What do you need in your next role?

How to create clarity before your next job interview

I've gotten to help several clients and friends think through their next career move recently. Details vary, but universally, they want a better experience than they've been having in their current role.

What does "better" mean? What’s it look like? It can be hard to know.

Here's an exercise that's helped. It takes an hour or two, and improves if you talk it through with a thought partner.

The underlying principle here is to interview potential companies just like you interview users. To do that, you need to do three things:

(1) Establish your stack rank of values

(2) Understand what you are moving toward, and away from

(3) Turn that into interview questions

1) Stack rank your workplace values

This is about what you value in a work experience and team behaviors, rather than general life-level values. Think about the behaviors that you appreciate and are frustrated by. They are clues to what you value. These might be things like role clarity, strategic coherence, feeling like you have a voice, mentorship, or proactive team collaboration.

Stack rank these.

2) What you are moving toward & away from (and stack rank them)

In choosing a next thing, people tend to overcorrect for what they disliked about the last one. The longer you’ve tolerated a bad situation, the more prone to this you are. It’s important to clarify what you are moving toward and away from.

Make two lists:

• Away: what do you not want, or want to avoid? This is probably informed by what you haven't liked in your current/previous roles. Try to parse out what is specific to your current role/org from what is more general.

• Toward: what DO you want?

  • General screening criteria: money, title, and other easily identified factors do not create motivation or satisfaction. They can break your experience, but they can’t make it. These are “hygiene factors” that need to be good enough.

  • Motivators: “motivator factors” are things like enjoying the work itself, meaningful challenges, growth pathways, or increased responsibilities you’d like to develop.

For both of these, stack rank them. On the away-from list, clarify what is an absolute no (must not) vs what you don’t like, but are willing to tolerate. In terms of what you do want, you must stack rank these. Otherwise you will not be able to effectively make tradeoffs, since there are no perfect options.

3) Convert into interview questions

Your answers from the last section establish your research questions, what you really want to learn and see evidence of. You may want to see evidence of managers coaching/mentoring, or that the engineers engage in product decisions, or that feedback from ICs is taken into account by leadership in setting direction.

The last step is to turn these into interview questions that elicit stories of actual past behavior or situations. Just like interviewing users, this is how you can uncover higher-reliability data for your decisions.

For example, these are my five starter interview questions for understanding what actual day-to-day product work looks like in an org:

• What were the last few things your team has built and shipped, and how did you decide to do those?

• When's the last time you talked with your customers? How often have you done that in the last month?

• What was the last feature or product your team killed?

• Can you describe your product vision?

• Tell me about the last coaching session you had with your manager. How often did that happen last month?

These won’t address your specific research questions, but they give you the idea of the format of story-based questions you’ll want to ask.

Good luck!