Friction to Fluency

When you’re watching someone skilled at their job, the way they think and operate can seem like magic. You could be awestruck by a musician you just saw perform, and they could be kicking themself for missing a note. What you see is excellence, and the result of their deliberate practice over time, and what they see is an opportunity to grow.

We spend a lot of time thinking about the manager’s perspective of growth. We wrote about this with the blog post Gatekeepers and Gardeners, and it’s commonly referenced in the context of situational leadership. Individually, though, we experience growth through ups and downs over time.

In this post I try to put words to this continuous cycle.

When I start something new, friction holds me back. Every brief start has a blunt stop. Every ounce of success comes with a pound of failure. It’s like dragging my feet on concrete.

This couldn’t be more true for a new job, a new role, or an evolving set of challenges, where friction pushes me to grow my fluency with new types of problems, and eventually empowers me to grow my impact.

One of the reasons I left my last job is because I realized my greatest mentor had become the internet. It became my biggest inspiration, for better or worse. I loved my team, I had a bunch of exciting projects to work on, and I had the freedom to implement things in any way I saw fit, but I felt that I didn’t have anyone to challenge me, or help me understand why option A might be better than option B, or even that there is an option B. I was skipping over the hard parts of making something work well, and leaning into my one strength of hacking things together in a haphazard way.

When I joined HubSpot as a Software Engineer, I was excited to grow and learn from people who had seen the story before. At the time, I couldn’t have imagined how much I still had to learn, and how much friction there was ahead.

In the beginning, there’s always friction

As a new engineer, you might know that building a product requires writing some code, connecting to a database, and somehow making that service available to users, but you might not know what each of those things maps to in practice, the expectations you should have for them, or when you should or shouldn’t use them. You also might not know what goes into user research, design, scoping out a “good enough” first version, or how to partner with folks who can assist with these problems.

As a new leader, you need to build trust on and off your team, learn how your team and the organization operate, figure out the active problems and paths toward their solutions, and so much more. You need a network to help you build bridges before you can easily navigate building them yourself. You need management and organizational systems, and flexibility within those systems, to individualize your relationships with your team and peers.

Similar problems apply to any new project or role, where the friction holding you back from moving forward immediately comes from the context and knowledge that you’ve yet to gain.

Friction is an investment

Friction is our startup cost. Working on something new, you lack the framework required to begin to describe or think about the depths of the problem. Even if you do know some of the framework, you might not understand the significance of certain areas or how they relate to each other. As you begin to learn, you realize how much breadth and depth there is to a problem, and how much there is that you don’t know.

Friction also comes from having to translate something you already know to something new. As someone new to a company with prior industry experience, or as you switch teams, you’ll likely have a strong foundation of abstract problems that engineering organizations need to solve, but you’ll need to put names to those problems in the new environment, and work to understand the intention of systems and processes.

And friction comes from changing expectations in new roles, as well as from being at a scaleup like HubSpot, where old problems often need new solutions based on changing constraints, and the rules are regularly revised or rewritten.

What’s important to understand about friction is that everyone experiences it, no matter where they’re at in their career, or whether they’re your manager, peer, or direct report. And everyone overcomes it on their own terms. This might be by pushing through the problem on their own, working with their mentor, leaning on their challenge group, or just taking a break and a deep breath. Your gaps, trajectory, and pacing toward fluency will be different from someone else’s.

Friction to growth

Friction comes during periods of growth, when we have to navigate through the frustration of not knowing in order to gain knowledge and context. And sometimes witnessing friction helps us find a perspective that was hard to reach, shedding light on a problem in a new way. We might’ve been working on something for so long that we take aspects of it for granted, or even worse, grow complacent. New insights in these situations help us rearrange the pieces and come to a better solution.

In your career you have to build foundations that you can fall back on. This comes from navigating through friction, and working on enough concrete problems that you’re able to build abstract frameworks for problem solving. This growing foundation helps reduce friction. It makes what once took weeks now take days. It lets you spend less time thinking about each step, and more time thinking about giant leaps. It leads to creativity, which leads to failure, which leads to deeper understanding. It leads to fluency.

Fluency to impact

As you master fundamentals you’re able to focus your energy on larger problems. You grow your ability to take an abstract problem, find optionality, deeply consider interactions and variables at play, and draw a reasoned conclusion. You can begin to take aspects of the problem for granted, but also learn to challenge the assumptions that you’re making, and shift your thinking accordingly.

One stand-out experience from my early days at HubSpot is an interaction with my tech lead at the time. From my previous job I was used to running forward with solutions as quickly as possible, and that became apparent to my TL as I picked obvious, short-sighted solutions to my assigned tasks. One day we sat down together at a text editor and they typed out “Options”. From there we thought through and typed out three or four potential solutions to a task I was working on. They had a great handle on both the technical and product contexts, and walked me through the pros and cons for each of the options.

It seemed wild to me how rapidly they could iterate through designs in their head, adapt to new constraints, see through multiple levels of the proposal, and commit to a path forward with confidence. This wasn’t magic, it was fluency in action. Afterwards they opened up another document and showed me where they’d gone through exactly the same exercise for a bunch of work they’d done recently. This one moment with me wasn’t luck on their part, it was deliberate, and the result of flexibility that can only be gained through increased fluency.

