Finding Your Confidence

In one of his early reviews at Microsoft, Nate’s manager gave him some game-changing feedback. He said, “Nate, you’re doing great, but you need to find your confidence.”

With that feedback and a bit of reflection, he was able to see that his lack of confidence was slowing him down. Multiple times, he found himself thinking, “I don’t know how to do that” while hanging back from tackling new opportunities. Classic imposter syndrome!

One year into his job at Microsoft, his manager suggested he blog about the product he was working on. After publishing his first few posts and getting feedback from developers reading his code examples, he started to realize he was an expert (in some people’s eyes). The same thing happened when he went to developer conferences. People asked him technical questions, and he was able to answer them.

He explains,

“I had become an expert on something I didn't know anything about a year earlier. That was a big “a-ha” moment for me. I realized I’m actually good at figuring out new things, and instead of hanging back, I started raising my hand for the high-impact projects, even when I didn’t feel 100% confident. You don’t need to feel completely confident to step up.”

Over the course of his career Nate identified two strategies for landing these types of career accelerating opportunities:

Leverage your strengths to open doors to opportunities that at first glance look out of reach. Take on side projects to figure out what you’re good at, what lights you up, and to build experience and credibility in the direction you want to move.

When you're trying to expand into new territory and make career shifts, Nate suggests,

“Ask yourself, ‘how can I have the biggest impact?’ The answer usually lies in leveraging your strengths. Use them to get your foot in the door for new opportunities, and to give yourself a leg up.”

That’s exactly how Nate made the transition from engineering to product management.

While he was still in his first role at Zillow as an engineer, he had the opportunity to take on some product management responsibilities. He helped drive release, process across the org, and communication between engineering, test, and operations. In taking on this work outside his core role, he learned he was naturally very good at program management, and that it was where he could add the most value at the company.

He also realized that product management was what got him most excited to come into work every day. Though he hadn’t had any experience with product management previously, the fact that he had started doing it outside of his role gave him the opportunity to make a career transition within the company.

He told Zillow’s leadership he wanted to switch into product management, and they gave him two options:

Take a promotion in his current test management role OR Switch to program manager and start over at the bottom level to prove himself, forgoing the promotion.

This was a hard choice. Take the direct path upwards, or take a few steps “backwards” and bet he could level up quickly and make a huge leap forward down the road. He gave up the promotion and started over at the bottom. In doing so, he set in motion a critical turning point in his career that put him on the path to VP of Product and Growth. Talk about bold moves.

By the time he raised his hand for a program management role, he had already leveraged his strengths to take on project management related responsibilities and demonstrate his competence. The combination of these two strategies helped him open the door to a rocketship role tasked with launching Zillow’s mortgage marketplace.

He remained in that role for 7 years, scaling Zillow’s newest and second largest business to millions in revenue. He did this all while laddering up from Senior Program Manager to VP of Product, and simultaneously launching and scaling Zillow’s growth team.

Be Known for Investing in Others

Over his time at Zillow, Nate has started and scaled multiple teams across the company. From starting the stress and performance team from scratch, to building and scaling the mortgage team, to now managing 150 people across 15 teams - Nate earned the reputation as someone who could hire, develop, and manage people to build strong teams. This skill is universally important across all high growth companies, and one of the most critical skills to cultivate if you want to advance your career as quickly as possible.

A few years into Nate’s tenure building the mortgage team, Zillow was looking for the right person to build out a traffic and growth team. Not surprisingly, they chose Nate because of his proven ability to grow new teams from the ground up.

Nate explains,

“If you’ve shown aptitude in certain areas, often it doesn’t matter the topic, the skill set is transferable, much like principles. If you can build a new product team and figure out a new vertical, you can probably build a new team to figure out growth.

This is a critical point because the only way to grow your career is to develop others and build great teams. You can’t scale yourself unless you're growing others.”

After years of successfully building and scaling teams for Zillow, Nate calls out two critical components of developing strong teams:

Balance the skills across your team Invest in the development of others

One of the foundational tenets of building strong teams is rooted in making sure your team, represents the full spectrum of skills, both hard and soft, needed to accomplish the team’s charter. The key to this is making sure each team member brings skills that are complementary in some way to the rest of the team. This empowers everyone to leverage their unique strengths to lead and drive impact where others on the team have little experience or skill.

For example, say you have a deeply technical lead on your team who has a promising idea, but not much experience or interest in selling ideas across an organization and getting buy in. You’d want to make sure that technical lead has a strong product or business partner who excels at evangelizing and championing new ideas to get resources and support from leadership and the larger team.

Building teams of contributors whose skills are complementary is all about first identifying the key skills your team needs to reach its goals. If you are starting from scratch, you can use that list of skills to identify who within the org has which skills and who may be a fit for your team, and advocate for them to join. Or you can hire in those target skills from outside candidates. This allows you to be proactive in assembling the right matrix of team members with the required talents and experience. It also prevents you from hiring reactively and ending up with big gaps or redundancies in your team.

If on the other hand, you step into leading an existing team, start with that same primary step of identifying the key skills needed on the team. Then, get to know each team member and determine where they excel and how they add the most value to a team. Next, compare your list of needs with what your existing team members bring to the table.

Which team members match up to which needs? Are there gaps? Redundancies? Once you’ve mapped this out, you will have ideas about whether some existing team members aren't a good fit and need to move on or if you need to bring in new talent.

As you build out your team to include members that embody all of the required skills and traits, you also need to invest in developing the various managers and contributors that make up your team. This means that as the leader you are always grooming them to take on their next role.

You want to coach them with radical candor feedback, give them new opportunities to stretch and grow, support them and teach them as they ramp up on new skills, and encourage them along the way. The goal is to help them advance the hard and soft skills they need to do their next role well. You want to help them develop their strategic and analytical thinking, problem solving and leadership abilities, confidence, and any other required skills to get them ready for new challenges.

Nate explains, "After a few years of building out my growth team, I now have managers who know more than I do in each growth area. I have a strong leader for SEO, paid marketing, activation, engagement, and other teams."

It’s important to remember that to be a good team manager you have to balance execution with leadership, and a large part of that includes developing and empowering your team to execute their work and be successful without you. If you’re always heads down doing your work, you won’t be able to scale the people or your team, or yourself.

Nate says,

“You can tell if someone is a great leader if when they leave, their org still runs just as well without them. Don’t be the lynchpin! You’ll know if you are if your team falls apart when you step away.”

Growth isn’t just about growing your traffic, conversions, users and revenue. At its core it’s about growing your people in a way that empowers them to drive the growth of the company. The faster you can grow the next level of leaders to own and run your current team, the sooner you can start working on the next big thing.

For Nate, as his career evolved and he laddered up to bigger and bigger leadership roles, this focus on building strong teams and and investing in the growth of his team members allowed him to consistently strike out into new territories and push his limits.

When I first realized that Nate had spent 12+ years at one company, I asked him, “Did you ever get bored?”

He responded, “How could I? I was always taking on new challenges, and each was a fascinating new puzzle to figure out.”

To close out our exploration with Nate, we wanted to share a few of the resources, books, videos and learning tools that most influenced Nate at different points in his career journey, so far.

We’d love to hear from you - if you have thoughts, opinions or questions about any of this, or if there are other books and resources you think we should add to the list, send us a tweet @natemoch, @reforge, and @laurenrobbass.

Nate’s reading list:

Personal growth:

Teams/Management:

Growth:

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