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Letters to a Young Manager


What does success look like?, #602
LTYM >

Please note that this letter is in-process; the following are my notes

Dear Adam,
***
"Well, that's the question we would always ask, or I would always ask in business is what does success look like? Have we thought about, so a year from now, what would have had to have happened? That we would break open the champagne and celebrate or feel as if we had arrived or accomplished that?" --Post-Bench, F2023, p. 93

" I think what we want to do and what I'd like everybody to be thinking of is working from the endpoint backwards." --D4G S2023b, p. 146

"Why don't you relate how you're sizing project up? Bringing it to closure? What do you think? Maybe it's good to start at the endpoint: What do you think success looks like?" --D4G, F2022, p. 5

"What does success look like? So when you give somebody an assignment, it's useful to tell them, here's what success looks like. So if you bring me back this report that describes these three things that's successful."

"...That’s the type of discovery and the discovery mindset that a UX person has to have, thinking, I need to get inside the head of the users. And the best way to get inside the head of the users is to ask them and to listen. So that's to me a UX one-on-one. And so you can even pose the question, what do you think successful UX looks like? And have her describe back to you that, and if she doesn't get that, you might have the wrong person."

"If people feel like more and more things are going well and they feel like there's more and more success around them. There's the phenomenon of success breeds success. Success engenders or makes everything more successful. It's like the snowball I think we talked about last time, if you start off with a melon-sized snowball and you’re rolling it down the hill, it gets bigger as more and more snow sticks; the snowball gets bigger and bigger and bigger and it goes faster and faster and it has more energy, right? That’s building momentum. And that's something that as your team feels as if they're succeeding more and more, they will generate more success. Nothing succeeds like success. That sounds almost like a tautology, but it's an important concept. If people feel like winners, they will win. Notice that's different than saying well if they just would win more they'll really feel like winners. No, if people feel like winners, they will win. It sort of turns that around."

"So it's like nothing succeeds like success that's the same. Success is like a big snowball and on the mountains, right, and as it rolls down it gains momentum and speed and mass. And that's what success is like. It just keeps, what we call, snowballing. And it comes from that image of the snowball getting bigger and bigger and faster and faster as it goes down the hill."

" you can ask each person on the management team to prepare a presentation about what it is they do.
...If you push them to think, what do they need from their peers? What do they give to their peers? What do they need from their team, what do they give to their team, and what does success look like? I always like that question. Can they each describe what success looks like?"

--Richard, p. 29-30, 52, 84, 174
***
Sincerely yours,
Ed
________________________

References...

Takeaways:

An objective is not complete until it has a success vision

Discussion Questions:


For Further Reading:





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