The full catalogue!

After years of writing about product, leadership, and scaling, I’m sharing the full catalog of all my posts (ordered so you can read them straight through).

When I started writing these, it was mostly to clear out my brain by organizing the random info floating around in it.

But I also had an idea in the back of my mind: the career guide I never had. I longed for a little book of shortcuts where, whenever I had a problem, I could turn to the right page and get a quick recommendation and a reminder that everything would be fine.

I made a list of all the things I wished I’d realized earlier in my career, all the lessons that took me years (and way, way too much angst!) to learn.

I wrote them down as letters to myself so I could remember those lessons later, and shared them in case they were useful to other people too.

That list evolved into what you see here: The "Hard Parts of Growth" catalog. It includes career growth, managing people, product principles — everything I’ve written about over the years. You can read it end-to-end as an overall guide to growing in tech, or turn to specific tactics for a problem you’re facing right now.

My hope is that these lessons give you a few useful shortcuts for whatever you're facing, and (more importantly) a reminder that growth is supposed to feel hard and messy. That’s normal, and you've got this.

Now that I’ve worked through my initial list of lessons, I’ll probably slow down posting for a bit as my mind fills up with new things to write about. But I'm sure I'll be back soon with more stories and hot takes 🙂

Thank you for joining me on this journey! It means so much to me 🙏🏽♥️.

The full catalog!

The career growth playbook I wish I had

1. Finding my voice:

   1. If I can see a problem, it’s mine to solve

   2. Leadership is taking accountability for things no one is asking you to do

   3. My manager owns context, I own the recommendation

   4. Getting (more) comfortable making hard decisions

   5. Learning how to make decisions in a new space

   6. Questioning my best instincts → more learning

2. Dealing with failure (from someone who hates to fail)

   1. Turning “What a failure” into “What a useful experiment”

   2. Reminder: 0 failure = zero growth

   3. Proactively budgeting for failure

   4. Owning my wins means learning to own my failures

3. Feedback is a (very uncomfortable) gift

   1. Soliciting hard feedback

   2. Dealing with hard feedback

   3. 2 tricks to make giving fast feedback easier

   4. Do it for yourself: Feed your own feedback loop & celebrate your wins

4. Managing my schedule

   1. It’s not prioritization until it hurts

   2. Making my calendar work for me

   3. Getting out of meetings and into focused work

   4. 5 tips to make context switching work for me

5. Breaking my limiting beliefs about what I can do

   1. Reframing “I need to change who I am to be successful” to “I can add to who I am”

   2. Upgrade my self-image from "1.0" to "2.0" (and repeat)

   3. Using a “series of dials” to discover new ways to show up

   4. Reframing “Giving myself what I need is selfish” to “Giving myself what I need is a service to the people around me”

   5. Becoming my own burnout spotter

6. Career growth and getting promoted

   1. To get promoted, focus on complexity, autonomy, and throughput

   2. 4 tips to make space for career growth this year

   3. Plan your career growth like you plan your product

7. Working with people on tough problems

   1. Building trust takes trust

   2. Making it through a work fire

   3. Making progress on controversial problems

   4. Use leadership reviews to build principles, not (just) get answers

8. Getting help from others

   1. Ask for help is a competitive advantage

   2. Activating peers instead of getting stuck finding a perfect mentor

   3. An introvert’s 3 secrets to networking

   4. Turn the worst offenders into the best defenders

9. Choosing the right job:

   1. Should I look for a new job? And how to start

   2. Optimize for being lucky

10. Focus on communication

    1. Learning to speak up

    2. The “red pen” trick that sharpened my writing

    3. Enjoying Public Speaking (or 10 tips for faking it)

    4. Moderating a panel or fireside chat

11. Parenting + work

    1. How becoming a parent has made me a better leader

    2. Writing a great parental leave plan
       

Managing a team

12. Easing your way into management

    1. Reminder: finding a global optimum is always a hill climb

    2. Lessons I learned from becoming a first-time manager

    3. 2 secrets that keep me growing as a manager

    4. Asking about career goals in the first 1:1

    5. Learning my team’s “recognition language”

13. Hiring

    1. The playbook I use to recruit a team

    2. Onboarding a new leader, or Joining as a new leader

14. Structuring a team

    1. Layering a team (and getting layered)

    2. Running a clean re-org

15. Developing your team

    1. Holding a great skip-level 1:1

    2. Build leaders faster — share the ambiguity

16. Performance management

    1. Respectful performance management

Product rules of thumb

1. Setting your vision

   1. Understanding your customer (without even leaving the house)

   2. Writing your Minimum Viable Strategy

   3. Creating a product vision

   4. Simplifying your product strategy is a competitive advantage

2. The main job: Execution

   1. The 3 key jobs of building a product: Recognize the problem, structure a solution, and execute

   2. Execution beats strategy every time

   3. Find your central product metaphor

   4. The 4 components of product quality: performance, bugs, completeness, and consistency

   5. Making the tradeoff between speed of shipping and quality

   6. Building confidence in my product opinion

3. What does it mean to build a simple product?

   1. To make something simple, make it predictable

   2. Designing for simplicity: borrow familiar patterns

   3. Keep things in proportion — make every pixel earn its space

   4. A quick simplicity test: remove all the NUXes

   5. Use successful products as clues to underlying human problems

   6. The intangible cost of complexity

   7. If we can make a product work for *anyone*, it usually works better for *everyone*

   8. When something has to be complex, build trust through small choices and fast feedback

   9. Creating delight: 90% “how”, 10% “what”

Thank you for reading, and wishing you all the best! See you soon 🙂