After leaving Sonos in 2016, I meandered a bit. Frankly, my career up to that point had been a bit of a meander. My approach was opportunistic, in that I learned to first watch for opportunities, then to create them, then made moves when the direction felt right. However, the direction itself was never clear, it was a sense or a feeling. I was loosely attuned.
March 19th, I set a direction. It was a test, reallly: what would happen if I added some strategy to the direction, managing my career the same way I would run a Product program?
After all, wasn’t I just my career just a product in a two-sided marketplace? My satisfaction and bank account on one side, and on the other were customers / companies where I provided something valuable and unique at a fair price?
So, I put together a brief, with the following strategic framework:
Here it is. Created March 19 2016, with a few light edits along its journey.
Well, it worked. Perhaps a little too well. Within 7 years, I had hit my target. What I didn’t / couldn’t predict was changes in my personal relationship to work that would evolve during that time.
In 2016, I was a hard-charging careerist Boston bike racer, with a firstborn under a year old.
By 2023, I was a post-pandemic Parent forest creature in the PNW with elderly folks back East.
My identity, priorities, and the people close to me had all evolved. Some in ways that were totally predictable (but not accounted for), and other ways that were completely unforeseeable.
Again, not at all what I could have predicted but totally aligned with the brief.