Turn Your Career into a Rocket w/ Oksana Kubushyna #142

Here's the truth. Hiring remote engineers doesn't have to be expensive and time consuming. Our friends at Revello can help you find and hire top engineers based in Latin America in a matter of days. Just tell them what skills and experience you're looking for. They'll come through their network of over 400,000 pre-vetted engineers and give you a short list of curated candidates that meet your specific hiring requirements. You interview

and hire on your terms and only pay for as long as you keep the engineer. To learn more, visit revello.com forward slash ELC today and save $2,500 off your first hire. If you're asking, how can I get ahead? I'm here to tell you also that you've got to flip that. That's the exactly the wrong question to ask. Because the more you ask questions

like this, the more people will perceive you as self-serving. And there is no quicker way to lose somebody's trust than for them to believe you're acting in your best interest and not in theirs, not in your company, not in your customers. Focusing on your customer, focusing on your managers needs, on your company's needs, on your team needs is a much more effective way to move forward. Welcome back to the Engineering Leadership

Podcast. ELC Annual 2023 is just around the corner. So we're launching a special series featuring past sessions that capture some of the themes and topics that you'll see during the conference. Why? Because you're probably wondering, what can I expect from the conference? Well the answer is incredible speakers, incredible content. In this episode really is just a preview of what you might be able to expect. We have a bunch of different types of experiences

at the conference. Speaking sessions specifically are going to tackle some of the most critical challenges facing engineering leaders today. We're talking topics like leadership, technology, well specifically how generative AI is impacting software development and engineering leadership. But today's theme is about career development. And if you haven't gotten your ticket yet,

I'm telling you right now you are missing out and you absolutely need to be there. You can grab your ticket and check out all of our speakers and topics at sfelc.com forward slash annual 2023. To introduce you to today's episode in her eight years at Riot Games, Oksana Kuboshina has been promoted at least five times into major, new and ever increasing in scope roles. Oksana session covers the drivers, the mindset, the priorities and strategies

to propel your career forward. She shares inspiring stories, tips to help you get feedback, asking for help, showing initiative and more. Let me introduce you to Oksana. Oksana recently made the leap to start her own company. And prior to that jump, Oksana was formerly head of operations

for Riot Games Entertainment Division. After joining Riot in 2014, she quickly rose through the ranks, holding positions, including head of infrastructure, development director for League of Legends, founder and head of Riot platform group and VP of Games Studios operations, helping build the foundation for launch and operate Riot's new games globally. Again, if you're interested in topics just like this and beyond, you can get your ticket to join your peers, check out all of our other

speakers and explore additional topics at sfelc.com forward slash annual 2023. Enjoy this special episode with Oksana Kuboshina. Hey, everybody. Wow, I love the energy. It's the last talk of the day. And you guys are still on it. You must have had a lot of coffee. All right, today we're going to talk about turning your career into a rocket. So I work at Riot Games. Riot Games aspires to be the most player-focused video game company in the world. And we have many, many games that, well, not many,

many, some games. We have a few games that are pretty popular. You might have heard of Valorant if you play games. How many of you play games? Okay, okay, great. So you might have heard about Valorant, but we're most known for League of Legends. It's the most played PC game in the entire world. And also we recently released this little animated TV series, which is called Arcane, which won four Emmy awards. It was incredible. And I'm very proud of that. But when I joined Riot

Games, that was eight years ago in 2014. And at that time, the company was already pretty large, about 1,500 people. And all of these people are incredibly smart, like very accomplished, and very intimidating. So when I joined, that's me right there, can you tell? And I was pre-intimidated by them. Everybody talked to was so incredible. And little did I know the amount of success I'm going to have in this company. It was hard to predict. In eight years, I had

at least seven major roles. And that's not counting promotions within the role. You know how you go from junior to med to senior, also like in role promotions. And I also change role quite a bit. I started on a small team of five as a development director or development manager. I was promoted was an eight months to lead, development lead of the infrastructure division, which was accountable for all of our data centers globally, as well as cloud solutions and back end

kind of technology. After that, about six to eight months later, I was promoted to the head of infrastructure. Then to development director of entire League of Legends, our flagship product, about 750 people. After that, we restructured League of Legends. And I took on the platform team that powered League of Legends, but also prepared the company to launch all of our new R&D games.

