Simple things to do well

There's a lot of skills to learn for your job that may be hard won. Learning how to have difficult conversations and be a mediator, new management techniques or some sophisticated ways of project planning. There are also some things I've found that are relatively simple that I've not seen many people do, but have a pretty outsized impact on how effective you can be and how effective other people may find you.

Taking notes in meetings

Pretty straightforward - wouldn't it be nice to have a summary of what went on during a meeting? Both to refer back to, or to share out to people who weren't there? Trying to work asynchronously while keeping a high degree of context and shared understanding among the team is pretty much the golden goose to unlocking parallel work in your team and getting them to be even more effective without working more hours.

I've mostly just made up how to take notes as I've gone along, but this seems like a pretty good place to start if you're trying to learn. Generally speaking my technique is to try and stick to what was actually said and provide some light organizing and grouping along the way. Make note of action items. Share it out after. That's it!

Moving things along

Despite your best project management efforts, sometimes it may just be unclear what the next step for some project may be.

Was it Person A's responsibility to reach out to someone? Are we stuck waiting for Person B to read a doc and approve it? Perhaps Vendor C went on PTO and forgot about us when they came back?

It doesn't matter! Just move it along. Send that email, ask for an update on Slack, set up a meeting time for all involved parties to force them to a decision if they're not doing their part on responding to a review request or something along those lines. Doesn't have to be too fancy or well thought out, just move it along.

Putting yourself out there, reaching out to people

This is a bit of a catch all, but just generally wherever you might feel a bit unsure about these types of things listed here - you should just do it. I've never really seen it go wrong beyond getting "no" as an answer.

• Setting up intro meetings for new people when you join a new company just to get to know them
  • Especially in the remote world you have to be quite deliberate about building these relationships!
  • It's a huge speedup to building a ton of context about the company and how it operates
  • Make relationships up front that you might never know you would have needed later on in your time there
• Reach out to outside people or teams at companies you find are compelling in your industry and ask to learn from them or compare notes
  • I've used this at jobs where we were significantly underfunded compared to companies similar to ours who were years ahead of us in some non-differentiating technology and they were very willing to share their learnings. This saved us months if not years of time from being able to avoid the mistakes they'd already encountered
  • I've made several connections with leaders or otherwise influential people in my industry that I can use to extend my network or use for referrals later
• Vendor management
  • Get at least 2-3 quotes for anything that you can get from multiple vendors
    • Not doing this is an invitation to be paying terrible prices over time, even if you believe your vendor is "good" and has your best interests at heart. They may just be getting poor pricing at wholesale for something like hardware and they/you would never know it otherwise
    • At worst you may be able to negotiate better for added benefits, things like more favorable payment terms or contract lengths, better support offerings, solutions engineering credits, etc.
  • Ask for discounts, and make vendors negotiate against each other
    • Pretty much every price is negotiable, sales people want to make the sale, and there's usually plenty of margin especially in SaaS
    • Get creative - can you offer something like a co-marketing agreement in exchange for discounts or more favorable terms? Your company may be very willing to slap their name on a case study if it means saving $100k a year and may be mutually beneficial
  • I don't think this is too difficult to do, you just have to be persistent and willing to put in some effort and to allow yourself to get a little uncomfortable by being more demanding and direct with people than you might otherwise be

That's it! I'd love to hear what you think and if you end up being able to put these to use.