#130 - Would you want a career with a poor feedback loop?
If the accuracy and frequency of the feedback loop came written on the label of the career you have chosen, would you have made the same choice?
In 2021, I was leading a unit of fifteen-odd that was building out a smart writing assistant for scientists. The time came when we had something to put out into the world, so I got some help. As an intrapreneur, I asked around the company for marketers. We did some segmentation of the market, designed a campaign around that, launched it, and then waited for results. And we waited.
It seemed to be a segmentation issue. We just didn’t have the ideal customer persona pinned down. It was maybe a discovery issue–the right people didn’t know we existed. It was also a conversion issue—our funnel narrowed down too quickly. After two months, I did not have a good explanation for the numbers, or the lack of them. The one thing I learned for sure was to always add more than 100% slack to the duration of a marketing campaign, no matter how tightly it was designed.
Now consider this:
👉Professional athletes have coaches, support staff, commentators, and the wider public to point out exactly what they’re acing and where they’re tanking.
👉Airline pilots have a wealth of flight data to capture how good they are at their jobs.
👉Surgeons have patients’ recovery times and post-op quality of life as a barometer for their competence.
These professionals can review their equivalent of game tape immediately after a performance and pick out the smallest areas of improvement. Armed with this information, they can then go on and design deliberate practice sessions and work on training simulators to get better at those identified areas of their work.
Knowledge work falls short on all fronts. No clear feedback loop, no game tape to watch and learn from right after, no training simulators.
If you’re a marketer or a product manager or an engineer or an investor or a CEO:
1️⃣Your feedback is delayed.
3️⃣Your feedback is ambiguous.
4️⃣Simulation opportunities (pilots? pre-calls?) are hard to come by.
Feedback loop determines your learning curve. You try out things, you hear back, you make sense of what you hear back, you make corrections, and you try again. The faster this cycle runs, the faster you learn.
I assume none of this is a surprise to you. Market conditions, the team you’re a part of, and timing are all factors that contribute to the outcome. Separating luck from skill, no wonder, is hard.
Under such circumstances, how do you get better at what you do?
You can’t measure your progress. There are no clear metrics, except proxies such as salary and rank. So, if you can’t measure it, how will you improve it?
Maybe you can go another way. Not as quantifiable as measuring but useful nonetheless. You can evaluate your progress. What are the signs that you’re doing better, or worse? That won’t be straightforward. Because there are a hundred variables at play that are causing the outcome.
Most don’t sweat over this. Most get frustrated and come up with coping mechanisms. One such mechanism is confidence. Appear to the world like you know. Pick up a belief system and champion it.
You will find such an ideological bunch everywhere. They will pepper their speech with absolutely and impossible and totally. When explaining their reasons, they will pile on moreovers and alsos.
I was / still am one of them, depending on the issue at hand.
I remember the first time I had the distinct feeling of listening to someone who didn’t seem married to an ideology. Instead of absolutely there was probably; in place of moreover there was however. It seemed namby-pamby and almost frustrating.
Yet, talk to Novak Djokovic and even he will admit to doubts. Even he will say he doesn’t know for sure. In vocations with reliable feedback loops, experts are comfortable projecting ambiguity. In noisy professions, like knowledge work, experts strive to project conviction. These experts aren’t paid to say ‘I don’t know.’
Early on in your career, things may be different though. You’re new so you’re building new mental models with each experience. You may have a manager who cares about you and your growth. As you move up into mid-career and assume more consequential responsibilities, that fellowship tends to end before you feel ready. And the (voluntary) work begins.
If you really want to be intentional about your growth as a knowledge worker, know that the bar for curiosity is high.
For you to extract feedback about your skill set that you can fine-tune and make more efficient, you have to have your own processes that lets you track your progress. You will find little of that ritualized. You will have to be creative.
Next time I’ll share some of the ways I have tried to hear back from the world. What has been your experience like getting feedback for yourself?