After those R&D games were launched, the company started bootstrapping this new division called called entertainment, offering more entertainment options for players such as like film TV, consumer products, and music, things like that. So I was asked to help bootstrap that. And so that's what I'm doing today. So quite a few role changes. It's like on average one role, one new role a year. And this is how it felt the whole time. It was incredibly stressful. I was freaking out. I didn't

think I knew what I was doing. I couldn't believe they would trust me to do that. So that's what, like, that's the experience. But I also learned so much. So I wanted to share with you just a couple of insights that I took away from that journey. And I hope you find them useful for your career. All right. So what are the key drivers for career success? Is it your employer? If you're like right, your employer is growing more opportunities are created. Of course, it's pretty important for

you to be at the right place. Is it your manager? A good manager can really help you move forward. A bad one can really set you back. Economy, the culture you come in from, the culture you come in into, your upbringing, your skill sets, all of these are really important drivers for success. But I'm here to tell you these are not the primary drivers of success. This is secondary. Because there are so many stories where all these were kind of stacked against the person and they

still succeeded. Check this picture out. This kind of looks like my photo graduation photo from my computer science class many years ago. I'm not going to say how many not to age myself, but it wasn't that long ago. Okay. What do you think are the odds of success of a career success of this woman in an environment like this? This photo is from 1958. Okay. 1958. This is Harvard Law School graduation photo. And what do you think the odds of that woman of succeeding in this?

And yet she became an incredible career success. She became a Supreme Court justice, a really known fighter for human rights. And without a doubt, a great career success, without a question. And all of those things that we talked about, all those drivers were kind of working against her at a time, but she succeeded. And you can tell me like, yeah, but she was like super special. And I agree with

it. She was like incredibly special person. And yet she wasn't. Because there's millions and millions of stories like this where somebody starts in a circumstance that works against them and still manages to succeed. That what makes all of those things, all the circumstances that surround you secondary to your career success, not primary. So then what is the primary key to success? And that's your mindset. The mindset and the battles you have with yourself as you move in your

career. Let me explain a little bit about that. Let's say you go into a meeting and in a meeting, you share your idea and your idea gets shut down. What do you do? It's very easy to think. Those guys are assholes. They don't listen to me. Be frustrated. Walk away or you can tell yourself a story. I'm not good enough. Maybe my ideas are not that good. Maybe I should just shut up and not do this again. So that's like a little story, like little thoughts, little feelings that come up. And the

battle you're going to have with yourself is to not act on them. Not listen to that voice, not listen to that emotion and not do the comfortable thing, but instead do what's needed to move forward. Look at yourself, figure out what can I do better to make my idea heard the next time. That's very hard to do. Your risk failure, your risk rejection, it's scary, but the fear is terrible reason not to do something. So those are the battles you must fight with yourself. And if you win more of those

battles over time, your career will move forward. And if you lose those battles on don't fight them at all, you will be stuck or worse, you will move backwards. So the battle ground is in your mind. So the key here is to manage your thoughts and emotions and don't let your emotions and thoughts manage you. And this is actually like a whole field out there on figuring out how to do this better. It's called mindfulness, becoming aware of your emotions is very important. Not everybody's

aware. A lot of people just kind of like react and move forward through life, just acting on their emotions. So I highly recommend reading these couple of books. Before agreements is a very easy read. There is like absolutely no excuse not to read it. It's a super tiny book. And then there's so is a bit more difficult. It's not for everybody, but you can try it. And hopefully you can gain some insights from that. Now that we covered the mindset, like what are the actual tips to

move your career forward? So let's talk a little about that. If you're asking, how can I get ahead? I'm here to tell you also that you got to flip that. That's exactly the wrong question to ask. Because the more you ask questions like this, the more people will perceive you as self-serving. And there is no quicker way to lose somebody's trust than for them to believe you're acting in your best interests and not in in in theirs, not in your companies, not in your customers.

