Dear friends,
many of you helped me in the last weeks through interviews, discussions, feedback. Via this quick monthly update I’m sharing back with you: What am I learning and how is my startup journey progressing. Don’t like it? There is an easy unsubscribe button somewhere ;)
What happened in July
I’ve investigated pains in the TECH-Talent job market, both from employers and employee perspective. More than 50 interviews resulted in two pains which TECH talents experience today, which I want to investigate further: (1) a lack of orientation in an increasingly VUCA TECH industry (2) a lack of transparency and fair process when engaging employers during the hiring process
Next up: start testing my key assumptions (and ugly minimum valuable products), to see if I can resolve some of that pain. Ideally I can already help some tech talents achieve (more of) their potential this month.
April - June: I spent three months of vacation in the US, Sicily and Germany. I didn’t work at all and hoped that startup inspiration would strike me (spoiler: it didn’t). Instead I got to spend 3 months with Clara, enjoyed every minute of it, could have done even more vacation but as a highlight we got to marry each other in July! 👰🤵 It feels like an amazing start into my new venture. I am pumped and energized now. Let’s do this!
Investigation & Problem Validation
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?Queen
Prio to my 3+ months vacation I settled on the tech talent crunch as an interesting problem area. Today there is already a global war for tech talent, work-from-home/anywhere intensifies this, while companies of all sizes want to double-down on investments in (software) technology. I expect this volatile environment is ripe ground for innovation.
And volatile it is: since recent economic downturns (starting with the war in Ukraine, Inflation, …) many companies have declared hiring freezes or even started laying off staff. I’ve checked recent lay-offs and most people losing their jobs are in marketing, growth or HR (e.g. talent acquisition), but there are also techies losing their jobs.
What does this mean for the talent crunch? I don’t believe it will fundamentally influence the underlying dynamic (e.g. 14 million positions will still be hard to fill by 2030) but the TECH priorities inside companies are likely to shift from “pure growth orientation” to “reasonable investments in key technologies/software”. Also, companies usually take economic times like this to lay-off staff which they couldn’t socially acceptably do in better times. More next time.
Problem Validation
Alright, back to July: I have spent the majority of this month with wedding planning, wedding dance practice, wedding wand selection… on talking with people from the TECH universe. I’ve talked to engineers, product managers, designers, data scientists, leaders, individual contributors, people early in their career and people already well seasoned. All-in-all something like 50 conversations. My goal: figure out if some of the pains I have seen as a VP Product at forto also hold true for other companies and outside Berlin. If yes - I can start trying to solve those pains and testing more specific assumptions. All with the mission to help tech talents achieve their potential.
Which pains are real? What’s a vitamin?
I spent 3 full days summarizing my countless pages of interview notes. I feel my 25 year old self could have done this in one night-session, so either I am getting old, this is harder than it seems or the heat is getting to me… In any case: here are some of the high-level pains:
The TECH talent hiring process is broken - oh boy, nobody is happy here. Nobody, but this is also hard to solve. HR teams and TECH leaders frequently have misaligned expectations and incentives, processes take too long, are not transparent and and and…
TECH talent lacks orientation in their career - our global world is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambigous (VUCA) and the tech sector constantly developing making it hard for talents to understand where they could fit in best
TECH talents leave companies because they lack personal growth and impact, or they leave bad managers - biggest lever would likely be to uplevel managers
Building an Effective TECH Team is hard - creating sufficient autonomy, purpose while delivering software reliable is hard, especially when experience in the team varies strongly. This category has like 20 sub-categories, but none of which I feel are clear enough to me yet to be addressed.
Many TECH managers are inexperienced (bad) at managing (according to their managers and themselves)
Managing a technical team is hard as a manager
Developing software effectively is hard
Given these results I need to decide how to continue: (1) either keep researching broadly and talk to more people to discover more pains (2) start to design and test against some of my discovered pains in more detail, MVP style.
I feel more like testing (and designing) something right now. Since I am my own boss I get to do what I want.
I get a lot of satisfaction from helping tech talents achieve their potential. So I will keep trying to solve the pains of the talents first. Building something for the companies would be much easier from a business-model perspective, but I can still do that afterwards.
Next steps: Drunken Walk
So here is what I will be doing in the next four weeks.
Exclusively focus on the tech talents, their pains & gains and develop initial solution ideas
Test my most important, but uncertain hypotheses for these solutions
How: I will run 4 tests, one test per week
I will specifically test for these pains:
Pain 1: Today TECH talents lack orientation in a VUCA world with more uncertainty, fast change but also boundless opportunities to work from anywhere for anyone
Pain 2: Today TECH talents do not get enough transparency, “quid pro quo” and understanding of potential employers in the hiring process. Old job descriptions and “about us” sections on websites don’t cut it. Oftentimes you get “the real talk” the first time you stand at the coffee machine with your team-mates, whom you never actually met in the recruiting process
How will I do it? Hyper-manually and ugly, that is for sure. Hello google sheets, e-mails and ugly google-slide prototypes.
“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.” Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn
Attention Booster: TECH talents lack orientation in a complex TECH world
I am already helping 7 individuals through individual coaching on all aspects of “achieving their potential” in TECH. If you know a TECH talent who is at an important career moment for them and they could profit from talking to me —> send them my way!
This early stage startup journey is hard to predict. I might change my mind in two weeks on priorities - however, this is it so far. Thanks for supporting me!
Disclaimer: since I left forto officially at the end of April from an Executive position. Logically I have a non-compete and am not allowed to recruit anybody from forto. For any intents and purposes this article is for informative purposes only. In fact, I still believe the company has a great future outlook in a market that has the true chance to impact positively on a global level. // End Disclaimer
Dear Philipp,
I always get inspired by your thoughts and the way how you try to help the tech talents. Thanks for the last discussion with me. I am currently working on my master's thesis and will get back to you when I finish this. I wish new thoughts and lots of gains coming to you in August!
Best Regards,
Jie Wang