PWiC Silicon Valley: Conversation over Coffee with Usman Muhammad
Introduction
On Sat Dec 7th 2019, the PWiC Silicon Valley Chapter held their monthly mentoring circle with their featured mentor , Usman Muhammad : a Staff Software Engineer at Lyft Level 5 (self driving division). The topic for December’s mentoring circle was “Climbing the Career Ladder/ Career Growth”.
The intention behind having a male mentor was to learn the differences between men and women when it comes to navigating the career ladder. There were some great insights shared by all attendees and we are happy that the attendance list is increasing as well as getting more diverse!
Here are some highlights from the event:
Career Journey
Usman started off by sharing his own diverse career journey. He started as a Software Engineer in Pakistan and also ran an online business while he was there. He moved to Canada and then eventually US, through Microsoft where he worked on various teams ranging from Visual Studio to Bing. After Microsoft, he was looking for opportunities in Machine Learning so he went to Salesforce to work on their search platform where he picked up ML skills and expertise. He then moved to Lyft in their growth division and after spending two years there, he switched into Level 5 — Lyft’s self driving division to work on computer vision and machine learning related problems. He shared that every time he switched careers — it was in a new field and to do so he either had to learn the skill before applying, or convince the new team that he could pick up the skills on the job. He felt that every time he switched roles/jobs he had growth both personally as well as career wise.
Usman also explained that he is passionate about mentoring and throughout his career he has mentored people with diverse backgrounds, and he truly believes in the power of mentorship. He said he has learnt a lot from his mentors and people don’t usually realize its power or see it as a tool. So attending such mentoring events, is already a big step forward towards your growth.
Career Growth Definition
The interactive conversation started with the definition of growth and what it meant to the people in attendance. We heard a range of responses :
- Increasing the amount of people you interact with and influence a wider audience
- Growth can also mean changing career paths from individual contributor to manager and then back
- Going deeper into a field and becoming an expert
The key areas for growth were identified as skills, job level, brand, money and a move to management. Everyone had a different answer to this question and we came to the conclusion that there is no universal definition of growth — it can mean different things to different people. You have to define what it means for you and use that as a goal.
Usman also pointed out that sometimes people view career growth as a ladder, when in fact, it is more like stairs. You will not always be moving upwards — growth can also happen at the same level e.g. learning a new area of work or growing in the personal sense.
Growth Planning
Once you have a growth goal in mind — the natural next question was, how do we create a plan to achieve that goal and who can help us get there ? You might think it’s your manager or your mentors — but eventually, the person who is responsible for your growth is you !
Your growth conversation with your manager should start from the first day of your review cycle, do not wait until the end of the review period to have these discussions. Set up regular 1:1s with your manager and also semi-regular ones with your skip manager. You should ask for continuous feedback through out the year and be open to receiving and acting upon that feedback.
If your company has an agreed upon framework with concrete action items then use that to measure your growth against. Sometimes it is not clear what you need to do in order to achieve the next step. It is always best to clear ambiguity by making things quantifiable. Usman shared his Individual Development Plan — a template that he uses to start the career growth discussion with his managers. This is aimed to help people in creating a list of skills to develop, action items to get there and a success criteria that you can measure against.
Summary
Usman ended the session with some useful advice for the attendees :
- Speak up and take charge of your own career growth.
- Get mentorship, guidance from other women leaders in your company.
- Manage up. Have 1:1s with your skip, and other managers.
- Ask for feedback ( for the future as well — what can I do better? ) and turn it into actionable items.
- When switching jobs — don’t hesitate to negotiate up on compensation.
- Don’t fear rejection ! It happens to everyone. Try and try again.
Overall, we had a very interactive and engaging discussion around career growth and planning and it was a diverse turnout for the event. We would like to point out that our events are open to all genders and ethnicities. We are looking forward to continuing this series in 2020 on a monthly basis.
Future Events:
Watch out this space for future events: https://pwic.org/events
Thank you for reading!
About the Author
Novaira Masood is PWiC Chapter Lead for Silicon Valley and currently a Software Manager for an R&D group at Apple. She has 15 years of industry experience in computer graphics and computer vision. She worked on the first version of Hololens at Microsoft and prior to that she used to work in R&D for visual effects in movies. She has an MS in Computer Graphics and likes working on unsolved, creative and ambiguous problems.