So that's a bit dangerous. And so to advance in your career, focusing on your customer, focusing on your managers needs, on your company's needs, on your team needs is a much more successful, like much more effective way to move forward. At Riot, we actually have the same player over my company, over my team, over me. So if you need to make priority decisions, you sacrifice in that in that order. And then the next tip I have is like, don't let others do the thinking for you.

As you look at the company needs, as your manager needs, team needs, you're going to start like discovering things. But also usually people ask you to do stuff like, hey, can you do this task? To give you an example, when I was on League of Legends, when I was development director, my job was to schedule tasks and make sure all teams are like prioritized well and there's timelines and all that good stuff. And I started getting requests from our R&D teams. League of Legends was the only

game at the time, but we had some R&D games. They started asking our teams, hey, can you deploy database for me? Hey, can you integrate me with the patcher or with the account system? Like just bunch of requests. And so my job was to do those requests. But instead, I went and I talked to the R&D leaders, to company leaders, to other departments to figure out what's the plan for this R&D games. When are they going to release? How are they going to release? Do we want to release them?

They won't release them all at once. I tried to figure out the larger context about it. And as I tried to figure it out, I realized, well, the way to just schedule these tasks, working off of League of Legends is not sustainable. So I proposed that we restructure League of Legends with separated, we form this platform group. And then that platform group will serve not just League of Legends, but all of these R&D games. And when I made a proposal again, with that mindset,

company, first customer, first, I proposed it, it would eliminate my own position. But as a result of that proposal, I was asked to leave the platform group. And so when you work on tasks, when you're like, I used to say, don't do what you manage or ask you to do it. It's slightly wrong framework, but basically whenever you get a task, try to seek out larger context and come up with your own idea of what needs to be done. And if it's the same as you being asked to do,

just go ahead and do that. But if not, that's a great opportunity for you to differentiate yourself and tackle a bigger opportunity. The next tip I have is become non-reactive. If you're a manager or leader in a large company, usually your job is to manage change. Like your project gets canceled, you don't get enough budget, you have to fire somebody or hire somebody new. And a lot of the time leader, like people on a team react negatively to change.

They are frustrated, they're uncertain, they vent to you, they complain, and as a manager, your job is to manage all that. So if you're in situations like this, you can be like everybody else and resist the change, or you can differentiate yourself again. You know, you can go and be frustrated in a corner by yourself for a second. When you come back and you show up in front of your leadership team, in front of your actual team, your peers, be non-reactive, stay composed, and lean in and help

execute the change, no matter how scary or uncertain it may be. And the more you do it, not only you're practicing your leadership skills, people will start seeing you as a leader and trusting you as somebody who can help manage the company, not somebody who needs to be managed throughout a change. The next one is pretty obvious, I'm not going to spend too much time on this, but show initiative. There's still boggles in my mind how many people are okay with status quo. You know, like you're

working on a team, your teammates complain about a broken process. Most people just kind of like live with it. Yeah, the process of broken has been broken forever, and that's it. Well, rather than

just accepting it, go figure out what's actually broken and go try to fix it. If your team is dysfunctional, again, most people just kind of like sit in dysfunction while start fixing it, start giving feedback to your, the people on the team, take them out for lunch so that they can to know each other, and like

it's more hard for them to like have a conflict. If your product is broken, go talk to the customers, do some research, market research, figure out what is it that's breaking that and start trying to fix it. So again, you will be acting as a leader. If you do this enough, you kind of quickly notice that people start looking up to you with like what should we be doing? What should we be fixing? What's next? And the promotions will follow after that. And finally, relationships are everything.

In this world, we cannot succeed by our own. If you're doing something on your own, it's not big enough. Building relationships and fostering relationships is like paramount for success. All of my roles, all of my jobs, I got through relationships. And a lot of people feel uncomfortable with that because it feels a bit icky. Like what do I do? Do I just like go and just say hi and start talking? What if they're busy? What if they don't take time for me? Like they didn't want to impose on people.

But relationships don't have to be like deep. You don't have to go to each other's weddings to have relationships. All it is is just a good first impression. And just put yourself on the radar of that leader. Send an email to your managers, managers saying like, hey, I'm working on this team. And if you need anything, I'm here for you. That's enough for them to notice you. So the next time you need something, you can you already have like an end, a foothold.

