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As someone who used this very technique to get into a leadership position, there's a difference between using this to give other people credit and using this to get people into your side. The idea is to have a win-win situation where your needs and theirs align. You should have something to consider a win for yourself out of this. As an example, you have a customer who defines success as X. In order to get to X you need feature Y. By having a conversation with the product manager you use leading questions to get the product manager to suggest Y. You agree, the product manager gets a win in a new useful feature the customer loves, your workload goes down and the customer sees you as invaluable. Customer retention goes up and you get to celebrate that win for yourself.

It seems like a lot of work, but if you do this continually then you build trust with other teams, and you become more skilled with the process. Bad actors generally aren't smart enough to realize when you're giving them rope to hang themselves so this same technique can be used against them and they will look insane blaming others for their own bad ideas.

It sounds as if you could use a mentor to guide you through the technique and avoid the pitfalls you fell into. I'd also suggest learning how to effectively market yourself. I'm nothing special, don't have a bachelor's degree, and used to have terrible people skills. I'm now highly in demand and effectively can make my own roles wherever I go. It's definitely possible for anyone to do.




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