My first job out of college was as a Product Manager at ZoomInfo. By all measures I was a terrible employee when I started.
I entered into a situation where 90%+ of what I was suppose to work on were things I knew nothing about. As a result I struggled to make progress on anything. I wish I had something like the Product Foundations program at the time.
Thankfully, my manager at the time quickly recognized this, and we had a long honest conversation about what I was comfortable with and what I wasn’t. From there, he helped reshape the project so that a larger percent of the work was based on things I knew how to do while making sure a chunk was still new to me. That was a turning point for me. After that, I not only learned much faster but delivered much better results.
The common advice is to maximize learning, you should jump into something with both feet. This is wrong. Studies have shown that the most effective learners learn by relating the new with the known.
If you want to maximize learning and impact you need a foot in the known and a foot in the unknown. Whatever you are working on, a certain percentage of the work are things that leverage what you already know, and a certain percentage are things you don’t know and you need to stretch.
The Known vs Unknown Spectrum
We can think about this as a spectrum where one end is 100% known. This is where what you are working on only requires skills you've mastered. The other end is 100% unknown. This is where the work doesn't utilize any skills you've mastered.
Both ends of this spectrum are problematic.
When you are too far in the known you aren’t continually learning. If you stay in this zone for too long it leads to your knowledge and capabilities becoming obsolete as the industry moves around you. Being in the known can often be the source of being bored or unhappy with your job. It’s easy to fall too far into the known because it feels easy, comfortable, and efficient.
Being too far in the unknown also has its problems. It leads to being overwhelmed and not knowing where to start. This leads it to making it impossible to make progress and feeling like you are on a hamster wheel. This is where I was with my first job at ZoomInfo.
The Goals Is Not Maintain 50/50
While you might think that this means the perfect spot is to always be 50/50, in reality there is no perfect 50/50. What you want to shoot for is the range in the middle of 70/30 to 30/70. Sometimes you might be 70% in the known, and 30% in the unknown. Sometimes the reverse. Your goal is to recognize the signs when you are one of the ends of the spectrum and figure out a way to work yourself back to the middle. To do that typically requires changing or reshaping the project that you are working on.
Related Links: Impact = Environment X Skills, Grow Your Career Like You Grow A Product, 7 Principles To Mastering Growth
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