And when they need to, like when they have a question, they need somebody, you're the first person to pop in their mind because they remember that, oh, there's this person on this team that sent me an email once. So relationships don't have to be complicated. But you have to invest in it. And I see people do it like either overdo it. Was there teams and not peers? A lot of people hesitate managing up or building relationships up. All of those are

incredibly important. Okay, let's say you've done all of that and you have the right skill set and you still feel stuck. What's up? What's that? Everybody else around you gets promoted and you're still in the same careers, still sitting in the same role. And you're overlooked for the promotions.

I noticed this a lot. Sometimes it's like spinach stuck in your teeth or bad breath. Everybody around you is aware of something that's holding you back, but they're not telling you or maybe they even try to tell you once or twice, but you maybe didn't listen or you rejected that feedback or something, something that's obvious for everybody. There's a perception. You may be you're too aggressive. Maybe you're not aggressive enough. Maybe you don't phrase your requests in a certain way.

Maybe you don't have executive presence, whatever that means, but something that like anybody around, you can tell you, but they won't. So if you feel like you may be in that situation, I would encourage you to be brave and go and seek out what's the perception people have on me? And you may not like what you hear. And especially if you don't like what you hear, rejoice because you found something that's holding you back. And now you can fix it. So discover your blind spot at all times, try to

figure out if you have one. And what is it? We all have one. Mine was when I wanted to try it to fix certain problems, I would come out very strong about it. I would be like, hey, we got to fix this. It's like, it's so bad. We really have to fix this. There's no two ways about it. This is the way to go. And I was so strong in my opinions. And it was kind of a strength of mine actually up to a point. But then I noticed people wouldn't listen to me as much.

And the more they didn't listen, the more I tried, like, try to push, you know, like, no, no, we really need to fix this. And one time my manager pulled me aside and said, like, hey, do you realize that when you present these problems in this way, you're perceived as not understanding the nuance so black and white so that people actually don't trust that you understand the situation and that your solutions are valid. And it just like clicked for me, like, I couldn't believe

that I was the perception. And I didn't completely, like, I completely didn't realize I was doing that. And the moment I changed my approach, the moment I became more nuanced and how I articulated my points, like, hey, we have this problem. If we leave it unfixed, here's the pros and cons of that. If we do fix it, here's a couple of options. What do you think? Just soften it a little bit. And all of a sudden, my ideas start getting traction. So it could be something simple that's

holding you back that you are not realizing. So try to find that thing. And let's say you did, and let's say everybody just loves you and but you still feel stuck. So then I have one final story for you about a watch. A father calls his teenage daughter to come to the room and says, honey, and he gives her like this old scratched out broken watch and goes, honey, go and try to fetch the highest price you can for this watch. Go to all the pawn shops and figure out what's the highest,

what's this was the what's this watch worth. So she takes the watch, she runs two couple of pawnshorts, come back, daddy, it's like they wouldn't give me more than $10 for this watch. It's a $10 watch. And he goes, okay, I want you to go to this other pawn shop. It's specialty pawn shop. It specializes in vintage watches. Go there and tell me what the price that they want to give you for that. She goes there, she hands the watch to the guy there,

looking like looks at it for a while, inspects it. And then he goes, wow, this is a very unique watch. It's made by this incredible craftsman who is very sought after. It will fetch incredible price of the auction. I'll give you $100,000 for it. She cannot believe it. She runs back to her dad and she's like, daddy, daddy, they wanted to give me $100,000 for this watch. And he goes, let this be a lesson for you. If you're in the wrong place, which doesn't understand your value, they will

always see you as a $10 watch. So my final advice to you, don't be a $10 watch, make sure you are in the right place. And that's the end of my slides. As a US company, hiring remote engineers can be time consuming, expensive and frustrating. You could hire freelancers, but you don't know how much they'll focus on your business. Outsourcing to dev shops, risks, control over who works on your projects and expensive long-term contracts. Or you could look overseas, but working across

