So satisfying.

• Checking off that 30 minute task that’s been itching your mind and you finally got time to knock out.

• Hanging up after dealing with that important call you were dreading which had been on the calendar for a couple of days.

• Dropping that box at the post office for the eBay sale of that thing that was too specialized and useful to throw away or donate, and needed a new home because it was cluttering your shop for the last two years (hey I just printed the label for one of these).

• Shipping that thing that you have been working on for a weeks with care and purpose.

• Slamming your computer shut knowing you’re going to be off-grid for a few days, and that all loose ends are dealt with and someone you trust has got you covered.

Open loops

Did you open them or did someone else open them up within you?

• That incomplete task that pops into your mind that you need to deal with a blocker on, but takes just enough time that you can’t seem to deal with it.

• That call that’s on your calendar for tomorrow that you’re dreading (or excited about).

• That thing that’s taking up space in your workshop that you don’t want anymore but is too good and useful to just toss, you need to put it on eBay so it finds a proper home.

• The looming finish line for that thing you’ve been working on, and really think people are gonna love if you can just get it out the door without ONE MORE goddamn delay from scope creep and final last minute detailing

• That knotted mess of loose ends you know you need to deal with before you can put up your favorite witty/lightly rude out-of-office and go meander through the woods for a couple days and remind yourself what living really feels like. Oh, and remember to check the expiration date on that bear spray.

Driven to closure

Humans are goal-oriented status-seeking monkeys. The goal-seeking behavior is wired into us in two primary feelings:

• Pressure / Relief. Achieving the goal makes a condition stop. This is negative reinforcement. It’s loses impact over time as we acclimate to the tortures. We avoid it.

• Tension / Satisfaction. Achieving the goal provides a reward. This is positive reinforcement. It works over and over again, and we learn to want more. We crave it.

We all seek closure, and want to make pressure go away and chase satisfaction. Open loops chew up mental cycles and jam up working memory. That feeling of “being buried” is often simply having too many open loops. Closing loops, whether they held pressure or tension, feels good.

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Opening / Closing

Loops are where most progress between people happens. Learn how to close a loop, and have the intuition to understand when one is open and how to open one, and whether it should be tension or pressure is needed.

Start inside

If this is new to you, begin with yourself. Learn to recognize and manage your own Loops, which teaches how to identify them around you, create loops in others, and resist them.

Want a starting point? Grab a sheet of paper and brain-dump all the loops you think you have onto it. Spend five minutes, then put it down. For the rest of the day, when you notice a new Loop, add it to the list, and if you close them, cross them off. Revisit the list the next day, adding first thing in the morning, and then going throughout the day.

Examine your Loop list at the end of the day.

• Which items are driven by Pressure vs. Tension? A quick way to do this is just putting a P or T next to the item, and then rank from -3 (quite bad) to +3 (real good).

• What were the triggers that stand out for each loop — environmental, temporal, relationships, etc?

• Closure actions: What closes each loop?

  • Closed Loops: What was the specific thing or moment that triggered Relief or Satisfaction? Which things felt good or bad?

  • Open Loops remaining: what will close them? How quickly can you knock those things out?

Now you know how to manage your own loops. Time for making loops inside of others.

Move outside

Loops drive human behavior. As I said before: all progress between people happens here.

Knowing thyself earns the keys which unlock others.

Three patterns escalate in complexity and capability.

1. Effective closure. Simple way to make everybody’s life better. When someone hands you an open loop, close it in a way that requires as few steps as possible from everyone involved. A basic one: the email request where you respond in such a way so that confirmation from them is not necessary. “If we’re all set, I’ll consider this closed — no need to reply unless you need something else.” It’s a wordy but clear starting point; build finesse over time so that this message gets built into the content. Why did messaging apps build reaction emoji? Short loop closure. So, how can you tailor your messages enabling you to close the conversation with just a reaction emoji?

2. Loop-judo. Recognize open loop, and put it on the other person so that you are closed and they are open, bonus if you can do it such that you can reopen at will. This is the “if you don’t hear from me in two weeks, email me and I’ll make sure you’re taken care of.” You are closed and they are open, but you can reopen if you need to. This is also the beauty of scheduling links (and the root of why people dislike them) “book a meeting with me at your convenience” pushes the loop onto the other person who wants your time. Never be the blocker, always get out of the way so and this drives others.

