2017年广东湛江执业医师资格考试报名资格审核通

This summer, after 5.5 incredible years at Included Health, I realized I was ready for my next adventure. Fifteen years into my career as a product leader, I've found myself fortunate enough to be able to take some time off and reconnect with my life outside of work while I reflect on what I want to do next -- something that, if I'm being totally honest, I haven't always been very intentional about.

Two months ago, I set off on a “listening tour” to better understand the intersection of my strengths, interests and potential opportunities. Since then, I’ve had 65 conversations — with friends, former colleagues, mentors, connections old and new. My goal with these conversations was to circle in on my “candidate-market fit” but I found that I took far more from this process than I expected. At the same time, I’ve been surprised by how many people have reached out because they are going through a similar process. I'm sharing some of my biggest takeaways in the hopes that they might be valuable to others navigating something similar.

On networking

The concept of a “listening tour” is something that I got from phyl terry 's Never Search Alone process. As an introvert for whom networking can at times feel like a dirty word, I’ve been surprised by how energizing it has been to speaking to people over the past few months. It’s easy for our perspective to shrink to focus on the day-to-day; I don’t think I realized how narrow my operating context had become until I began talking to a broader group of people. These conversations served not only to expand my horizons, but also to remind me of what matters to me. To those who’ve spoken with me — thank you. Your time, conversation and perspective has been a real gift. Some of my biggest takeaways:

1. The power of asking for real feedback, and the role of context in being willing to accept it. I can't overstate how powerful it has been to ask people who know me what I've done well, what I could have done better, and how they'd approach a next step if they were in my shoes. The feedback gave me clarity and confidence in my strengths and illuminated areas for growth. The toughest but most important feedback was about things that aren't my forte and that I realized may never be. A lot of this was feedback I’ve heard before, but hearing it in the context of consciously deciding what to do next was liberating — it truly allowed me to decide what to do with it, and to define and come to terms with the kind of product leader I am. That’s not going to be equally valuable everywhere, and that’s ok. (More on that below.) A huge thanks to Nupur Srivastava , Ben Hadden , Nisha Masharani , Anant Gupta , and Wade Chambers for giving it to me straight.
2. Never say no to a conversation. James Raybould gave me excellent advice: pursue quantity over quality because it's surprisingly difficult to predict how valuable a conversation will be. He was right. Some of the conversations I was most hesitant about turned out to be the most fulfilling, and honestly, there hasn't been a single conversation I didn't learn something from.
3. The Q>1 test. Ross Jensen introduced me to a simple diagnostic for figuring out what truly energizes and motivates me. The Q-factor is a concept from physics, about whether the change in energy in a system after some sort of event. If Q>1, the energy in the system is increasing; if Q<1, the system is losing energy. After each conversation, he suggested, ask yourself if you have more or less energy than you did going in. You know the feeling you get when you’re excited. It’s remarkably simple, yet so useful that I even started tracking it in my notes doc for each conversation. It’s been a terrific gut check on whether I’m really interested in something, and a prompt to help me figure out what piece of it — the industry? the product? the person? — is causing that.
4. Connection to the broader world as the antidote for career burnout. I've been surprised by the number of people who've reached out because they too are reevaluating their priorities and career path. One thing I've realized is that it's really hard to do this while you're in a job where most of your mental and emotional energy is narrowly focused on succeeding within that job in that organization. The reality is that that is a very narrow measure of success, but it's hard to see that while you're in it. Especially for those of us who derive much of our identity and self-worth from our job (raises hand), it can be scary to step out make a change, even if it's clearly the right thing to do. Talking to friends and colleagues who’ve chosen different industries, roles, company stages and organization sizes was a reminder that even within a career in product, there are many different paths available and that what it means to be successful and fulfilled is very personal. It gave me permission to put a stake in the ground on what I care about and want to optimize for.

On evaluating opportunities

I picked up a lot of practical advice along the way for evaluating potential opportunities. Much of it is specific to early product leadership hires, and enough so that I will probably write a standalone post about it, but a lot is fairly universal.

1. It’s about the people. This is the #1 piece of advice I’ve been giving to folks I mentor for years, but the further I get in my career, the more I realize how true and important it is. It’s been the people I work with that have contributed not just both to my career growth, but to my enjoyment of my work. A few helpful heuristics I picked up to evaluate people: (a) Ask yourself, would you still want to work with this person if they didn’t happen to be the founder? (h/t 潘博文 ) (b) Ask the people you interview with, who in the company is the person they’ve learned the most from? Are they all pointing to the same person? Go work for that person. (h/t Wade Chambers )
2. Look for the wind, then look for sails that will catch it. Everyone’s heard the advice to “get on a rocketship, and don’t worry about what seat you have.” But how do you figure out what’s truly got legs? The first part’s easy: identify the prevailing winds that are blowing. The second part requires work: build theses on the industries that are likely to be transformed by it and look for the types of companies that are positioned to catch that wind. Another great one from Wade Chambers . (In terms of wisdom dropped per conversation, it is hard to top spending an hour with Wade.)
3. Write down what matters to you, and consistently track it. I went through an exercise to write down my must-haves and must-nots in what I’m looking for. Some of these are fairly straightforward parameters (must be at least partly in person, must be fewer than 200 people), while others are squishier (is it a product-driven company? is it something that people use and love? do I vibe with the CEO?). I then created a Notion page with a table with columns for each dimension, where I evaluate every opportunity on each of the dimensions. Something I’ve realized is that in the past, at times I’ve gotten so excited about a problem space, or so invested in an interview process, that I haven’t always paid attention to the other factors that play a role in whether I’ll enjoy something. My goal with the tracker isn’t to immediately disqualify an opportunity because it doesn’t check one of the boxes, but to be more conscious about where I might be making tradeoffs.
4. Listen to your gut. Yes, it’s important to rationally weigh opportunities, but your gut is an important source of signal about what motivates you. And if your gut doesn’t truly believe in something, no amount of rational debate will convince it. One great heuristic that James Raybould shared was the 48-hour test: Are you still thinking about the opportunity 48 hours after the conversation? Lots of things are exciting when you first encounter them, but if you are still energized and noodling on ideas after two days, that’s a pretty strong signal.