A while back I wrote about Gatekeepers and Gardeners, a spin on situational leadership, where I described how leaders should balance between oversight and autonomy with individuals on their team. In the example above, my tech lead was acting as a gatekeeper because they knew I didn’t have the experience yet to solve the problem on my own. Many months later, by the time they promoted me to lead a part of the team, they were doing a lot of gardening. I’d demonstrated impact and built trust with them, and they responded by giving me autonomy. This was all thanks to my growing fluency.

The cycle of friction and fluency

Where “Gatekeepers and Gardeners” intends to speak to leaders, as individuals we all experience friction and fluency in our roles. For me, time and time again, this becomes obvious when I have to ask myself the question “why does anyone trust me to do this?” When I’m feeling most like an imposter, I’m often experiencing friction, and it’s not until I gain fluency with my new challenge, or in my new role, that I feel confidence in my position.

It’s the difference between feeling like I’ve got it or that I don’t. Like I’m in a flow state or I’m thrashing. When I want to lean in with my manager for help or guidance, or when I want to lean away for more autonomy. If you visualize fluency over time and zoom too far out, it might look like it’s up and to the right, but it’s really full of starts and stops.

What’s common no matter where you’re at in your career, whether you’re an intern, senior employee, manager, leader, or anywhere in between, is that friction and fluency present themselves in the way we approach problem solving.

This can be broken down to a handful of phases:

1. Relying on someone else entirely to solve your problems
2. Learning by example, with someone guiding you through the problem to the solution
3. Trying on your own, documenting and validating a plan, and communicating progress as you work to leave space for course corrections
4. Solving the problem on your own, communicating and validating as needed, and sharing outcomes

From high friction with a new type of problem, to effortlessly working through to solutions thanks to your growing fluency, your foundation grows. You own problems and solutions, build trust, and grow your impact and influence. This leads to more opportunities, which leads to more problems, which leads to more friction, and the cycle continues.

And as you grow your fluency over time, some of the most critical skills you pick up will help you more easily get through new friction. When this happens, you’ll begin to balance reaching out for help with deep diving to push through on your own, where your hard-earned tools for problem solving can guide you through new unknowns. You might feel like an imposter at certain moments, or lose confidence, but you recognize the friction and use your skills to guide yourself to fluency.

So, does it feel like magic when you finish another one of these cycles? Almost certainly not. Unless you take the time to regularly reflect, you might not even realize that the way you work through problems has evolved, and if you’re in the right position, the problems never get easier, you just get better at navigating toward what once felt out of reach.

And does the way you leverage your fluency look like magic to someone else around you, earlier on their path, working through friction you once knew? Chances are it does, just like when I saw my tech lead effortlessly spin through options years ago, but now’s your opportunity to help short circuit their learning by remembering where you started, and help guide them to grow their fluency.

I’ve included a few ways below that I work this type of thinking in my day to day, and how we use it to think about our roles here at HubSpot. If you’re looking for your next growth opportunity, take a look at our Product & Engineering careers page to see if we’re a match.

A few practical considerations

Onboarding and starting small

Starting small gives folks the opportunity to slowly build or translate their foundation of knowledge. In our careers we go through a number of role progressions: intern, associate, senior, and so on. As an intern it’s likely we can take almost nothing for granted, and it takes a decent chunk of time to learn the fundamentals. As an associate we use our foundation from internships to quickly increase our velocity and grow our impact. As a senior contributor or manager we continue building on that foundation to broaden our impact even further.

As I’ve changed roles, I’ve tried to view the world through the lens of an intern first. If I make few assumptions about what I think I know, I’ll be more likely to shed my biases and find better solutions. I understand that my progress and success aren’t fleeting just because what I’m doing today is hard, and that I need to give myself some time to adapt. Given my previous experience I should then be able to rapidly gain my footing, building trust and growing my impact.

I frequently speak with tech leads about this as they’re onboarding someone new, and especially someone senior, to their team. Just because your new hire has years of experience, and has contributed to major projects in previous roles, doesn’t mean you should expect the same from them day one in their new role. Give them the opportunity to be an intern. Give them small projects that help them translate the primitives from their previous experience to their new environment. You should expect them to come up to speed quickly and meet the impact expected for their role, but they deserve the opportunity to navigate through the friction of their new team with tempered expectations.

Higher level individual contributor roles

The gap between entry and lower level individual contributor roles is autonomy. It’s getting to the fourth phase of problem solving (“Solving the problem on your own, communicating and validating as needed, and sharing outcomes”) with projects that take days to weeks to complete, and that investment in time aligns with the impact of the work. This corresponds to the amount of trust you’ve built with your manager, and your growing influence on the team.

From there, it’s possible for your impact to grow and stay relatively consistent in a career role like Senior Software Engineer, where there aren’t expectations that you must grow beyond solidly contributing.

The technical gap then between a career role like Senior Software Engineer and higher level individual contributor roles, like Staff Engineer, is fluency. You already have part of what you need to be autonomous, but you don’t have a big enough foundation to take on harder, more abstract problems, potentially spanning weeks or months, that require knowledge or insight that can only be gained through experience and time. Engineers operating at this level have a great deal of independence.

By the time they’re promoted to a role like Staff Engineer they’ve often repeatedly carried large projects or streams of work independently for a significant period of time. In this way, they’re able to demonstrate their fluency through autonomy, accountability, velocity, creative problem solving, and impact. By this point they feel like a pillar on their team and surrounding teams, and they’re a trusted partner to their manager and other peers in the organization.