In 2012, Google was
named by Fortune as the Best Company to Work For and hired around 8,067 Googlers
that year. Also according to the data from Bureau of Labor Statistics, an
average employee stays at each of his or her jobs for 4.4 years and the tenure of the youngest
employees is about 2.2 years. With such intense competition, how do you make yourself
noticeable and make sure you are taking the right steps to a fruitful career as
a new employee?
All your peers will
probably get the same level of training and have access to similar resources
during their initial days. The thing that depends on luck and might be beyond
your control is being assigned to a highly visible project. But as a new
employee, you will mostly not be invited to those discussions. In one of my
earlier roles, my colleague and I started around the same time, but he ended up
getting assigned to a development team that had 5 engineers. In the next 6
months, some folks quit while some were laid-off and the company acquired a new
technology. He was given the onus of driving this integration and he seemed to
be very happy. But around a year after that, the product was moved into
sustaining and he eventually quit. Such a change may not be completely in your
hands, however some might argue that he should have seen this coming.
Regardless of the debate,
if the above situation was or was not in your control, how should you position
yourself to differentiate your capabilities from others? Here are some steps
that I have taken and have also seen some good performers take in their
careers:
1.
Set
1-1s with important stakeholders: At a startup, during my first 90 days, I made it a part
of my learning curve to set up 30 min 1-1s with the folks that I would be
working with. My role was that of a Product Marketing Lead and hence I set up
meetings with not only my immediate Product Managers, but also with the
Directors and VP of Product management. The other people included – the Sales
VP, Support Director, Solution Architect and the Engineering VP. As a new
employee, setting these introductory meetings can help you to learn more about
your stakeholders and also tell them more about you. This way you know more
about people’s working styles and skill sets before you actually end up working
with them. It also helps to avoid surprises and can lay the foundation of a
strong working relationship. Use these meetings to know more about their
previous experiences, tell them about yours, ask them what is their highest
priority and how can you help.
2.
Research
on the existing problems and come up with a proposal to improve: My first 90 days were to enable
sales and also manage customer relationships along with thought-leadership
initiatives. Most of my peers did the same for their product lines. In
order to gain credibility, differentiate my capabilities and show my technical
prowess, I set up calls with the support team and created a sample set of
customer support tickets on zendesk. These tickets were bucketed into top 15
themes, with the customer severity level and a dollar amount assigned to it -
the amount of money our customers were losing due to these issues. Then I sat
down with the solution architect and the support engineers to come up with
potential solutions to these issues. Once I had my data, I presented this to
the VP of product management and the VP of engineering. The product roadmap
was modified to incorporate this and it helped to differentiate me from the
rest of my team.
3.
Market
trends and customer analysis: One of the initiatives that came from the CEO was to
create cross-selling opportunities and stop re-inventing the wheel for similar
customer problems. The approach I took here was to analyze our salesforce data
and come up with industry verticals and map them to existing customer use
cases. I then set up meetings with the product manager and the solution
architect to brainstorm more use cases that were likely to be implemented in
that vertical and the Total Available Market (TAM) for that use case. This
proposal was presented to the C-level executives to show the potential
opportunity (revenues could go up by 40%) and was followed by demand gen
campaigns and sales enablement efforts. Sales managers could now go back to
their existing accounts and up-sell or use this approach with their new
accounts. However, these efforts would not have succeeded without supporting
collateral such as whitepapers, technical solution guides, webinars, email
marketing, etc.
4.
Thought-leadership:
Almost
all companies have their own blogs. However, the thing that adds
credibility is if someone else talks about your product or strategy. When I
joined Cisco, we were working on a new product release and I was doing
everything from a traditional launch perspective. However, to get wider
publicity, I started looking at Network World. One of our distinguished engineers
was a blogger there. I wrote a blog providing technical details on the
product and he then published it here.
Here is an interesting article and video that talks about similar
initiatives that one can undertake to set themselves apart from the crowd.
Ending this blog with a
quote from Aristotle "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is
not an act, but a habit.”
I hope these tips will help
you during the first 3 months at your new company and define your path to
success. Feel free to share your experiences in the comments section below.
Good Luck!
Thanks,
Almitra
Karnik
