A Wild Few Weeks!

I have some juicy content for you today!

I took 3 weeks off work to take care of one of my partners who had surgery. She’s a champion! I’m very proud of her for resting when the house is chaos and she really wants to help. I’ve only had to yell at her to go back to bed 10 to 100 times! :D

I’ve spent a lot of my time off between house work writing. I decided to learn how LinkedIn works to write short-medium sized content there, and save my larger more impactful writing for this newsletter. So when you see Lead Kindly in your inbox you know it’s going to be amazing.

I was beyond successful. I had around 221 followers on June 1st around when I started. I broke 500 on June 8th, over 1000 on June 19th, and as of today June 21st I have 1546.

When I go back to work on Monday that growth will slow and that’s okay. I didn’t expect to grow so quickly, and I’ll share down below how I think I did so well, but I don’t want this article to be just about LinkedIn.

If you want to follow my short-medium content then you can follow me here.

Where Is the Course For New and Aspiring Managers?

If you’re aware of such a course, please send it to me! I’ve struggled to find anything aimed at a much needed area. Even if it’s not exactly what I’m looking for, I’d love to see it!

When I was a new manager I wasn’t given much. We didn’t do any formal training until I had already been doing the job for quite awhile, and while it was helpful it left a lot on the table. Yelp does a great job with mentorship and providing guidance, but I’m a try hard. I wanted a detailed course! Let me cram that for a few weeks so I can learn everything I possibly can to serve my team well!

A course aimed at new managers or those thinking about becoming managers who want to dive deep? Yes. I want this. Even though I am years into my journey as an engineering manager, I still want it to exist so badly that I’ve decided to make it. My brain is obsessed with this idea.

I became a manager because I want to help others, and I want there to better leaders in engineering. There is so much opportunity to do good for people here, and I want to pour all of my empathy and learning into a course that can multiply what I have learned. As I learn more, I want to update that course and make it better and better over time!

If you’re interested in such a course, I will be sharing free snippets of it as I build it on this mailing list. Anyone who signs up there will also get a big discount when it’s ready. I am not going to do any weird tactics like artificial scarcity, limit cohorts, etc. It will be an online course you can consume anytime, once you purchase it (even at a big discount) you own it forever, you will receive all updates to the course at no extra cost (no DLC 6 months down the line ;p). There is no commitment for signing up, so you’re welcome to get the free snippets and never purchase, totally fine!

I will share the course outline and rough details in future newsletter articles, but for details on how the course is going it will just be to that mailing list. I don’t want the newsletter to just be an advertisement for my courses (nothing wrong with doing that, I just don’t want to).

Why charge for it? I have a full time job and very little time outside of that, if I am trading my limited time I’d like to be compensated for it. I give everything else away for free, so my hope is that this can be the “end of the funnel” where people can optionally pay for more if they’d like. If I build something high quality, it’s easy for most full time folks to expense it as a development expense (which most people don’t take advantage of!) If you’re not sure how to do that, I will provide email templates to make it easier to get approval from your manager/CTO/etc. If you can get a badass course for free and I still get paid? I’ve got you!

Something Viral, My Journey Winning at LinkedIn

So first I need to brag about a recent post:

This post is still going, the numbers are already higher than when I took that screenshot 5 minutes ago, so by the time you read this it may have 10’s of thousands or hundreds of thousands more impressions.

This is partially how I accelerated so quickly from 1000 to 1500 followers. Before that I had no viral posts, though a few that did very well in the 50,000 impression range. Those were insane and I was riding that high all week. I gained this long term goal of eventually getting a post with 100k since 50k seemed to be a plateau and I thought it was an ambitious challenge! Obviously at 1,500,000 I blew up that goal before the ink was dry. At this point, I have no impression goals because I already won LinkedIn XD

Now, I have no secret formula for getting this viral post. A ton of luck is involved here, and I can’t just duplicate it. I could go many years of posting and never get these kind of numbers again. I am not a wizard and I won’t pretend to be a LinkedIn guru just because I got lucky.

That said, I am certain that if I posted this on June 1st, the exact text, it would have flopped. It was partially the build up to that post which primed the algorithm. I didn’t need tens of thousands of followers to get these impressions or engagement, but I need LinkedIn to trust my post enough to show it to people, and get enough engagement from them to show it to more people. Once it got momentum it was over, the post had won LinkedIn lottary. I also did have a goal to get a viral post and it worked, so maybe I’m not too far off. Here is what I did:

I set out to post 1-2 times a day. I engaged with all the comments, give actually thoughtful responses and try to connect with people in the comments.

I avoided including links in posts. I experimented and included links in the post and it TANKS hard. There may be a way to do successful posts with links, but I avoid it for now.

I noticed that posts that people just liked did okay. Posts that made people mad did great, they would always comment how wrong I was. We would politely disagree in the comments and it was great! I learned a lot, I hope they did too. The posts where I pissed people off and they fought with each other were the 50k+ posts. LinkedIn saw all that engagement and so it shared it with more people, who then jumped in to give their opinions. Here are all my 20k+ posts:

• I don’t believe in resumes.

• Why are people mad about TDD?

• I’ve hired people who bombed the interview

• Anti-patterns of managers

• Can you make the engineers do it?

For a month of 1-2 posts per day, that’s not a lot of posts that went huge so my analysis could be off. I had a few that did 5k+, but most of posts before I got a decent following were < 100. My “good” posts in the early days did 200-300 impressions and I was elated. If this is where you’re at, no problem! I got 1,500,000 impressions on a post but I still have some with < 100. I’m sure I will have more posts which don’t get picked up by the algorithm.

While I am very happy about the 1.5m+ post, it also doesn’t matter. The real power of LinkedIn is the connections I’m making with folks. Getting to know engineers and managers has been amazing. While most people reach out trying to get me to do free work for them (review resumes, do mock interviews, write them posts, buy their service, etc) a lot just want to connect. It doesn’t mean there isn’t an endgame, but all relationships have give and take. I also wouldn’t mind reviewing someones resume or doing mock interviews if I had more time, but with all my projects, 5 kids, 2 partners, 1 full time job, being dope at LinkedIn, writing this newsletter, going to the gym 3~ times a week, 3d printing, etc etc, I just don’t want to make the time. Helping 1 person get a slightly better resume is very low leverage. I’m also crap at making resumes, so someone else better at that can take that ask.

If I think about the industry, I think the best thing I can do right now with my skills, besides being a good manager for my team and company, is working on this course. So that’s where I will redirect my extra energy and hope it helps people one day!

To wrap this up if you want to give LinkedIn a try, or you want to up your game: Post real things. Adopt a real creator mindset, and anytime you have an idea write it down. If you have 5 ideas in a day, don’t make 5 posts. Put those ideas somewhere, and stick to 1-2 a day. Take breaks so you don’t burn out, there will be days where I just don’t post. That might hurt my potential reach, and that’s okay. Short term loss for long term gain. Good luck out there and be kind!