On myself

Talking to so many people has been simultaneously a map and a mirror: it’s both given me the lay of the land as well as helped me find my place within it. Some of what I’ve realized:

1. I’m a team builder and bar-raiser. People and craft have always been focuses for me, but I was surprised by how consistent people’s responses were when I asked them what I did well. They described me as someone who: consistently elevates the standard of what good looks like for both products and PMs; identifies and hires strong talent and nurtures them to excel; takes ownership and leads by example; and simplifies complex concepts, communicating vision and strategy in a way that connects with and inspires teams. Hearing this feedback was both humbling and validating.
2. I'm a builder at heart. I've always loved building things. As I've climbed the leadership ladder in larger organizations, my role has shifted more towards the "work around the work." Listening to people discuss their projects, the challenges they face, and their approaches to problem-solving -- made me realize how much I miss the direct connection to what we're building, why, and how. I also spoke to senior leaders who've led hugely successful businesses yet have chosen to prioritize building — either by starting their own ventures or by carefully selecting opportunities that allow them to focus there. These conversations gave me permission to prioritize what truly matters to me: building for the love of the craft. One leader told me, "I'll never work on a product again that doesn't have users who love and use the product." This resonated so strongly that I've decided to adopt it as my own mantra.
3. I'm more of an editor-in-chief than a visionary. We often envision product leaders as Jobs-esque visionaries, conjuring new ideas from thin air. However, conversations with founders and startup executives reminded me that in early-stage startups, the founder is the vision holder and will always in some sense be the true head of product, and what they’re often seeking in a product leader is a partner who can help refine and execute that vision: someone who can translate it into a strategy and roadmap, and build a team capable of delivering, learning, and iterating. And this is exactly what I love doing. What at first felt like a failing as a product leader emerged as a reminder that different contexts call for different types of product leaders, and an opportunity to define the type of product leader I am.
4. I need to be around people. As an outcomes-focused introvert, I was surprised at how much energy I took from spending time with people. The creative energy in this exchange of ideas — both those shared directly and those that emerged from the alchemy of live conversation — and the simple experience of human connection has been invigorating. It’s made me want to prioritize this in my next role — both in terms of the quality of people (smart but humble, passionate but not overly self-serious, ambitious but also a bit playful) and in spending meaningful face-to-face time with the team. Fully remote work is not for me.

On where the wind is (i.e., thoughts on AI)

I’m a little hesitant to opine too much on AI because of how rapidly things are changing — as soon as I have a thesis, the ground shifts. But here a few things I’ve found interesting and have been thinking about recently:

1. How AI will change things by radically reducing the technical skills needed to build. I wrote a post a few weeks ago about “AI as API” and how industries where writing software isn’t a core competency will be transformed because it no longer takes technical capacity to build interactive experiences. Since then, I played with Wordware.ai for the first time. It's a natural-language IDE for building agentic experiences, and it’s worth checking out — it’s a glimpse of how this future will come to be.
2. AI as “magic duct tape.” I loved this description of LLMs from Alex Komoroske. What I find most different about building products with AI is that unlike software that we’re accustomed to building, it’s non-deterministic. This makes it possible to build incredible things — from a chatbot that can (for example) respond to health insurance queries across incredible breadth and framed in myriad different ways to, as Ben Thompson theorized in this week's Stratechery, the ability to generate UI on-the-fly in response to infinitely variable scenarios in AR devices. But it’s also what is most different to designing experiences where where there are a fixed and known set of inputs and outputs -- from how you help create context for users on what kinds of things they can do, to how you handle unexpected outcomes.
3. Everything product will have AI, and AI will change every product. This isn’t meant hyperbolically, but literally. AI, or perhaps more accurately, what it enables, will drive the next platform shift in technology. We're rapidly approaching a point similar to circa 2012 when it no longer made sense to ask if a company was a mobile company. We'll soon no longer be asking if a company is an AI company because all companies will leverage AI in one form or another.

A few other miscellaneous thoughts:

• The power of being present.?From playing with the kids, to doing the dishes, even something as small as shifting from using a laptop to an iPad, where there’s just a little bit of friction in shifting between tasks, I've been practicing being more present in what I'm doing. It has illuminated how fragmented my attention has become, and how rewarding it is to give one thing at a time my undivided attention.
• Walking.?My god, it’s powerful. You can walk while talking with others, or by yourself. You can walk in the city or the woods. You somehow both process thoughts and clear your head doing it. Your posture improves, you feel alert and alive. It’s almost as if human beings have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to optimize for walking.

What's next for me?

I’m looking for a head of product role at a fast-growing series A/B startup that is what I’m calling “consumer-ish” — product-driven B2B or B2C companies with a strong end-user orientation who’ve built something that people use and love. I’ve realized I love the phase where there’s traction and product-market fit, but it’s still small and early enough that I can help shaping the product and team for the next phase of growth.

If you’re connected to interesting companies that fit that description, I’d love to be connected.

And if we haven’t caught up in a while, please drop a line! I’ve realized how much I love talking to folks in my extended circle and am looking forward to making it a more regular habit.