Just when you think you have reached where you want to be, when you have hit all your goals, you realize that this isn’t where you want to be at all. You want to be somewhere further up, you want to change your game and go in a different direction, you might look back down and realize something you skipped over to get here and then decide that where you are isn’t where you need…
I wrote this article on Medium a while back called the “Software Manager Minimum”. At the time, I was writing about the bare minimum you need to be doing as a manager and leader on a software team in order to keep your team moving forward. In this I boiled it down to three questions you should always be asking yourself on a daily basis; What’s the Pulse of the team? How are we doing? …
The process, the plan, the path you had laid out for today, that’s been working for the past few months, that after a constant back and forth you got everyone on board, for now, needs to change. It doesn’t mean the process didn’t work, it doesn’t mean the changes were bad. It means you’ve now outgrown them and now you need something else to keep managing yourself and your growth. If processes stayed the same…
They aren’t supposed to, that’s the idea of preparation, you do it solo. You choose the task. You choose the priority. You make the changes. You choose what’s next. You decide where you need to go. The only person that notices is and will be you.
Specialize, Specialize, Specialize. Own and find your niche, focus on the niche and nothing else. But you can own multiple niches. You can specialize in multiple areas. And what you learn in one will inevitably help you in what you need to do to master the other. The only time it’s scary to be a generalist is when you make assumptions for things you don’t because you have gone as deep as you need.