The Most Valuable Career Advice I’ve Ever Received

I want to share a piece of advice that has been incredibly impactful for me, both personally and professionally. This isn't exclusive to product managers, but I find it especially helpful when working in product.

The advice was this: you should compile your own personal board of directors.

Just like a company board, the goal is to bring together a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds to ensure the best outcomes, ideally with people who make up for things that you lack. This isn’t a formal thing where you need to ask, "Will you be on my board of directors?" It’s an informal, intentional way to surround yourself with people who can help guide you, who you can bounce professional and personal things off of, and who help you continue to move forward.

Making Up for What You Lack

The real crux of having a personal board is to get help with the things you don't have, be they skills or perspectives. To start compiling a board, think through what you are good at and what others come to seek advice from you about. You likely don't need more of that on your board. No one is an expert at everything, so thinking through what you need help with will ensure you have a diverse, excellent board.

When compiling a board, think about perspective and demographic as valuable distinctions. I'm a 30-something male, gay, product manager. My experience as a product professional is very different from someone in their 60's or from someone who is female. Even if you have similar skills, perspective and demographics can yield wildly different insights and learnings. Be sure to stock your board with diverse perspectives and diverse skills!

One person on my board is seemingly good at everything. I admire her chameleonic ability to adapt to wholly new jobs and execute them with finesse. Given her many prior roles and track record of success, she's a must-have on my board because I can ask her about navigating change in addition to her many areas of experience.

Likewise, I’ve worked with people who are masterful at organization-level optimizations and operations—getting an entire organization in line behind OKRs and moving as one big whole toward goals. That is not an easy feat. I have a specific person on my board who is great at this exact sort of thing. Anytime I'm faced with an operational, process, or alignment hurdle—where I feel like the organization is speaking 10 different languages—I know I can seek her advice to clarify a path forward.

When I'm faced with a large life decision or a particularly significant challenge at work, I go to my board members and ask for their perspective on what they think I should do.

Assembling Your Board Members

When you think about your board, don’t just look for skills. The value is in the diversity of perspectives they encourage in addition to their skills.

• Vary their ages. It’s important to have people younger than you, older than you, and your peers.
• Vary their backgrounds and life experiences. You don’t want everybody on your board to be the exact same type of person, or they’re going to have the exact same type of perspective.
• Find people you can trust. When you talk to your board members, be as transparent as possible. These should be people you can have a real rapport with.
• Look for people who will challenge you. You want people who can push back and say, "I don’t know if I agree with you on this. Here’s another way to think about it." You need people who can help craft you and push you in a better direction, even if you can’t always see it yourself.
• Stay in touch. Finally, just like in a corporate setting, stay close with your board members. Keep them abreast of what’s going on with you–when they’re plugged into your life, they'll be able to help when you need it most!

The Core Philosophy: The Strength in Asking for Help

At its heart, creating a board shares a core truth close to my philosophy for work and life: asking for help is valuable. Asking for help requires knowing that you are not always the best at everything. It's important to be able to admit that you are in need of help to stay humble (and honest) and to continue learning to better yourself.

I'm in a professional council group called Collaborative Gain that emphasizes this as a core part of its operations and our cadence as professionals, particularly for product managers. Being able to ask for and receive help is valuable for the person receiving it, the person giving it, and anyone observing.

Your personal board operates the same way. When you ask for help, you honor the people you’ve deemed worthy of asking for that help (you implicitly think they have a valuable contribution to make), and it also helps you in the process. You can then pay that forward with the wisdom you gain. One of the greatest strengths a person can have is asking others for help–it isn't weakness. On the contrary, asking for help requires great humility and strength. As you build a practice of asking for help, you create a network with a "pay it forward" mentality where everyone gets better in the asking for and giving of help.

Get Started

If this idea resonates with you, take some time to intentionally think it through.

1. Sit down and brainstorm who you would put on your board.
2. Think about the people who have already started to play that role naturally in your life and those who have skills/background that you don't.
3. Consider the people you really respect and identify why you respect them.
4. Start to place them on your board and begin to ask for help.

I hope this helps you as much as it has helped me! If you have a similar concept in your life, I'd love to hear about it in the comments!