypothesis.

This tight and fast paced feedback loop from the users is available only in high growth companies. Why not in big companies - you may ask (who have tons of users) - They are not testing a new hypothesis every day. They select one hypothesis and spend months on testing the same hypothesis since they can afford to be slow.

Why not low growth companies - They are not able to get User Feedback.

So - we need all these factors to be working simultaneously -

1. Willingness to test a lot of hypothesis in a short duration of time

2. Generating statistically significant user feedback on the hypothesis

3. Willingness to work on the user feedback to alter the current hypothesis/create new hypothesis

Any one who is working on a high growth company gets to see this loop in action hundreds of times and is privy to the user feedback. She, therefore, understands

1. Customer needs/idiosyncrasies at a deep level

2. The solutions which worked or did not work

3. Why did particular solutions work or did not work

And this is all that matters in your career. Your ability to empathise with the customer needs and your ability to give them a solution to their problems. Riding a rocket ship for a year can potentially give you life learnings worth decades of learning while riding a bullock cart.

So go ahead to ride the next rocket ship which is just around the corner but mind you - it is looking like a bullock cart right now so go look under the hood.

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