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With Revello, you're in complete control. You get to decide who to hire, what to offer, and you get to decide how long to keep them on your team. To learn more, visit Revello.com forward slash ELC today and save $2,500 off your first hire. All right, that was a great talk. Thank you so much. Love the slides, love the stories. Let's switch it to Q&A. We will be handing out mics. Just raise your hands and we'll be walking

around. I have a question about discovering your blind spots. Right there, blind spots for reasons. It's difficult to discover. You talk about getting feedback, but sometimes in a small organization that feels that requesting feedback also kind of becomes a sensitive topic that may hurt my ability to function in my role going forward. If I showed too much vulnerability, what's your perspective on that and how in general would you go about getting feedback?

That's a good question. The question was, how do I get about getting feedback? If I showed too much vulnerability, it may set me back in my career. One thing I will say is asking for help and asking for feedback is one of the most effective ways to build relationships and find mentors. So that's one thing. If you go to some senior leader and say, hey, I really want to improve, what opportunities do you see for me to improve? You don't say I'm failing. You position it as

seeking advice. People love nothing more. It strokes their ego to be recognized as somebody worthy of giving advice. You may even find a mentor or a sponsor who will be willing to guide you

through some of those blind spots. I don't know, vulnerability is also a strength. If you show it in the right way to the right people, if you have to hide yourself and you're afraid to be vulnerable, I'm questioning a little bit the environment that you're in because a good manager, good leader will encourage people to be vulnerable and open because otherwise, how do you learn?

Maybe you can even model vulnerability because that will inspire other people to open up and you'll be surprised how many people struggle with these questions and how many people would admire somebody who shows them that. Thank you so much for the presentation. I think it was amazing. I wanted to understand where did you learn the art of storytelling, capturing your audience?

And then the follow-up would be how do you adjust storytelling for the remote world that we live in now where you are no longer in front of a thousand people but you are in a thumbnail in a Google Hangout? Good question. The question is how did I learn storytelling and then how do I adapt it to the more referring mode setup? I am mortified of public speaking. That's why I'm doing it. Remember the

battles you have to have in your head? That's the one of mine. I'm being vulnerable right now because I am mortified for public speaking but I've been getting better and better over time because I would just go and do this time and time again. And this is easier because this is a much smaller group and y'all really amazing so you make it easy for me but sometimes you have to speak in large audience

and the art of storytelling, I believe everything in life is actually a skill. Things like charisma, humor, ability to tell stories. All of those things are skills that you can learn and improve over time. There's literally this YouTube channel on how to be more charismatic and I watch the shed out of it. So you know like that helps. So the art of storytelling, this is one book that maybe

good made to stick I believe it's called. So just reading a lot of books, watching a lot of really great presenters and trying to figure out what is it that makes them good and what resonates with me. And then finally there was training opportunities within my larger company which I took as much as I could for public speaking and how do I adapt this to remote? I think remote is actually a bit easier

if you need to give a presentation like this. I've given a couple like this but you can write down the notes and you can be very eloquent in your notes and you can just read them and people when they experience you they actually don't realize that you're reading. And so you're able to give much more like visceral storytelling if you craft it well enough that without worrying to like stumble or

like remember all the right words. So I think it's easier for a presentation like this and there is a bunch of obviously different nuances for just like a team meeting or you know stuff like that. Thanks for the talk. I have a question regarding the last point you talk about like what you realize you're not you're probably not in the right place. Are there any objective like signals where you can tell whether you're good or not good or feed or not feeding your current

position. Sometimes like it could be I would like probably try to be like too much eagle or to say oh am I not good enough or is that really true like I'm not being valued here. So how did you tell the different how do you balance that your yeah. I think none of us can see ourselves objectively they're just a human condition. So that question is very important. How do you know if you're objectively good or it's a place that just doesn't recognize how good you are. Like one thing I

would suggest is kind of like trying to understand your value objectively in a market. One thing you can do is by going and interviewing and I might actually manager recommended that and I thought he was a bad manager for a second because he wanted me gone but I did an interview and it just open up my mind so much because I was able to be rejected from a few places but then got offers from another