3. Inception. With the basics of loop-mechanics under your belt, now we can abstract the loops away into Satisfaction. Why not start here? Because amateur-hour folks start here, and don’t have the mechanics right — you can recognize these people by their overtly just swinging sticks and dangling carrots. When they half-assed a blatant carrot, and nobody responded, then there’s a tantrum and the sticks come out. You, dear reader, have a more methodical approach, using more nuanced tools at hand to craft your own style. Understand that everyone has a Loop-list, and while the list items all rhyme, the triggers and rewards are all very personal. When discussing work, feel out the triggers and rewards for each person. When it comes to an item that needs doing, understand — either empathically or through clear discussion — what will drive closure and where how you can help them get the most satisfaction. Then just do that: help them achieve ultimate satisfaction or relief, making sure to manage their loop without making it your own loop.

Looping is everywhere. That “So satisfying” feeling at the top? You can engineer it. For yourself and for others. That’s the skill. The question isn’t whether you have loops — you do, right now, reading this. The question is what you do with the ones you’re holding.

Are you managing your loops or are they being used to manage you?

In 2016, I meandered a bit. Frankly, my career up to that point had been a bit of a meander. Opportunistic would best describe my approach, in that I learned to first watch for opportunities, then to create them. Moves were made when the direction felt right, however the direction itself was never clear - it was a sense or a feeling. I was loosely attuned.

A brief case

March 19th, I set a direction. It was simply one more experiment: what would happen if I added some strategy to my direction, managing my career the same way I would run a Product program? The stakes were both super-low (I could just abandon it) and super-high (this is my livelihood here).

After all, wasn’t a career just a product in a two-sided marketplace? Satisfaction and bank account on one side, and on the other were customers / companies getting something valuable and unique at a fair price?

So, I put together a brief with the following strategic framework:

• Ten-year time horizon

• Target markets in motion, with some predictions

• Successful outcome clearly described, yet not prescriptive about how to get there

Briefs are so simple and so effective. That’s why I use them so much. Here’s the basics of how I do a brief:

Product, Briefly

Briefs, Briefly

One powerful page…

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6 months ago · R. Colin Kennedy

Created March 19 2016 (according to Evernote) this Career Brief took a couple of passes to get right. Over the decade, it got a few light edits, and it’s pasted below. At the core, it’s a basic strategy brief, the meat of it on the first page with framework and details on a second.

Here it is, and below the brief is a look at what held up and where it missed.

RCK Next Moves | March 2016

Context

Ten years from now, our lives will be very different - technology is reshaping how we live at an ever increasing pace. To play a major role in those changes, there’s five years or less to maneuver into the right organization (or build one) that will have five years to grow into a major player in those shifts.

This timetable is similar to a VC’s fund cycle, so there’s a TON of great material out there to help shape a course.

After starting with about a dozen areas that could be interesting, I’ve whittled down to three themes in the progression of technology that I find most personally interesting, ordered by the priority of investigation:

1. Ambient computing goes multi-user. A shift from personal computing (your personal smartphone) to ambient (voice and other smart devices around us) and how our personal clouds collide into interpersonal experiences, recognizing individuals and how to relate to groups of them. Interesting topics here are in identity control & portability, cloud computing, “thoughtful environments” of smart homes / offices, robotics, as well as UI’s that compliment the screens we’re glued to today which will be driven by environments, voices, & things.

2. VR & AR make the next leap in connecting humans. The printing press, telephone, television, and internet. It seems public perception of VR / AR is that it’s another interface (like the first Mac or the smartphone), however its promise to fully immerse and transport us offers a fundamentally different potential. While gaming is the first wedge (a passionate base that already spends on the hardware and media to support it), the applications for learning and work are what will take it from niche to an everyday platform with wide use comparable to (or exceeding) internet adoption.

3. Commercial logistics becomes automated and on-demand. In the latest BLS report, 2.5M people in the US are listed as “truck driver.” That will be a whole lot of robots. Here’s a piece that sums it up nicely. What “applications” on top of this will evolve: displacement of today’s mid & long distance logistics companies, software to coordinate it all, service systems that keep asset utilization maximized, security and asset management services, and more.

4. User-facing artificial intelligence becomes the standard. Machines will augment our lives in ways we can’t yet see, from the times we’re interacting with them and they’ll be indistinguishable from people, to how they’ll seamlessly amplify our work. Interesting spaces here are where we have people filtering information or businesses connect with end-consumers, such as business process outsourcing, support, real-time analysis, and medicine.

5. Electrical grids get smaller, smarter, and more sustainable. Today’s US power grids are massive, running on fossil fuels with minimal system compliance; surges in demand are addressed by burning more. Trends in rooftop solar, household batteries, and smaller nuclear reactors (like Transatomic) combined show the potential of power systems are city or neighborhood wide, have better storage, and are cleaner. Opportunities in this space are tougher (regulated, with massive powers fighting to extract value from the status quo), but necessary, in more sustainable / cheaper / easily recycled battery technology, solar that’s cheaper to deploy with lower embedded energy, and pushing molten-salt reactors out into the world to compliment traditional fission and decrease nuclear risk and pollution.

