 Hello, who's managing your career? Carrier can be a noun or a verb. If you think your manager is managing your career, think again. If you imagine just doing great work will boost your career, think again. If you feel the performance management system in your company or wherever you work is so aligned with how you're doing, and things will naturally automatically follow through and help with your career, think again. So what makes career management challenging? What are some ways to lean in and proactively plan your career? Let's take a look at it through these different topics, which I call the six C's. We'll look at context, which are on myths. We'll see some challenges about technical roles, primarily a topic that we want to focus our conversation around, which would be, then again, around growth and success and what it means. And the central part of today's theme and topic would be around form, which is around cultivating networks. And we will close with these interesting paradigm that I can surface to you, called ninja, spiders, and forests. And you might be wondering, what on earth do those things mean? And then, of course, we will have some time for clarifying some questions that might have come my way as part of helping prepare for this topic. Let's have a chat, shall we? First, let's talk about myths and paradigms about what career means and what career opportunities are. Now, the top portion of these slides are some of the common myths or popular myths that you might have heard of. The first one is about we have to strategize. We have to play the game in the locations where we work, play, and operate. But I'd love to tell you that it's not just about strategizing and playing the game anymore, but it's about understanding the culture and thriving in it. That is what is most important about building a career. The other myths that you would have heard and you would have seen, even if you go to your favorite search engine and type, it's always about ladders. Carriers are about laddering up, following the crowd. But it's not. It's about climbing. Yes, but climbing in all different ways and doing it in your way. That is what carriers are all about. The third one, which is a very even more common myth, is about career is being a path. You always hear the term career path. There are specific milestones, there are pit stops, there are speed limits, and so on. But it's not. It is about setting course and navigating to your favorite destinations. So carriers are about understanding the culture and thriving in it. It's about climbing and doing it your way. It's about setting course and navigating to your favorite destinations. Let's take a look at career growth. Some of the key paradigms for career growths are it's all dependent on your manager or by managing other. But it's not. It is eventually today's world about how your circle of influence, your peeps, your peers, your skips, your mentors know you, know the real you. That is how career growth happens. The second one, which is another common thing that I've heard, among so many people that I talk to and mentor, is about career growth. It's about doing a lot of things all the time. It's not. It is also by doing what you love. And it's not cliche to say it's what you love and loving what you do. But it's true. It's important. That is a central part of how career growth happens. You've heard these other terms about career growth being navigating jungles, handling turbulence. Well, I'd love to tell you that it is back to fundamentals and foundations. It is about investing time, driving impact and bringing people along. You might have heard these things many times before, but I'd urge you to reflect on these things. When you invest time, then you drive impact and when you bring people along, career growth happens. Okay? Let's take a peek at, you know, I told you that we're gonna talk more about technology and technology roles. Let's take a look at some of the challenges and all the different options by which career growth can happen within technology roles. Let's take a look at some of the roles. It's a very simplified view, but provides an interesting perspective on how some of our roles can be applied. On the X axis, you have technical skills. And obviously all of us have some form of technical skills. It could be a practical skill, all the way to an expert technical skill and you can define what these terms mean, but you get the point, right? There is a gradation of different levels of technical skills that each one of us have. And on the Y axis, let's talk about product skills. Product is foundational and fundamental regardless of the type of roles that we all play in the technology world. You can have an operational model of product or you can have a strategic thinking about what product management is. Okay? There is a Z axis which is around domain skills and we'll keep that as whatever the domains can be for now. And the four grids that emerge from a two by two like this or on a graph like this is on the X axis, you can be very strong in project process management and you can get into more and more engineering management based on growing on the X axis. On the Y axis, you can still be project to project process management which is very fundamental and foundational and you can start getting really good at product management. But the place that I would like to focus our conversation on is this amazing space called technical program management or product TPM as it's called in some companies. And that area is also a very interesting fascinating space because it blends process, product and engineering management into one space for technical program management. So why am I talking about all these things to you? I wanted to give you a flavor, one framework about how we think about technical roles and how we can be applied to the type of career growth that we want. So let's take a peek at a few options of career growth. So on the extreme left, you see that the same set of four boxes that we talked about before and you can try that particular combination, go all around those particular roles, you can rinse and repeat, but then change it by domain. You could be in health care today, you could be in climate change tomorrow, you could be in any different forms of domain that you want and you could try process, product, technical program management, engineering management that way. You can grow your career that way. Boredly rotate roles across domains, the first one. The second option for career