Improve my executive communication skills
Reflecting on 2022 performance, there is significant scope to improve how I convey my ideas to the leadership. I want to work on how I process questions and provide feedback.
‘Gravitas’ by Caroline Goyder will be my guide to improving on my executive presence and communication skills.
Explore AI Product management
Lot of data is generated by the work my colleagues and I do. The type of data ranges from how research participants act and behave in the platform to medical and genetic data as a result of participation. There are many opportunities to automate how the system learns from the data and improves the research experience for the participant.
I am looking to explore Udemy courses or find mentors in the industry to lean how to implement such features and capabilities.
Implement customer journey mapping to identify customer pain points
A breakthrough learning last year was that having an agreed upon customer journey prior to discussing the problems and solutions to improve the customer experience led to better quality of discussions and decision making. I employed journey mapping techniques described in Teresa Torres’s book the Continuous discovery habits for that purpose.
This year, I hope to have my product team craft, share, and refine the journeys of customers in their respective area of focus. I will continue to use Teresa Torres’s book for guidance.
Establish relationships with professionals who work in the industry
Product Management, engineering management, genetics, big data, AI/ML, organizational leadership are some of the areas these experts can be from. But finding and nurturing a mentor relationship is an important goal of mine in 2023.
Improve hiring processes
As I wrote in my recent blog post “It is easy to be Andy Jassy“, a good organizational culture makes many things easy for the employees. Improving hiring might require establishing and promoting a team culture that then throws light on the must have, should have and nice-to-have skills of potential candidates.
Hiring product and data experts to work in a research environment onsite in this job market might have additional challenges.
Explore good System Design practices and build something
A good system enables a good product and consistent user experience for the users. In a resource constrained environment like the one I work in, it is important to build systems that are reusable, scalable, and robust. So I will understand and document existing systems, or help design systems this year that will solve customer problems.
A simple chatbot, an application, a product, or a website; getting my hands dirty is a priority this year.
Honorable mentions
Some other things will include, joining a Spanish language speaking group, Improving on product and organizational strategy, constantly improve or remove the recurring meetings that I organize.