A role in this shift

The aim of my work life is to help lead us there; so, a decade from now, that likely means a leadership role with an organization that’s at the forefront of these shifts.

Today, I’m not looking to build a company, but rather join a team that’s working on something within one of these themes. At the moment, roles that I’ve been best suited to have leadership and span the technology / business / Design - so roles as in Product (Product Management, Product Development, Product Marketing) have been strong fits. Smaller, faster teams that are empowered to make decisions with a priority on speed and quality are great environments for me to help everyone do their best work.

Prioritization

There’s a lot buried in the themes, so a quick framework to parse it down into actual opportunities where I can help a team unlock its potential.

• Roles

  1. Product Management

  2. Operations & Leadership

• Business Scopes

  1. Connected physical products in Hardware / SW & IoT

     1. Consumer Electronics

     2. B2B / Industrial

     3. Health

  2. Product design & consulting

     1. Product development & ID studios

     2. Digital product & UX

  3. Software & services products

     1. B2B SaaS

     2. Consumer Web

     3. Business Services

Locations

Since launching our careers, my wife and I have been in alternating transition cycles, with one of us always tied to Boston; this cycle presents an opportunity for us to finally break away from New England for a bit, with a potential move to Seattle allowing her to better progress her career than staying in Boston.

It may take a year for the right role at the right company working for the right person on the right team to materialize, so while I look for permanent positions to pull us to Seattle, I’ll keep working consulting or contract roles in Boston.

Timetable

Location-agnostic consulting work: ASAP

Seattle-based permanent roles: up to a year, or sooner if possible

Soooo…. What happened?

Let’s work this through in two levels: macro and personal. Both may be useful to you, dear Reader.

What happened within the themes

The rubric was sound. I’d recommend anyone looking to steer their career give something like it a try. Let’s look at each one.

1. Ambient computing goes multi-user. This happened, but not yet to the extent that I expected. We learned through its dissemination into homes and offices that Voice is actually a secondary UI and won’t replace a “silent” UI like typing & screens. However, we are seeing a new wave of innovation here powered by LLMs and I expect another surge in ambient computing will be unlocked as companies take swings at the next major evolution in consumer computing after the smartphone - lots of bets on pins and glasses so far, not sure if that’s crazy enough.

2. VR & AR make the next leap in connecting humans. Metaverse. We saw this one come and go. It will be back again. Too many people want a Ready Player One world, and frankly there is too much money to be made for it to go ignored. Horizons wasn’t it. Hardware is no longer holding it back. Something else is missing, and it will likely get unlocked in the decade to come. Massive progress and investment made it so this vision is becoming a (virtual) reality, to an extent. More to see here.

3. Commercial logistics becomes automated and on-demand. Shockingly, this has been slower to happen but progress is coming along. Perhaps we need the next round of World-Model driven AI systems to really unlock this. The market forces are more pressing today than they were a decade ago. Interestingly, I now wonder if the second-order implications of this technology make it less compelling - even if driving is automated, do we still need a person in the vehicle to safeguard the journey? If that’s the case, the unit economics of automation are less compelling, and even though safety and efficiency might improve, the Market runs on cost/benefit.

4. User-facing artificial intelligence becomes the standard. ‘Nuff said. ChatGPT brought it mainstream, Anthropic and the US government are having a bit of a tiff right now, Palantir is a megacorp, and Amazon is taking surveillance capitalism to new heights. Lots more to come here, not all of it great, but some of it will be wonderful.

5. Electrical grids get smaller, smarter, and more sustainable. Massive systems shift slowly. Something is going to happen here. When the influx of AI datacenters under construction comes online, I expect it will kick off a massive wave of energy innovation. Companies right now are not-so-quietly building things like solid-state transformers and small modular reactors to be ready for the impending power system revamp.

The themes held up.

Where did this guide my career?

Not at all what I could have predicted but yet totally aligned with the brief. Consulting let me test-drive some options, and one pulled my work to Silicon Valley, while we moved to Seattle.

• Ambient Computing led me from Sonos to Upthere (personal cloud compute would be necessary to achieve this) to Western Digital.

• VR & AR led me to go check visit Meta when they tried to recruit me twice, but ultimately it wasn’t a fit.

• AI is now in everything, I use it daily.

• Energy was a longshot - just a dream from my youth that was tacked on as a stretch because I wanted five categories. Somehow, it’s where I ended up at TAE Technologies; we built a new venture based upon taking technologies that power fusion reactors and commercializing them for next-gen battery packs for battery energy storage systems and electric vehicles.

