Whose results are you delivering?
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“I am confused by the peer feedbacks I received from last year.” Tommy seemed frustrated, “I wonder if you could help me interpret them.”
“Sure thing!” I said, “What are you growth areas?” I asked.
“Dive Deep, Biased for Action and Deliver Results.” Tommy sighed, “Several feedbacks pointed out I needed to improve my communication.”
“Any particular situation you can think of that made your peers think you need to improve in those areas?” I asked.
“I guess it was the matrix project.” Tommy said thoughtfully, “I wanted to deliver a complete matrix. There were many corner cases I needed to consider. But the feedbacks said I should have delivered it earlier. I don’t understand, don’t we want to deliver highest standards products?”
“Yes, these leadership principles are purposely designed to have tensions between each other. Engineering is the art of balance conflicting forces into a harmony.” I said, “do you think an incomplete matrix will be useful to your customers?”
“Yeah I suppose.” Tommy said, “Most of customers don’t care about the corner cases.”
“There you go. All these leadership principles are toward one end goal: Deliver Results - aka values to customers. Suppose your customers want you to build a shelter for them to get through cold nights, but you spend a year to deliver a palace for them - it has higher standards for sure, would your customers by happy?” I asked.
“No. The palace is not what they asked for, and they probably won’t be able to afford it.”Tommy said.
“Yeah. The complete matrix might be that palace. Did you talk to your customers to find out if a incomplete matrix would be enough to get them going?” I asked.
“No. I was just focusing on designing a complete matrix solution ... ” Tommy answered, “I get it now. But I have another question: if we always cut corners like this, is that bad for customer value in long term? what about our career development?”
“Good question.” I thought for a moment, “If we constantly cut corners and accumulate tech debts, eventually we will deliver less values to customers. And we won’t be proud of our work. But I think in your case, it is more about delivering in incremental milestones and early customer values. You need hyper communication to get inputs from your stakeholders and get the optimal outcome - short term and long term.
Now career development and business goals are related but not the same. In career goals you want to build skills and experience, in business goals you want to deliver the results customers want.”
“I see.” Tommy’s spirit was lifted now, “We deliver results that customers want, by balancing leadership principles, by communicating to customers and stakeholders timely and effectively. And through these engineering practices, we develop our career skills and experiences.”
“You got it.” I said, “It is the Yin and Yang of delivering results!”