A long time ago, I believed that merely doing great work was sufficient to get promoted, and that it was my manager\u2019s job to not only know that I was doing great work but also to ensure that I got promoted for it. This is not true. As your career advances, and this is doubly true when you\u2019re leading a team, the more that your success is measured in terms of others\u2019 perceptions of you. You cannot wait for recognition to come to you. You have to tell others why you deserve recognition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I know that this is not easy. It\u2019s hard to know where to start. It\u2019s sometimes hard to know when you\u2019re being successful. It feels like getting people to understand the impact of your great work is taking away from you being able to do more great work. Not being able to concentrate on doing more great work makes you worry that you really are<\/em> selling snake oil. But that\u2019s not true. What you\u2019re doing is enabling people to discover your great work and build on top of it. Help them understand why it\u2019s great. Help them understand how it contributes to them doing great work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In user experience, we know that one of the common challenges of any product or service is discoverability. I\u2019ve experienced this many times. You get user feedback that says that the one way that you could make your product or service better is to do this thing really awesome. \u201cBut it\u2019s already there! I spent months<\/em> delivering that feature!\u201d Not only is your user frustrated that they think they can\u2019t do what they want to do, but also you\u2019re frustrated that you spent all that time and energy developing the very feature that they need and they\u2019re not actually using it. You\u2019ve got a discoverability problem. You\u2019ve got to figure out how to fix it so that your engineering effort isn\u2019t wasted and your user can accomplish what they want to do. Fix your discoverability problem, and you\u2019ll fix two different frustrations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And it\u2019s the same with your great work. It\u2019s not enough to do great work. You\u2019ve got to make it possible for other people to discover your great work, to understand it and how it\u2019s a contribution, to be able to build on it. Don\u2019t think of the time that you spend changing perceptions as a waste of time. Think of it as solving the discoverability problem in your career.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A long time ago, I believed that merely doing great work was sufficient to get promoted, and that it was my manager\u2019s job to not only know that I was doing great work but also to ensure that I got promoted for it. This is not true. As your career advances, and this is doubly … Continue reading the discovery problem in your career<\/span>