About Me
Hey I'm Jeremy, an Engineering Manager at Pave. I've been lucky enough to help start many new initiatives at different companies, from cultural and engineering processes to entirely new lines of business. Reflecting back on what's helped me develop that agency, it's really been the good fortune of being in team environments that affirm that I can drive the changes I want to see.
My goal in writing this blog post was to give folks, particularly those early on in their careers, a few practical tips on taking this kind of ownership and creating at work - and hopefully the nudge they need to do so!
Creating at Work
Starting something new is a creative process, and our work can be one of the primary avenues for practicing it. You've probably thought of something that you believe should exist at your company but doesn't. Maybe it's a valuable but overlooked feature, a critical technical investment, a time-saving process addition, or a culturally impactful team practice. While proposing and getting something off the ground amongst your peers can be intimidating, it's one of the more impactful things you can do in your work, and a key quality of those who embrace an ownership mindset.
Having worked at companies that encourage high agency and ownership from every individual, I've been lucky enough to be a part of many such efforts. Being a founding contributor on impactful new projects can be empowering, and having many of those early experiences helped me develop the initiative to pitch and start successively larger efforts, including entirely new product lines. In this post I hope to share some perspectives I've developed along the way to help demystify this process of creating at work.
Don't seek ideas, leverage perspectives
Every endeavor start with an idea. I tend to believe ideas aren't things you seek, but things you spot by being in and paying attention to the right places. Leverage your vantage point, particularly if you're close to the ground and embedded in a domain day to day. Knowledge of the details lets you spot opportunities, patterns, and real problems. The key is to balance these low-level insights with a high-level understanding of your team and company goals. Recognizing potential efforts that would be both realistic and impactful requires the ability to oscillate between zooming in for clear understanding, and zooming out for the right perspective.
Good ideas in companies also don't have to come from a singular person. Oftentimes they grow in the collective minds of a group that is exploring, thinking, and conversing about a domain together from different perspectives. When you spot one, develop it, then share and let it evolve with the input of your peers. All ideas start as seeds of potential - mixing them with the right perspectives can help them gain momentum and sprout into promising seedlings.
Pitch the why, the who, and the how
Identifying a good opportunity is only the first step. Once you've developed conviction, you'll need to take action. To catalyze an idea into a reality in an organization, you'll have to get others behind it, be that your teammates, your manager, or company leadership. The work required to do so will generally be in proportion to the size of the endeavor you propose; bigger rocks take more effort to get rolling. Distill the value down to a clear point and back it up with evidence. Write it down to force yourself to articulate it clearly, and so that you can share it at scale. Practice your pitch, and refine it with the feedback you receive. Ideas that go the distance are the ones people can get behind together.
Once you've articulated a clear "why", you'll want to outline a pragmatic "how". Draw a path from where things are today to where you believe they can go. The level of detail to include at this point will vary by case and audience. The important thing is to show critical thinking and consideration for execution. Leaders and stakeholders don't want to say yes to an idea - they want to agree to a thoughtful plan of action, and to trust that you'll be able to make things happen when the rubber meets the road. Ideas and insights can inspire, but plans allow people to believe they will transpire.
Key to any plan is the required investment, and within a company this typically translates to funding in employee time - from yourself or your team. As new ideas are bids measured in the opportunity cost of existing plans, you'll want to err on the side of running lean. It helps to show how your project could be executed efficiently with minimal cost and execution risk. Both of these are factors that can be mitigated with the right personnel. Ideal founding team or project members will have strong domain context, relevant and often broad skillsets, and a track record of getting things done at the company. This could be an engineer familiar with the right part of the codebase, an account manager with close relationships to the target customer profile, or an ops person who facilitates key internal workflows. Recruiting or becoming someone with this profile will go a long way in bringing your plans to fruition.
Embrace an empowered mindset
The most important factor in being able to create at work, however, is the mindset you adopt. For a lot of folks, the biggest unlock to their potential for impact is simply internalizing the belief that their work environment is malleable. One way to cultivate this is by recognizing that everything you see and use was started by someone not much different from you - they just decided to be an agent of change. Once you make that decision for yourself, open your awareness to the stream of opportunities around you, and when you find conviction in an idea, go for it! Start small and be prepared to pitch, receive feedback, and put in the work. Once you feel truly empowered to create, you'll bring that much more value and reward to your work.
Work where you and your ideas can grow
Lastly, remember that you can consciously seek environments that are particularly supportive of taking this type of action! Look for a team and culture that empowers individuals at all levels to drive change, and believes great initiatives can start anywhere - from the top to the bottom.
And if you happen to be actively looking for such a place or team - please, reach out so I can tell you about Pave!
Email me: jeremy@pave.com