It’s not the easiest question I’ve got. I’m going to limit the answer to who I am professionally.
I solve problems of many different types, and I always try to get to the solution incrementally. It’s the best way I’ve found. I always reduce the problem into meaningful parts that can be tackled one after the other and, more often than not, I find that the solution doesn’t need to be as complex as I imagined it originally.
Working iteratively has many challenges. Teams might not be used to it and would like to spend a long time finding the best possible solution, stakeholders only care about the end result and not the intermediate steps, management feels the need to know exactly when things are happening in the future, etc. I have had all of those issues and many more, and I have been able to overcome them almost every time by communicating clearly and implementing cultural changes.
Some problems I’ve solved through the years:
Without good communication, solving problems becomes much more difficult.
Organisations are made of people with multiple and different skills. Being able to communicate clearly with all of them is one of my main priorities.
When I started working, I was focused mostly on the technical part of the job, and had a problem that is a bit of an epidemic in our field. Software developers don’t have any problems communicating with other developers, but some (many?) don’t know how to communicate with a non-technical audience.
I noticed this problem early, and I’ve been constantly working on getting better at communicating in general.
This is a general issue in IT. People tend to speak equally to different audiences, overwhelming others that are less knowledgeable in their field. Usually, this causes confusion and misunderstandings, which can lead to multiple problems from not buying to delays on getting the work done. That’s why I always work on getting people to understand that their communication skills are as important as their technical skills.
Some examples on how I’ve worked on improving communication for me and for others:
As I see it, life is about learning. There are so many things to discover and experiment with.
Through the years, I’ve come to a simple process to learn new things. First, is the discovery phase, where I usually read about a topic I would like to get better at and find new and interesting things about it. Then, it’s time to apply the learned lessons one at a time, so I can see how each experiment works in practice. Finally, I reflect on those experiments to see what worked and what didn’t, and to check if I misunderstood the idea and I have to try again now that I know more. It’s worked for me so far.
This learning and experimentation has also helped with cultural changes, influencing teams and organisations.
Some examples of this are:
But mostly, it has helped me personally to grow as a professional. It has helped me to find effective ways to be proactive and influence or set strategy which, in turn, have allow me to move from an individual contributor to a more leadership heavy path.
I’m Alberto, and you can find me in LinkedIn.