Within 6 years, I had hit my target: VP of Product at a technology company working on clean energy. Hooray?

What I didn’t / couldn’t predict was changes in my personal relationship to work that would evolve during that time:

• In 2016, I was a hard-charging tech-careerist Boston bike racer, with a firstborn under a year old.

• By 2023, I was a post-pandemic parent forest creature in the PNW with elderly folks back East and a job located in Orange County.

My identity, priorities, and the people close to me had all evolved. Some in ways that were totally predictable (but not accounted for), and other ways that were completely unforeseeable.

What did I miss?

Personal evolution was the biggest miss. When I found myself in an the role I envisioned, the rest of my life was in a place where I felt torn between the two worlds: career impact vs the commitment to the people I care about.

This, frankly, is totally natural. Lots of people at this life stage (don’t call it middle age) feel it. My parents did too; they made the conventional move, and kept the pedal to the metal career-wise. They didn’t think they had a choice. When they finally let up a little and made more time to savor their time, so many opportunities had faded into the rearview on the highway of life. Those off ramps were long gone. They have told me of their regrets.

My choice was different. I shifted my work back to focus on flexibility, for now. It enabled me to take those off-ramps, detours, and explore the backroads for adventures, a little sightseeing, and lots of time wandering through the forests.

When I was growing up, my parents idea of a journey was packing up the Volvo, hitting the road to a destination, and making it there as fast as possible.

Now, my journeys are in a campervan with bikes and skis on the back and my family and dog along for the ride - I always make it to where I’m going, but give myself a little more time, push a little harder on occasion, and savor all the hours.

Maybe I’m letting opportunities for impact and wealth slide past. Yet, I’ve seen fortunes made and lost and made again in this past decade.

Maybe I’m not missing anything.

What’s next?

Right now I’m staring down the barrel of the next decade. I’ve learned new ways to relate to my career, to the future of technology, and the role I’ll play. Perhaps it’s time for a new career brief, built upon not just what I see changing but what I’ve seen change.

Opportunities will align, and I’ll be playing the game at the highest level again. For the love of the game. I am highly attuned.

Maybe I learned some things along the way. It’s time to set a new direction.

Maybe I already have.

Maybe you want to follow along.

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Originally drafted at rcolinkennedy /drafts

Most people have only been exposed to hiring that looks like this:

1. Hiring need recognized. Something on the plan/roadmap requires a skillset that the team will can only add via a new hire, or the team’s workload capacity must increase.

2. Job spec’d. Team scopes the work, and the Hiring Manger creates a job description, and gets a budget allocated for headcount addition.

3. Job spec posted. Job posting goes up online, and there is some broadcasting through social networks to try and drive attention to it.

4. Candidate sourcing. In parallel with posting, someone looks through resume databases - external or an internal - to identify Candidates that align with the Job Description; this someone might be on a Recruiting team, or at smaller companies might be the hiring manager or even the Founder if very early stage.

5. Applicant filtering. Applicants to the posted job pour in (or don’t - there’s never an in-between). Reviewing applicants costs a ton of time and headspace, reply with rejections (yes you need to do this - ghosting is lame), and mark some for consideration. Total crapshoot on quality.

Then: phone screen the best, interview some, offer to one, references are an administrative checkbox.

The result? Stuck at the bottom of the world’s worst sales funnel full of noise and junk, hires are of dubious quality. Tons of time and effort spent to get one person in the door, and starts over for every new hire.

What a nightmare.

Guess what? Now, with job seekers using AI tools and “reverse recruiting services” the volume pumped into the world’s worst garbage funnel just got cranked up to 11.

It doesn’t have to be this way, especially for scrappy startups.

What to do? Go old school.

People pro

Time to invert things, turning that funnel into a flywheel. This is how a pro people person works. How do I know? Because I’ve been doing it for over 20 years and been training it for almost that long.

1. Workforce plan. Plan 18 months out and identify the types of people needed, broadly. Understand that this will evolve as hires are made, work progresses, and roadmaps shift. Use this plan to define some boundaries on candidate pool & pipeline. If there’s a requisition authorization process, front-load it here. Don’t overcomplicate things.

2. Activate a referral network. Four months before a new hire needs to start, reach out to a network of people with a request for referrals; some may want to become candidates, but this is NOT a candidate pool. The key is to get people to pass along the job info to generate more referrals. Candidates are two or three degrees of separation down this chain of connections, so make that request compelling and as easy to pass along as an email forward.

