The most important Ingredient for Growth
If you are an entrepreneur, you will be successful if you build what solves customers’ problems. You need to be in their shoes, understand their short-term and long-term requirements, need to understand how is their day-to-day life, what problems do they face; and then based on it, prepare short-term and long-term plans to build/enhance the product.
Smiling to your customers or providing them freebies doesn’t help in getting them to stick to your product!
If you are working with a company, your customers are users of the product that you are working on, plus your boss. You need to think about those end-users as an entrepreneur does for her/his clients. You need to be aware of the long-term plans of the product, you need to be authentic in your feedback about those plans and practices/processes that are being followed to support them.
Additionally, in this case also go through the deliverables of your boss, her/his pain points, and solve them as you do for the end-users. Just adhering to existing plans without your authentic feedback, will just make people around you happy in the short run and may not give you the growth you are seeking.
When we superficially look at successful people, what we see is just the tip of the iceberg. We can see a lot about what they have achieved, but only a little about what they went through to accomplish it. Remember there is no shortcut, there is nothing free.
The growth process is iterative. In each iteration, you will clean up and make things easier for people, and then pass on the ownership of those items to your subordinates to take on even bigger challenges.
The process is long and will be exhausting. But, this attitude is the only thing that you need to grow your product and also for rising in your career. Just additionally work on your fitness, which you need as support along the journey.
