preparing for a tech leader position
Preparing for a tech leader position is hard. How do you summarise your personality, your passions, your needs, your lessons learnt and abilities honed from decades of experience without writing the next Encyclopaedia Britannica?
You then get a job description: a few pages and a company name. How do you even start to answer the enormous questions “are we a good fit culturally, ethically, technically etc.”, “can I offer what they are looking for”, “can they offer what I’m looking for”, “is this a 6 month, 1 year, 10 year, etc. journey” etc.
Where do you start!?
Well, the good news is that this is a simple problem that we probably face day in/day out: making a safe decision with very limited information and time. The first thing is to get the most out of the information you have:
- review the company’s website
- search the company and see if they’ve been in the news recently. If so, is it good or bad?
- search for “company name glassdoor” and see what employees say
- check the company’s financials - are they healthy? Have they sacked a whole bunch of IT people and are now desperately back-pedalling?!
This is good context, so summarise. How? Read the material a bunch of times and identify the necessary points, but also recurring themes. What’s “behind” what they are asking for? For example, “Tech Lead” can mean any/all of leet hacker, suit wearing 24/7 meetings with stakeholders, help-we-don’t-know-what-we-are-doing-so-save-us, Excel and PPT master, budget setter, people manager, IT person etc. Identify the main themes that emerge.
Maybe throw that material into a word cloud. This will highlight repeating words (even if it can’t identify the common theme behind the words).
The next step is to repeat the process on you. Write the perfect job description you are looking for. How would people review you (ask them!). Be honest. What are your needs.
Now compare. Are the matches strong? Are the differences a deal breaker?
As a final step I create a table listing the strong themes/necessary things and write exactly how I meet that need. And back it up with experience if you have it. Then I do it the other way around, i.e., filling in how they meet my needs.
This (“make a decision now based on hardly any information”) is something you will need to do, so get good at it :-).
Ultimately, it’s all people. So don’t worry. Do your best, put the time in, and have fun. It’s hard, time consuming, (and hopefully fun!) for everyone.
(this was also posted on LinkedIn)
P.S> #AI should help a lot here, particularly in summarising, and I’m sure there is a disrupting SaaS waiting to be written, but I still think doing this long hand is worth it.