a couple of places. I was able to see the kind of offers that are coming my way what the feedback is and it just incredible way to gauge your own value objectively in the market. That's one thing and the other thing is we all struggle from imposter syndrome and you will always unless you're narcissist of some sort you know like you will always struggle with you know always looking up

and comparing yourself to the best there and always feeling what you're behind particularly in engineering it's very easy to feel that way because the field moves so fast there's so much change there's so much innovation that you feel constantly can like left catch and up you can never

know everything so just figure out do some research on imposter syndrome I don't know whatever works for you in a therapy you know like whatever works just for me therapy was actually very valuable and that's why I mentioned it but figure out how to separate your inner voice that telling you

that you're not good enough and start listening but more importantly believing people that tell you you're good you probably have a lot of those but like a performance review when you receive it all you focus like there could be like five pages of greatness and then there's one criticism you will

like focus on that criticism so just train yourself to also look on those positive feedback points that you receive really enjoys your story on the watch was really insightful you've been with riot for eight years so you're definitely the right watch for riot but have you had an event where

you felt like you want to write watch for an environment then you had to do something about it yes I really like Bruce Lee's phrase or like quote be like water I like to move with where you know like the universe seems to be moving a lot of my role changes were like that where for example

I could have stayed in a role longer but situation circumstances changed and I would move with that change so it's it wasn't about recognizing the value but more circumstances keep changing and you got to recognize that and figure out the time to move on to something else I do feel like I've

had a couple of cases where my managers maybe didn't understand what I was doing and in some cases didn't value that and in those cases I've done my best to deliver the best I'm capable of delivering but then I was looking for new opportunities so I kind of like didn't realize this explicitly

for a while but it just doesn't feel comfortable the way a bad manager or the bad bad fit like it doesn't have to be a bad manager it could be just a fit you know you may not fit the right way in the company and you will feel that the feeling of great fit is like it's like a rocket ship you

feel great you delivering your valued you will feel that if you have to constantly fight up hell unless something's holding you back that you need to really work on yourself first then you will feel it and you will know I think thanks for the talk and thanks for the tips that you have

shared my question is can you stack rank the things that you have picked the one that you feel played the most biggest role in your career growth or do you feel that all of these things are equally important and should be considered equally I think the mindset is the most important thing

by far you will fail you will have setbacks you'll have tough feedback you will feel like you're not good enough you will feel the pain like all I felt like that that the image with Sheldon kind of breathing into a paper bag like it's a lot of pain that you will feel and you will quit and the

same applies when you're doing a startup or you're pursuing something new you will feel so much pain of growing learning not knowing doubting yourself that the most important thing for you to keep going and not stop and not go go backwards is your mindset like you have to have optimism you

have to have perseverance and it's not just perseverance is like anti fragility is cold is where you fail and you don't just emerge the same you emerge better and you emerge better by like forcing yourself to like what happened what do I need to learn and believing it will get better so like that

is the single most important thing I can recommend for everybody work on yourself relentlessly learn and like mental toughness I think I got a question about managing up do you feel it's important or do you have to kind of showcase your work to the upper management or sell in the way your team

or your work the important part of a routine yes very much so and especially like the higher in your career you go the more important it becomes to manage up and the reason for that is because I've seen people who don't manage up enough and it has usually bad connotation again like people feel dirty a little bit about it particularly like they then they like especially if you get promoted you like to focus on your team that's comfortable it's very kind of like uncomfortable to go and make

friends with the higher ups you know but unless you have good relationships with them and relationships relationships mean you can get shit done it means without those relationships you cannot provide a cover for your team you cannot get the right resources you have to fight and your team

will lose out so in order to serve your team and your customers in the best way possible you have to ensure relationships and kind of support from the top and that's the reason to manage up or build relationship up or put your work in front of those people to create visibility you're

not doing it for yourself again if you keep your eyes on solving for your team for your customer that's who you're fighting for that's why you go and showcase your work and that will put you on a map by the virtue of you doing that I think yeah so I think related question so if I have a one-on-one like a skip level with my CVT what's the best you know use of that time how do I keep that one on one going should I use it for my advantage probably not but it starts on I think making it informative

