[Masterclass] How To Build And Grow Tech Products To 500k+ Users For Free

Here are our Top 5 points from this session:
- **Side projects are incredibly powerful** - They improve your portfolio, increase your coding velocity, and give you holistic experience around building products end-to-end.
- **Care deeply about quality** - Users notice when your app or website is buggy. Strive to cover all edge cases and provide a truly polished experience.
- **Eat your own dogfood** - The best way to know how to improve your product is to use it yourself. This was a staple of Meta's engineering culture.
- **Least clicks design** - At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how "pretty" your product looks if it isn't efficient. Think about how you can have your "hero flow" take as few clicks as possible.
- **Understand SEO** - Work backwards from what people will be searching for when they need a product like yours. Then have those words in your product title and relevant metadata.

Related resources:
- [Presentation Slides](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lfSCWI_OUtchWpIEKwG8JkII8IUvBeACRqEJlnTErjU/edit?usp=sharing)
- [How To Come Up With Product Ideas That Get 100k+ Users](https://link.jointaro.com/7Q8cDrda23zv2omU9)
- [How Side Projects Make Recruiters Come To You](https://link.jointaro.com/rxqDDu4sgMQbP6LT8)
- [Why Side Projects Are So Powerful For Junior Engineers](https://link.jointaro.com/cFo3doiWDeE5dpa67)
- [How To Split Your Time Properly Between Work & Side Projects](https://link.jointaro.com/YFCmNrsdqhuMSeUw5)

"What does your day to day look like?" - 8/19/2022

- *In short, it varies a **lot**.* Startups are extremely unpredictable, and the biggest problem facing the company will change every month or even every week.
- However, there are 2 constants:
  - **Talking with new Taro Premium members** - We chat 30 minutes with every new member to get to know them, make sure they're set up properly within the community, and understand their job and career goals. These meetings add up, and we have a decent amount of them every day.
  - **Talking with Rahul** - There's always a ton going on, and we always have a bunch of ideas on how to evolve Taro, so we need a lot of time to talk each day, usually 45 minutes to 1 hour. According to YC, cofounders falling out is the #1 reason startups fail, so we really want to make sure that doesn't happen.
- We try to get a decent amount of code in every week, but it's hard to find time for it and the company's top priorities are often times not build related.
  - On a side note, the highest build priority for us right now is to really make the Taro web app silky smooth.
- We are fundraising right now, so that's dominating our lives.
- We have a lot of meetings in general as networking is crucial for startups.

"Is Taro hiring?" - 8/18/2022

If you're searching for a job, check out [our in-depth video on how Taro can help you do just that](https://link.jointaro.com/e5Swdksn8886KrQs9).

- **Not right now, but hopefully soon** - We want to make sure that when we do hire a full-time employee, we treat them very well and pay them top-of-market. We also want to make sure we're running as stable a ship as possible, especially in this economy - We don't want to hire someone just to lay them off within a year. This requires a lot of capital, more than we have with just the YC investment.
- We're raising our seed round now, and if this goes well, we should be able to hire a full-time engineer, maybe 2.
- Our dream is to turn Taro into a huge, financially sound company and then hire folks who have been supporting us for a long time, all the way back to the Tech Career Growth days.
- If you want to help, continue using Taro, letting us know how we can improve, and sharing the app with your friends and colleagues! The more we grow, the faster we can scale up Taro and achieve our vision of empowering every software engineer in the world to be happier and more effective in their careers.

"What is the growth plan for Taro Premium?" - 8/18/2022

There are 2 core areas at play here:
1. Empowering Taro Premium members to share their diverse wealth of perspectives and wisdom
2. Tactical areas of improvement

**Communal Sharing**
- Right now, Rahul and I are doing the thing that doesn't scale in true startup fashion: Providing the vast majority of career guidance ourselves.
- However, not only does this not scale, we firmly believe that this isn't the right thing to do long term: Our perspectives are only 2 out of millions of incredible people working in tech.
- Let me be frank: While we've had a diverse range of experience and pushed to understand as many angles of the tech scene as possible, our perspective is narrow. We've only worked in the Silicon Valley. We're around the same age. We spent the lion's share of our careers working at Meta. We're both Asian men. Because of this, there's a lot of stuff we don't know and aren't well equipped to talk about.
- This is where the community comes in. At the time of release of this video, we have ~170 members in Taro Premium, and I've been blown away by the diversity of backgrounds present. If we can enable, reward, and empower all these incredible folks in tech to share their perspectives and help one another, we can create what is truly the greatest repository of tech career advice on Earth.

