Penny

Good post!

I think there is a lot that can be said about career choices that isn’t often considered by people on their first, second or third jobs. When you specialise in an area (analytics, UX, whatever…) you get engrossed in what you are doing and the way things are moving forward and it’s often hard to take a step back and see the wood from the trees. Also (small plug!) it’s rare that you get a good manager – more on this here: http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/10/10/experienced-designers-choose-your-next-manager/

I think Avinash makes a very good point about becoming a team leader/manager. In most corporate companies there is very little scope to go up the ranks *without* getting into managing people somehow. You have to be *very* smart and sit with all the strategy MBA management consultancy types to avoid it, in my experience. So acquiring and learning as much as you can about whether you think managing people is ‘for you’ is very wise in my book. If you don’t think you would enjoy it, then consider where you think you’ll most enjoy yourself (life’s not just about money obviously!)

The other set of skills that I think are very important are those of consulting.
By this I mean building positive working relationships, probing effectively to find underlying needs and objectives, facilitating discussion and driving a consensus, aligning needs with a set of solution options, presenting ideas powerfully and coherently. Very few people I’ve met can do this stuff really well, even quite senior managers, and I view this stuff as essential to career development even if you’re not cut out for management.

These two elements – managing people and consulting – I think are my favourite bits of my job. They are always frantic, sometimes exciting and often frustrating. But when they go well they are thankfully colossally rewarding.

Cheers
DJ

This latest post struck a particular cord. Your point is clearly valid and you make the case for producing key insights in the good times as well as the bad really well. It got me thinking that this point can be made wider than simply in the web analytics space.

How often have you seen a post project review taking place when a project or initiative has not achieved the outcomes that was planned or expected? Everyone likes to get involved and has an opinion when reviewing why an employee has been underperforming. What went wrong? Why? and What can we do differently to hire better next time? etc are all valid questions. BUT, how often t
do you see a project review when quality time is spent understanding why the project was a success and what contributed to this? If more time was spent in organisations reviewing and measuring what is happening when things are going well then quality insights might be gleaned that ensure there is less fixing (and analysis) to do when things don’t go as as planned. You could say it’s the difference between being proactive and reactive and from where I’m sitting I don’t see many reactive organisations creating much shareholder value these days…

IMHO of course

OW

When clients send you excel spreadsheets, you open it fairly quickly; especially when they mark the email as urgent. But when a colleague emails me with a spreadsheet, you are absolutely correct: I make sure that is at the bottom of my priority list. Hmm, I just remembered something: I emailed my colleagues recently with an excel spreadsheet. No wonder they didn’t reply yet!

Jing is a great system for recording these, since it enforces a 5 minute limit. It used to be 2 minutes, which was an even better discipline.

Jing also allows you to upload to screencast.com, where they can be password protected. You wouldn’t want to upload these to YouTube!

I visited your site to see if there were any new posts and I assume others have done the same. Haven’t seen anything this April, write something! You know you have my support.

Happy Easter.

Rafi