for the it depends what your goals are but let's say it's like for building relationships like making it informative for that person just kind of like hey did you know this happens we're working on this here's the impact it has here's the things I think you should know about our efforts just like give them some tidbits so they're feeling informed they walk away gaining something from that interaction

and then asking advice but making it easy for them to give advice don't put them on on a spot you know where they have to commit to some like okay and now I need you to be my mentor and meet with me for one hour every week from now on you know it's just like hey this is a problem I think you might

have a solution if not totally okay just make it easy for them to say face and then ask them to help you on something something relevant to their role the easiest thing to do is like something you working on asking for this bigger context like why is this and how does this initiative

that was the bigger strategic effort something like that usually is a safe question and thanks for the great points so one question is you're talking about the don't let others do we all thinking right for example for you I believe you are very busy all day long right and the same for many leaders

so how much time do you spend thinking and when do you spend your time if thank you great question out not enough but one thing I will say as engineering leaders actually we have great advantage because by the virtue of our profession a trained to see patterns and that's a really valuable skill

for us so even if you're not like sitting down and thinking about a thing for an hour when you talk to individuals you start connecting the dots it just will happen but by how your brain is wired because you do that when you program you'll start like okay this person told me that this tool is

not working on this person told me that their team is having difficulty with this tool and then you start putting things together and tool just pop in your head that's how I usually do it like I just have a lot of conversations with a lot of people and I just start seeing patterns in

organization that I can feel like I can fix but then you have to spend dedicated time thinking strategically I recommend taking I know it's super hard especially in big organizations free up your Fridays Mondays and spend that time like walk away and spend your time thinking whatever problem

you're trying to solve write it down whatever's your process at least one day a week everybody has different process some people take a week off to just do that some do it in the shower who knows you know but but do spend some time thinking that they can think it's thinking time kind of following

up on that same thread once you identified a problem and maybe it's it's not just your team but broader organization you want to drive some chain and both you may have some proposal but also you are really interested in making that change of solving the problem is there a pattern or process

to really drive through that in an organization which is beyond just your scope that you are assigned to yeah I think it depends on the organization some organizations are very strict with the process for things like that some are more loose I think in all cases it helps to work with people

and get their support so let's say you're working on a process problem between two teams working with them and with your team to like really get them on board working with them to come up with a solution and then together presenting that solution like if you can execute on that then you're

already done because you can just together fix it if not some people have some companies have official process like you're gonna submit a request get budgets and all that stuff some people are more loose like in in a triad for the longest time used to be like you have a great idea go execute

it most important thing I would say is building support and momentum for whatever problem you're trying to solve go talk to Roland people if they agree with you then you have that on your on your side when you try to follow whatever process exists in your company so when you're in that dark

area and you're hyperventilating how do you find the strengths to forge ahead instead of retreating back into your comfort area it's very hard again like that's the hardest part is like those battles you have to fight it's a battle you have to fight it with yourself the way I do it is

like I have a couple of trusted people that I can go and vent to there's usually this spike of emotion when you hear bad news or something changes you're like oh my god everything's falling apart the other advice I have is never make decisions in a medal of change you know like wait to see

how it plays out like wait for your emotions to come down because when you make decisions during that spike probably not gonna lead you in the right direction so during the spike I would just go like call up one of my friends or people with an organization I trust and I'm like I need you to

listen to me and I'm gonna vent for a minute and that's all I need from you right now and so I would just like say all my frustrations to that person and then I thank them deeply and then I'm able to move through it with much more grace and the other thing is experience because when you

experience something in a first like first time it feels back it feels scary you know the first time you fire somebody it's incredibly scary like I was like puking in a bathroom before I had to do that my first time it couldn't sleep you know but then as you practice it you know people

interesting can get used to basically anything so these kind of things that really frickty out yesterday will be easier tomorrow and when you face your next big challenge just remind yourself that this big challenge feels big today but you'll be through it you'll be better because of it

and the next time it will be much easier for you so just like keep that big perspective in mind and it will help you but that's exactly it like if you are able to have that battle with yourself and win it you will get ahead and most people can't all right well thank you very much round of a

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