growth can be how do you create, craft, and cultivate your brand? Who it is that you are? Who do you want to be? Now, when you take a look at the technical program management that area that I specialize in and I work a lot in is you could be a fixer of things, you could be a builder, you could be a connector, or you could be a scaler. I could be great at scaling large scale systems. I could help fix things that are broken or I could help create and build a new thing. So you find your brand and you start developing your persona and then you can have career growth that way. You can change each of these particular roles or you can go deep in any one particular role and become the best known scaler for technical program management. That's another way to grow your career. The last option which I also wanted to surface with you is bread versus depth, single versus multiple. What does this really mean? Every one of us has a style, every one of us has an intention of our repertoire. And so the goal is how can we learn to be good at one and then perform and master and then get better at it over time or then switch over. So I can be a master of one program or I can take care of multiple programs that I want to run. I can go deep into one domain, one specific set of systems and keep doing really great there or I can go bread twice. So technology roles and career options. So think about these as you're thinking about career growth as well. So we talked a little bit about the myths and paradigms. We talked about the different career options and so on. So now why don't we have a conversation about what growth means and what success should be defined as or how should we think about it in that particular way? Now what does growth mean? So let's take a parallel. I'm fascinated by trees and this whole notion about arboreal aspects. So what does a tree actually need for a tree to really grow? Like if you think of career growth in parallel to how a tree grows, a tree or some kind of vegetation requires these three core engines, core elements. Sun, sunlight, water and nutrients. That helps this arboreal nature of growth. So similarly, there's a very strong parallel to what happens at work. So you need three things. You need sponsors, somebody who knows the space and investing in it, somebody who knows you and investing in you. The spaces, the problem spaces that are very important and that's a true form of nourishment that's required for us as humans, for us as individuals to operate in and the necessary skills and attributes just like nutrients that are required for us to actually grow. So remember that sponsors, spaces and skills are very important and you need to find it through your mentoring circle, through your manager and through your own self-reflection on how you can develop and grow those. So what does success demand? It's a very complicated workplace today, as you know. We all have to deal with so many different aspects to it but I hope this will give you a summarized or a TLDR view of what success means in today's workplace. So there are these bunch of boxes. Let's start from the first one where I have a star that says know your potential. I think that's a very important thing. There is a time and place for all of us to reflect and know who we are and what our potential is. Then you find your purpose. I think it's the second and most important thing here. If you don't know what your purpose is, if you don't know how to seek it, then you can't develop your skills. And if you can't develop your skills, you can't induce passion, which is very important. And once you know your potential purpose and your skills and your passion, then you can turbo boost as I call your core, like your core performance. Once you do that, then the rest of the things will begin to follow more logically that you will land impact and you will not only grow yourself, but you will grow heroes around you. People who kind of rally with you and that helps you build and cultivate your network. Once you cultivate your network, the next few things are very fascinating. You will find people starting to become very happy. You will start having a much more cohesive sort of people around you. And then comes the time, a very important time of not being quiet here when it comes to career growth, but being able to narrate your story or narrate the story that you've been able to create. And then you start again tracking and watching the trends. That's what I call friend the trends aspect. So this is the cycle of what success demands in today's world. The more you do that, the more you consciously are aware of and take control of it, the better your performance will be. Know your potential, find your purpose, develop your skills, infuse your passion. So that's one phase. Once you do that, you can turbo boost your core. You land impact. You grow a group of people who are all going to be heroes. It forms your network. People are happy. Then you take time to tell the story about what actually happened. You go on to the next set of trends and off you go in what we would call a very successful orientation. So let's take a look at this, the network part, which is another fascinating piece that I really wanted to talk to you about. So what does networks mean? All of us know this notion. Some of us go to business school and say, I got to develop my network. LinkedIn is a crazy place for developing networks, right? Crazy in a sense in a positive way and also in sometimes in an organic way that you want to build your networks. But what is it actually, right? So let's take a peek at how we ship music and then we see how we ship products. So let's focus on the left side. Now for a successful production of a music album or a performance, it requires an ecosystem of players that have to get involved in it, right? You need to have a terrific orchestra. You need to have some engaged producers. You need to have some invested advisors and then you have some passionate followers and you have some really, really fond fans of yours. In order for all of these things to happen, then you ship a great label, okay? So this is a paramount importance. This is a paramount importance in order for this ecosystem to actually work and that is the cultivation of the network, a successful music producer or a successful album will have to do to ship music. So let's take a look at it in the technology world of shipping products because we are after all talking in product school and it's very important to know are there