7:00 a.m.
Three weeks left. Hoping to lock down all my interviews for before the Presidents’ Day weekend. While I’m hoping to get 2-4 more “full loops” locked down for the 7th – 18th, I’m wondering every day if that was too aggressive a goal. While multiple seem on the verge, only one is locked. It’s so crazy. It’s hard not to doubt myself. In March we start having to sell investments to cover expenses.
I had five calls already scheduled for this week before it started, one a 2-hour screen (called an “exercise”). I’m happy about 4 of them (including the exercise). The other is with a recruiter who reached out at the end of December and I scheduled the follow-up for when I figured I’d be in the thick of the job hunt. As I’ve gained more clarity on my ideal role/product fit, the product they make feels less like it fits. I’m sort of hoping we’ll get on the call and they’ll say “oh, sorry, we made an offer already” so I don’t have to turn them down.
So what is my ideal product fit? I’m glad you asked because this is something I’ll need to talk about in interviews. I left Alexa primarily because of changes and impending changes to my duties. Changing priorities aside, I loved Alexa. And I one of the things I had to think about was why Alexa was my favorite product to work for since I left the Internet Explorer tech docs team. And the primary commonality shared by Alexa and IE was the open space for developer creativity. They aren’t tools. They are canvases.
I love the products that are neither fish nor fowl, that defy attempts to put them and their developers/users in neat little boxes. I like products that aren’t so much messy in themselves, but let developers get extremely messy.
I am talking with some FinTech companies, one in the IAM space, as well as some broader SaaS and PaaS opportunities, but all of them give me the “so many possibilities” vibe. Even if I’m not immediately visualizing specific wow demos I could create, I sense they’re in there. They are products that I believe provide important elements for dreaming big.
Monitoring tools, IaaS, CI/CD tools… I believe those help developers realize their dreams, but they don’t help you dream per se. They are the melatonin that helps you sleep healthy, restful sleep. The products I love are the spicy burrito (or biryani) that fills your sleep with visions; the product that makes you wake up at 3 a.m. with ideas, not anxieties.
Yes, I love to dream up cool demos and neat tools and make them real. I love to create SWAG and show off my inventions on stage. But mostly, I love being part of people’s a-ha moments. I love helping people reach the place where they see the road forward and start running. And I love celebrating their successes both because they deserve celebration and because they can inspire others.
So I’m looking for companies/products that provide me and the developer customers I’d serve a base from which we can launch dreams, experiments, and inventions.
Does that make sense?