Now I Tell Me: A Decade of Career Advice for My Past Self

Ten years in industry research have taught me that soft skills are the key to a satisfying and impactful work life. Here are the tips I most needed to hear when I was starting out.

Logan Wells

Published in

Meta Research

8 min readNov 19, 2021

If you could travel back in time to when you were first starting out, what advice would you give yourself?

It’s one of my favorite interview questions, and with ten years as an industry researcher, I have plenty of advice for my past self that would have greatly improved my professional life. I might start with how to better drive alignment with my cross-functional partners. Or how to be more flexible and avoid getting stuck on never-ending projects. Or how to spend more time on consequential conversations and less on the minor details. In any case, I’ve learned that soft skills like these are critical to having impact while maintaining work/life balance.

While I’m still growing as a researcher and as a cross-functional partner, I’ve come up with some rules of thumb that help me recognize when I could be doing better. I hope you’re listening, past self.

1. Don’t hold back on ‘stupid’ questions

When I first started out, I was terrified to speak up in meetings. I assumed my partners knew everything already and I was self-conscious about how I’d come across if I said something. However, what I’ve learned is that within a product team, what’s obvious to members of one discipline often isn’t clear to everyone else. While designers think about what makes a good user experience and data scientists craft meaning from metrics, only one person is habitually doing both at once. That’s you, so ask away! You’re the bridge between building a successful experience and how the team measures that success.

Also remind yourself to keep asking evergreen questions like “What value is this product delivering for our customers?” and “How will we know when our customers are having a good experience?” And if your team can’t provide an articulate answer, you may have discovered your first research project.

2. Clarify research requests before acting

Don’t expect your partners’ requests to arrive fully formed. Before you can properly respond to a new request, you may need to size up a study’s potential impact. The team says it’s an important project, but make it a habit to ask clarifying questions, like:

How will this data inform team decisions?
What stage of the development cycle is the product currently in?
When does the team need the results in order to make decisions, and how feasible is that timeline?
If we did X instead, would that still give us Y result?

The need to ask clarifying questions at work is so essential that you should make it a daily habit — again, every discipline has their own lens for analyzing a problem. Through this process, your team might discover that their request wasn’t as essential as it originally seemed, or that the research questions could be reframed before starting.

3. Negotiate more

Partnership isn’t a one-way street. Only so many studies can be run in a half, and that makes your time a negotiable resource. When it feels like you’re taking on too much work, and can’t possibly fit it all in the same timeframe, it’s important to evaluate and prioritize.

Does the new request outweigh the potential impact of an existing project? If so, can the team help you complete one of the projects sooner by taking notes or doing data analysis? If not, can the project be done later?

Ultimately, you’re not a service provider, and you have the power to decide your research priorities.

This conversation doesn’t have to be contentious. If anything, your tone should be empathetic: “I want to help you run this research, but help me find a way to make it work.” Use your calendar as a bargaining tool. If you’re being asked to take on more than you can handle, get more support in return. Arriving at a shared decision will build a healthier partnership than shutting down requests with a terse “No.”

4. Aim for ‘good enough’

You’re probably holding yourself to a higher standard than anyone else is expecting. Many new researchers aim for perfection, but the results of this mindset can manifest in ways that aren’t conducive to personal success or effective teamwork. Most teams likely want enough information to make an informed decision: what does success look like, what are the biggest risks, etc.

One way to help aim for ‘good enough’ is to regularly re-evaluate your time against a project’s potential impact. Was there an earlier point at which you could have shipped and achieved a similar level of impact? If so, it’s probably time to wrap it up.

Establish the main research findings and ship it. You can always follow up later or break the project into milestones if more work is needed.

5. Conversations are more valuable than reports

Writing a report and getting cross-functional partners to act on the information are two separate steps in your project journey. There’s a language barrier between disciplines. While back-end engineers may find your work interesting, it takes effort to connect abstract user experience problems to changes in their daily work.