parallels? And of course there are. Just take a look at how fascinatingly similar these things are. Now, if you want to ship a great product, right? You obviously need to have a great product team and which is sort of an aspirational thing for a lot of us is how do you become a great product manager? How do you become very good at product sense? And you need to have invested sponsors. You need to have some engaged mentors, very similar to the advisors in the music side, right? And what about teammates? You have to have and we depend on a terrific teammates and committed partners, right? Partners who all of us have to deal with either internally inside the company or outside. So a similar ecosystem is absolutely important in order to cultivate and create and ship products, okay? So just as if we ship music, it's equally important how we think about shipping products as well. So let's conclude. I told you that we're going to talk about some fun things about warriors and spiders and Mike or Rizal for us. Are carriers determined by these three things? Remember we started our conversation of this presentation today that our managers, the ones that determine your carriers. The answer is yes. But managers are coaches. And remember what coaches are and who they are. They're extremely important people in our lives. They see in us what we can't see ourselves, right? And this is exactly a quote from Pep who, if you're a football fan, a Man City coach who talks about it that way. But what is more important than managers are to be on a great team, whatever the team means to you because as you know, a great team achieves more and more boosts camaraderie. And that's a very, very important part of our careers and determined today. So it's not just about managers who are about coaches but being on a great team. So you have to be on teams like Man City. It's not just by having Pep as your manager but by being on a part of a great team. The second one is our carriers determined we ask this question just by great work. Absolutely, yes. There is no substitute to hard work. As Edison would have talked about and some of you might have known the quote. But also we have to make sure that we all have that purpose, that passion that we skill it with. And then we bring it home with solid performance. So purpose, passion and performance is as important in addition to just hard work, okay? Performance review systems. Every one of us has it in every single company that we work for. Yes, as Drucker said, the famous management thinker, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it, right? So there has to be a way that we have to work within the performance management system for carriers. However, what is more important as I called out very early in the presentation was understanding the culture, knowing what actually matters and making sure that the key metrics in that culture that you work with, in the realm of the project and the impact that you actually do, how it actually matters, how it actually matters to move those metrics, okay? So managers plus team, hard work plus passion, purpose and performance. Yes, performance review system, but also understanding the culture, knowing what to ship and how it moves the metrics, okay? So if you have to still want some simplified view about thinking about carrier management, think about these next three things that I'm gonna give you, I'll leave behind. One, don't think about carrier ladders anymore. It's ancient, okay? It is about ninja warriors. It's about ziplines. It's about being in these gyms. It's about all forms of growth can happen. It's no longer just laddering up or down, okay? Next, do not think about isolated actions. So just as if you're working on individual work and independent affiliation with the manager is not the solution anymore, right? You have to build and work over time with a part of people, with the network of peers, mentors, well-wishers or even your family. And that is when the network will work for you, okay? So don't think about yourself as an individual entity trying an individual relationship with somebody, but it is about a microcosm of people that you would have to go along with. The third, try please not just being the tree. It's no longer important to become the best tree that you ever can or the stronger tree, the taller tree or the most powerful tree, but you have to become integral to what is called the Maikori Jal forest. A Maikori Jal forest is a fascinating place because it is how all the trees communicate with each other. Trees talk to each other, trees warn each other in times of distress and trees nourish each other and provide signals. And so Maikori Jal is a type of fungi that is known to communicate with each other. I'm just drawing analogy or parallels to it because that is what career growth happens. So don't think about just being a tree but think about helping your forest develop and your forest become as successful as yourself. And that is when true things happen. So if you like so far on what we talked about and you're wondering who on earth am I? So my name is Kaushik, Kaushik Sethuraman. And that's my LinkedIn profile. I am a technical program manager at Metta, formerly known as Facebook. And if you like what you do, I'd love for you to consider talking to me and talking to us as a company. And some of the roles that we have on our team are called the technical program management roles or technical product management roles. So feel free to give us a shout out and take a look at us. Last but not least, I'm sure there are a bunch of questions and answers that you all might have. If you have questions about these topics discussed today ping me on LinkedIn or other channels, I'd be happy to answer those. If you, again, to reiterate, if you like what we learned today and have an interest in technical roles at Metta, please do consider the Metta TPM roles and other open positions. Or not just at Metta, but these type of roles of interest to you, I'm sure these things would be a fascinating place for you to look at in the industry. And remember how we started this presentation. Who's managing your career? Well, by now you perhaps arrived at this insight. It's you. You manage your career. Remember, it is after all your tree, it's your forest, and it's your career. Our tiny, quirkus rubus, sapling that you saw, has now grown into a full, big, large, strong oak tree. And if you remember, our oak tree now nourishes the mycorrhizal forest that it now lives in. Thank you.