Di Lin's Blog
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Work Mindset

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Work Methodology is hard to change since we have inertia. Practice more to change it!

Presentation (Demo / Tech Sharing)

How to do presentation or tech sharing effectively?

  1. Who is your audience and what do they want to hear / what can they take away? Construct your meterial from the stakeholders’ angle. Learn what your audience is doing.
  2. Ask experts for what they recommend.
  3. If you are doing a MVP demo, it is vital to get feedback cause that’s your main goal. Through demo, you can gather more points of view so you can improve your product at an early stage.
  4. Rehearsal before presentation.

Turn Bad Porject to Shining Gold

The most vital thing is not how important or hard your task is. Of course good project means you have more resources. But if it happens that your project sucks, it is how you can do it perfectly that matters. Shine it by:

  1. Do it well.
  2. Communicate well between teams. Increase the across-team impact.
  3. Empower other teams by your “little” and “trivial” project.

Think More

DO NOT only finish the task you are told to do. That’s just the basis.Take a second to think more:

  1. Which part do I miss?
  2. Ask experts for feedback that can improve your methodology and remind you aspects that you miss for your lack of industry experience.
  3. Focus on the “WHY” part of your task. Does it make sense to do thing this way? Can we improve it?

Do Things THOROUGHLY

  1. After your task is done, you can intiatively do a demonstration inside or outside the team. It is a good chance to gather feedback for your product and expand your impact.

  2. Re-think the WHY part of the project. Can I improve anyhing?

  3. How do I finish this task? Score yourself for the performance. What can I learn through this task?

  4. Summerization and sharing.

  5. Take an example, if you write a tool for your team, you can do the below thing to make this task complete:

    • Place the code in a correct and complant place where other team member can easily leverage it. (eg. Azure DevOps of big team’s org)
    • during development, keep stakeholders aware of the latest progress and your future action items. This can also remind them that you are contributing.
    • Write README file or tutorial / wiki for your tool so later when the project is transferred it can be easy to use.
    • Do demo.
    • Write project summary for it to remind all the pits you encountered.

Focus on the WHY part

Your boss literally does not care how technically hard your task is, it is the value of the task that he cares. Have a clear mind why your team is asking you to do the job you are currently work on. From your bos’s angle, what is the urgent problem he would like to resolve? Can you help with that?

Grow Sense of Ownership

Develop your ownership. Initiatively drive meetings / discussions over your project. Think more of your project. Your project is where you build your own career reputation.

Cross-team Communication

  1. Drive the process. Don’t be passively pushed forward. You got to take the initiative.
  2. Mind not to distractive readers in email thread. Construct your email logically and mind the subtle details. Or it might have bad effect on your boss who is not very familiar with the truth.
  3. Effective communication.

Be Expert of What You Are Doing

Don’t just finish your task. Dig into the details of what you are doing. You got to be very familiar with the detailed implementation and all the subtle corner cases because that ensures your task quality.

Tips for Career

  1. Gather feedback or compliment each time you co-work with others, especially cross-team. You can email the people describing the entire process and your thankness. Ask them to give you some feedback to help you grow.