3. Build a candidate pool. Build a list of potential Candidates through referrals, as well as any searches. Keep Candidates warmed up with an update every couple of weeks as things progress, but do not start start interviewing. Some will fall out of the pool over time, this is fine - they will provide referrals if you treat them well.

4. Hiring flow. Two months before the needed start date, drop the top 5-7 candidates from this pool into a hiring flow that’s fast and tight. Minimize time from first screen to offer, try and keep it under two weeks. Effective interviewing is a sprint, not a marathon; the longer it goes on the worse the outcome because people lose interest or get scooped up by competitors. Offer goes out, always with a backup candidate in the hopper in case the first-choice bails. Make sure new hires can give 2 weeks notice and can take 2-3 weeks of downtime between their final day at the last job and the start date. Always check references, and make those references referral sources and/or recruit them too.

5. Pipeline. For anything 6+ months out, keep potential referrals / sources informed so that they can be slotted right into the flow above. The pros have people on the bench waiting for the positions to open.

No jobs posted. No noise, all signal. Network effects compound and scale in your favor. Mostly referred candidates, which have built-in quality. The pool grows itself with a little weekly maintenance.

Now, there are a thousand little tactics embedded. Such as, always print resumes and doodle org charts. I learned them the hard way, but I’m always happy to teach a motivated learner - but they’re not for this post.

Sounds idealized? It’s not, it’s real. In 2006, I hired something like 85 Engineers with and all but a handful were through referrals. My volume has gone down since then, but my referral rate has gone up.

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Why would anyone do it the first way?

Procurement & processes, that’s why. The bigger an organization gets, the more things need to standardize. People can be the most expensive part of running a business, and with size & scaled stakeholders, a bit if bean-counting to is necessary to control costs through systems - like Procurement processes. One-off requisitioning becomes hell above a certain size, and hiring experience for candidates and hiring managers degrades without something to corral things into consistency; this stuff all gets get put into systems that work more like procurement tools than a human touch. The bigger and older the company, typically the less it can run on implicit trust and the more it runs on control.

Without a good Quality Control step, what happens? Procurement controls costs to drive them down, control + downward pressure means you get what you pay for. Quality ain’t cheap, and cheap ain’t quality.

This is the generic BigCo hiring environment, where people are procured - and this is business as usual. This is what has become the default.

You’re shooting for the stars, so business as usual simply isn’t good enough for you. Don’t fall for the default.

Founder leverage

Anyone, regardless of title and level, who needs to hire can run this playbook. However, those at the helm get extra superpowers, and used well they scale well.

• Quality control. Quality compounds - both negative and positive - great people attract great people, while substandard hires deteriorate team quality and performance. This is on the Founder for a while, but can scale with a program like Amazon’s Bar Raisers. Aim high, then consider building a lightweight system so that the team can hold the line.

• Cultivate a referral network. A little weekly Founder activity keeps things growing and strengthens connections: sharing company updates, welcome messages for new hires publicly shared, company milestones, etc. Post them online, and share directly via emails to folks in the referral network.

• DIY, make it culture, then delegate. Do it yourself first, get competent. Teach the core team, then make it part of the culture. As things grow, you’ll be able to select the right person to hand ownership over to - but can maintain the necessary involvement to ensure talent quality is ever increasing, and intervene when there are signs of degradation. This scales.

• Grab unicorns. If you have the cash, when you find incredible top 1% people, hire them - either ASAP or play the long game. How do you know them? You will know. Once hired, they just jump in and find a way to improve everyone’s work. This is the best way to elevate the team’s baseline.

No referral network yet?

Don’t wait, start now. More on that later perhaps.

Yet

My interest in trying them is somewhere between morbid curiosity and less than zero.

Why? They are the wrong kind of magic - in fact they are huge leaps in the opposite direction away from where I want to spend my attention, energy, and resources.

There will be plenty of people who love these devices and the new interactions they enable. Some folks will be thrilled.

I am not those folks. Though I work in technology, I try to maximize time without technology: flying through the woods on a bike or skis, and fully present with people I care about. I’m bullish on technology that gives me more of this.

My goals for personal technology are:

• Get out of my face, not onto my face.

• More asynchronous, not more interaction.

• Experiences that are more visceral, not virtual.

Some former colleagues of mine, whom I hold in the highest regard, have worked on them and kudos to the challenges they have had to overcome, over a long Product journey, in order to ship. I applaud the work.

However

In a world where smartphones begat screentime that’s measured and, for many of us, minimized - a new set of interfaces that allow always-present displays with wearble microgesture controls seem in opposition to intentional living.

Superintelligence, the other big bet by Zuck & Co, seems to be covering the other end of the spectrum: wearables harvesting more human attention, while AI can free up attention for human thriving.