What’s a career brief?
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Product Management
Operations & Leadership
Business Scopes
Connected physical products in Hardware / SW & IoT
Consumer Electronics
B2B / Industrial
Health
Product design & consulting
Product development & ID studios
Digital product & UX
Software & services products
B2B SaaS
Consumer Web
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Originally drafted at rcolinkennedy /drafts