The 5 Stages of Craft
I’ve been fortunate to learn many things from many people. At the beginning of my career, a lot of it was directed learning — I learned what I was told my job needed, such as programming languages and frameworks. Close to the 10-year mark, I started having more of a say (and more of a sense) in the areas I wanted to specialize in. Online learning became more prevalent (remember MOOCs?) and I started taking some courses out of self-interest. As an aside, the courses I took outside of work on my dime have had the biggest impact on my career — but always a few years down the line, unlike things I had to learn for immediate job requirements. But that’s another story.
Besides tech, I’ve learned race car driving, simracing, DJ’ing, snowboarding, public speaking and a bunch of other… crafts. In the journey from novice to intermediate or advanced in several diverse fields, I’ve noticed a recurring pattern. I call it the 5 Stages of Craft:
Stage 1: Awe
You discover something new, you watch experts doing it well, and you see people passionate about it and thrilled about doing it. It rubs off on you. You’re curious, you want to learn more, and through serendipity, you start noticing more and more of it around you. It’s the same feeling 5-year old you had when you first wanted to be an astronaut or a PM (C’mon, admit it, you wanted to be a PM since you were a child, right? 😉)
This is the stage where you buy books, bookmark courses, get lost down the YouTube rabbit hole, network and get to know (or find out more) about people practicing this craft.
Stage 2: Mechanics
This is where you start understanding how things work in your area of interest: What are the prerequisites, which traits are necessary, what does a prospective career path look like, how expensive or challenging it is, and what “good” looks like.
You start building the ability to filter the signal from the noise, and start picking up nuances. Some of the initial awe gets an uncomfortable reality check. You feel overwhelmed by how demanding, extensive or complex this thing is once you’ve dived into it. Or you might find that you’ve got an aptitude for it, and maybe this is your life’s calling.
This stage is usually the deciding point — you either find alignment and decide to commit, or the enchantment wears off, and you move on to something else.
Stage 3: Flow
This is the part where you start enjoying it. You no longer feel intimidated — you’re still not an expert, but you’ve got a healthy awareness of your strengths and weaknesses, of things you know and don’t know yet. You might start leaning on others in your team to cover your gaps (awesome relationships built, yay!)
You start enjoying it; it doesn’t feel like a chore anymore, you don’t mind working hard to get better at it, you start building your own shortcuts & best practices, you lose the sense of time when you’re immersed in it — in short, you enter a flow state[1].
Depending on what it is and where you are, this is the point where you might start enlisting others and possibly mentoring them.
Stage 4: Peak
Because you’ve built up the expertise, met the people, lived the experience, walked the talk — you now have a commanding view of facts and patterns that you couldn’t see before. You start seeing some of the unappealing parts. People may have strong opinions, hidden agendas, personal (or corporate or community) ambitions, or simply opposing viewpoints. These people were there from the beginning; you just notice them a lot more now that you’re more caring and passionate about it. You may even kick yourself for missing it earlier 🙂
Now that you’re deeply entrenched, you have to clearly define your position at the very least and start picking sides at worst. I’m not saying this is a bad thing — it’s a fact of life. I’d choose a world of heated debates any day over a world of conformity.
This is your chance to emerge as a true leader. Because we’re talking about Product Leadership here and not politics, the ideal ways to achieve this are:
- facilitating alignment
- driving consensus
- enabling data-backed decisions
- favouring collaboration over competition
- cementing your team, group, organization or company’s leadership in this area
Stage 5: Enlightenment (or Disillusionment)
Usually, by this point you’ve become an evangelist, an ambassador and a natural spokesperson for your craft. You’re likely invested in the community and playing an active — even if small— role in shaping it.
What happens next depends on what the peak stage revealed to you. If it’s not too bad, you can probably live with it. By now, you’ve probably realized this wasn’t really your life’s calling anyway, and hopefully, you’re involved in other things, too 🙂.
If it’s really bad, it’s an opportunity — for you to step up, rally people around a new vision and fix whatever is broken. It happens to the best amongst us. Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the web, is so disappointed with the current state of the Internet that he’s working on building a new one — in his 60s. My take on dealing with disillusionment is very Buddhist: if you keep pushing against a wall and it doesn’t move, find a way around it.
Either way, you’ve learned something new and gotten better at learning new things in the process.
Thank you for reading this journal entry. If you found it interesting, please follow The Product Leadership Journal. If you have any questions, thoughts or comments, please leave them below or hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn. A kind reminder that thoughts penned (typed) here are my personal views and don’t reflect those of my employer.
Dive Deeper
- “Flow: The secret to happiness”, TED Talk by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (and his book)
