Notes from 15–22/6

Hum Qing Ze

5 min readJun 21, 2020

COVID19

Post COVID-19 trends

Teachable? Lots of bits and pieces.

Career

How to Be a Career-Changing Mentor — 25 Tips From The Best Mentors We Know

1. Save the troubleshooting for later.

great mentorship is not about tactical problem solving — it’s about supporting the person holistically

2. Loosen your grip on what it takes to make mentorship “work.”

mentors need to let go of their ideas of what success looks like

3. Figure out what kind of mentor you are and tailor your advice accordingly.

Mentors who are much further ahead in their careers are going to be terrible on tactics. But they can help you peer around corners that you don’t even see coming. You don’t want to serve up career platitudes if they’re looking for targeted go-to-market tactics.

4. Be sure to listen for the subtext.

You have to listen to the challenge that they’re overtly telling you about, all while hearing what they’re actually saying

5. Remember that most of mentorship is getting your mentee to focus on the right problems.

nine times out of 10 the issue isn’t about finding the optimal solution, but rather ensuring people are focused on the right problem in the first place.

6. Hand down your hard-won context.

Feedback in 3 ways. Broad information the mentor experienced or changed in the career, personal stories, and finally frameworks.

7. Skip the instructions — tell stories and share resources instead.

8. Hand out fishing rods, not fish.

9. Give the gift of confidence and validation.

10. Help your mentee practice checking for blindspots and surveying stakeholders.

11. Encourage the emotion and create space for self-care.12. Practice your management skills and treat mentees like they’re on your team.

13. Imagine you cloned yourself. What would you always have your clone do and what would you never let the clone do?

14. What do you need right now?

It’s easy to jump straight into giving advice based on our own experience, but often that’s not what your mentee needs.

15. What else is on your mind?

When mentees bring up a challenge, it’s not always what’s bothering them the most, but rather what they think is appropriate to share

16. What are you excited about doing in the future, five years from now?

By looking five years out, and focusing just on what gets them excited, as a mentor you can help them stay within reality but release all of these other constraints that get in the way.

17. What would be the worst case scenario if you dropped this item entirely?

18. Let’s get concrete — what’s the context and what are your constraints?

19. What’s getting in the way of your learning?

20. How would you perceive this challenge from the outside looking in?

This question shifts their mindset and helps them cultivate a more objective understanding of the challenge and potential solutions

22. Probe deeper when it seems your mentee doesn’t know what to ask.

25. Get your mentee to step back and see the why.

I like to spend time on the purpose behind a specific problem or situation,” she says. “Why are you working on this product or program? Why does your company exist? Why do you think the founder cares so much about this issue?

Data

9 Key Machine Learning Algorithms Explained in Plain English

Putting as part of future reference notes on how to explain difficult things

Development

Want to learn DevOps? This Free 3-Hour Course will Teach You the Prerequisites to Get Started

When I finally need to learn DevOps

Product

Startup school

Content looks good!

Avenify We give you money to pay for school

brilliant and possibly synergistic model

Product Judgment: How some people can repeatedly create product success

it is the idea that you can use your own judgment to (1) accurately predict what your customers need, want and value, and (2) design and ship the right solution for them.

Roadmapping: When faced with two competing feature ideas, the person with great product judgment can accurately predict which one will be better for customers. They simply don’t ship changes that people don’t value.
Scoping: When faced with a scope call, whether a feature is in or out for a release, they can find the right balance between shipping value sooner by building less, but still solving the customer problem. They don’t waste any effort.
Designing: When faced with different design solutions, they can pick the solution that customers will more easily understand and be able to adopt and use. They understand how all the features in a product are connected together, and they can predict with accuracy which workflows and paths their customers will take, and how design changes will impact those paths.

In summary

Product Judgment isn’t an obscure concept. It exists, it is verifiable, and it is learned through direct experiences with customers.
You can increase the speed at which you build Product Judgment by talking to, and observing, more and more customers.
Building a great product crosses many domains, and Product Judgment is domain specific. The domain might be the industry the product is in, or the type of problem it solves. Or the domain might be the different areas that make up a full product, from how it is designed, to how it is priced and positioned in the market.
Product Judgment is transferable across similar domains, but not across different domains. To build fully rounded Product Judgment, you need to cover the wide range by directing talking to customers about all the domains.

How to Scale High Performance Product Teams

Trust is something that can’t be seen. Trust exists between specific people — trust does not exist between roles, or job descriptions. Each time a person leaves a team, and a new person joins the team, trust needs to get rebuilt. Trust is what makes The Hum in high performance teams.