First you might set up 1:1s to identify your partners’ top-of-mind questions. Then partner with your product manager (PM) to action your research findings across the team.

Also, explore new strategies for translating your message. How are you helping your team digest your findings? Are there various ways you can share or explain the information? Are you tying your findings back to the decisions they’re currently struggling with?

The product partners I’ve cherished most are the ones who’ve made my life easier. Do that for your partners and they’ll start doing the same for you.

6. Clarity is more important than precision

Researchers love doing deep-dives on methods and data, but your partners may need some additional context to truly ‘get it’ and understand how the smaller details in your study contribute to the bigger picture issues they’re solving for. It’s not that they don’t care about getting it ‘right’, it’s that your partners are more interested in what you learned (and why it matters) than how you got there.

If you’re told your deliverables are verbose, try to simplify your reporting and invert your writing style. Drive home the critical pieces of information and save the details for individual follow-ups. A punchy summary is more memorable than a 30-page thesis. If you lead with your most important findings and how they should impact the team’s decisions, the broader product impact should be unambiguous.

7. Keep conflict in context: summarize as much as you elaborate

I once had an hour-long argument with a PM, only to learn we fundamentally agreed on my core concerns. The problem was, we jumped straight into what was going wrong before establishing our alignments on those issues.

Over time I’ve learned that before diving into nuanced discussions, lead with a summary of your perspective (or better yet, lead with a compliment). “Overall, I think this is a great idea, but a couple of items give me concern,” is a great start. Hair-splitting is not only an inefficient use of time but also generates an atmosphere of persistent negativity.

When you are in a heated discussion, occasionally stop to summarize what the other person is saying and ask if you got it right. Ask what your agreed-upon next steps are. This can be a relationship saver, because instead of it feeling like you’re tearing down their ideas, you’ll instead be unlocking their potential.

8. Let go of the little things and trust more

Sometimes it can feel like we’re attending meeting after meeting and not doing enough work to move the needle forward on projects.

If you think it could be related to your overall workload, lean on your partners to extend your influence and focus your time on where you’ll have impact. In addition to negotiating which projects you’ll take on (Tip #2), consider delegating your input to someone more involved with daily decisions (eg. designers, content strategists, marketing managers), or ask your manager if you can cut a meeting that isn’t giving you value or enabling you to provide value to others.

When a disagreement or surprise comes up on a project that threatens scope creep and unnecessary stress, ask yourself if it’s really a show-stopper. If not, simply let it go or work with your partners to create a sub-project related to that issue for a later date.

9. Avoid surprises

Don’t give someone bad news in public without giving them a chance to respond in private. It’s bad enough hearing your product is tanking; it’s much worse to learn it in front of your boss. Share your findings in a smaller setting first, and craft an action plan before the larger shareout.

This cuts both ways. If there’s an issue that diminishes the value of your upcoming research (a change in target audience, a technical limitation that diminishes its potential impact, etc.), you’d ideally learn that before you run the research. A team that consistently surprises one another is a team with deeper problems.

10. Make ‘future you’ more efficient

Get ahead of your known frustrations — your future self will be just as busy as your present self. Take 5 minutes between tasks to track those pain points in a document as they come up. For example, after a difficult meeting write down the skills you’d like to improve on with your manager. Start a document linking to all the professional development notes you eventually want to read. Create templates for yourself. Make note of how you’d like to improve your organizational systems.

Jotting down future improvements while they’re top-of-mind will pay dividends later when you have spare time to address them prior to the next project.

When in doubt, empathize

While academia teaches us hard skills, succeeding in industry research means doing good research and being a good partner. Learning soft skills on the job, though, is a major challenge.

An important first step is approaching your partners with empathy. Work to understand what’s driving their research requests, collaborate on unpacking research findings, and develop strategies that help you stay focused on the big picture — the impact of your research.

Whether you’re just starting out or wanting to level up, these rules of thumb will make you not only a more effective researcher, but a healthier one, too.