**Tactical Stuff**
- Our main priority right now is opening up the Q&A career advice platform, so that all members of Taro Premium can easily ask and answer questions.
- While this was recently made possible, there's still a lot lacking. There's no notifications to know when your question has been answered, and we all know that the UI/UX has a ton of room for improvement, especially on web.
- We're working with a contract designer right now to completely overhaul the look and feel of the Taro web app.
- Another thing we want to figure out is member matching. For now, we're mainly matching folks of similar level as the incentives get wonky when you pair folks of different levels. However, this "algorithm" is still quite naive, and we have a long way to go before we can sustainably have folks network with one another in a way where all parties feel like they got value.

[Case Study] Effective Communication: Leading A Multi-Org Re-architecture At Meta

Here are [the presentation slides](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/184dP9pi41lO5TlME4cn4fRblCPtKFdet7d5WmrpnbGc/edit?usp=sharing) and the [polished chat log](https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/tech-career-growth.appspot.com/o/tps_chats%2Ftaro_premium_session_4_chat_notes.txt?alt=media&token=ca1a199d-fe36-42bc-8d2e-fc91371e691f) from the session.

As an IC, you don't have authority over engineers in the way a manager might. So your impact is defined by your ability to have **influence without authority**. Influence comes from consensus + collaboration, which comes down to communication. Said another way: Communication is the foundation for trust. 

Rahul talked about 3 parts to effective communication in this presentation: 
- **Start with the audience**
  - Understand how much context your audience has, and connect the dots for them.
  - Your communication should be as short as possible.
  - Bad news should never be a surprise.
- **Choose the right medium**
  - Do some reflection on what your objective is: build relationships or efficiently communicating some info? Be clear the difference between verbal and written communication.
  - Evaluate the current processes for communication in your org: standups, team meetings, email updates, cross-org communication. 
- **Be consistent**
  - You should have a regular drumbeat of posts for your projects. If you feel like nothing happened, you should explain why nothing happened.
  - For long-running processes like brainstorms or architecture reviews, you should consistently message the timeline and milestones.

Related resources:
- ["How can I come up with big initiatives, especially those at a Staff level?"](https://link.jointaro.com/sm57uikgXJ3RRpTv8)
- [Writing is thinking](https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/writing-is-thinking-an-annotated-twitter-thread-2a75fe07fade) - by Steven Sinofsky (Former President @ Microsoft)
- [Be plainspoken](https://boz.com/articles/be-plainspoken) - by Andrew Bosworth (VP of Eng @ Meta)

The Hardest Part Of Peer Feedback: Giving Them Constructive Criticism

- When the feedback prompt asks you for what your peer can improve on, it is *not* asking you what your peer is doing poorly. If you see your peer doing something toxic/negative, you should give them that feedback *immediately*. Don't wait 6-12 months until performance review season to drop this giant ball on them.
- The *real* question behind this prompt is: "How can your peer expand their scope?". This often times involves something they're already doing well that they can do even better and expand to achieve even greater impact.
- This question will be much easier to answer once you have a deep understanding of engineer levels as a lot of this feedback will be around what you think your peers can do to reach the next level.
- Example: Your peer is very passionate about automated testing and always pairs their landed code with robust test coverage. You suggest that they push to spread this behavior across the entire team with an overall testing initiative.

How To Maximize Your Peer Feedback Impact And Build Stronger Relationships

- Like everything else in life, peer feedback follows The Golden Rule: If you want good feedback from your peers, you should write good feedback for them.
- If a peer feedback request doesn't have a specific ask, proactively ask your peers what they want your feedback to focus on. This really shows your peers that you care deeply about them as performance review is such a core part of every employee's life.
- Writing very powerful, salient feedback for your peers on this crucial stage of performance review is one of the effective ways to build immense social capital.

Claiming Full Credit For Your Projects On Performance Review

- What is the project: Which features did it compose of? How does it work?
- Context behind the project:
  - Why was this project hard/interesting: Complexity of projects is especially important for more senior engineers.
  - What was the business impact: Did it lead to more revenue directly? Did it improve user experience? Was a core KPI increased?
- Role you played in the project: What value did you specifically add to the project, especially that of the deeper kind? For Big Tech companies, this is very important as projects can easily have 15+ people working on them.

Making The BEST Case For Yourself In Performance Review: The Self Review

- Your self-review is the most important feedback for you come performance review season: Ignore the weirdness you may feel hyping yourself up and take it very seriously.
- The onus for representing yourself well falls mainly on you, not your manager or peers. Nobody knows you better than you. It's your job to make sure that none of your awesome achievements fall through the cracks.
- Start your self-review early and refine it across several iterations with your manager.
- Use [your brag journal](https://www.jointaro.com/course/nail-your-promotion-as-a-software-engineer/brag-journal/) to seed the self-review.
- Show the impact. Attach links to proof as much as you can (e.g. linking a dashboard with positive metrics to show that the project you launched added business value).

Related resources:

- ["How can I most effectively talk about my projects?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/c0CDYi5VCRXz0gHHLiGP/how-can-i-most-effectively-talk-about-my-projects/)
- ["How to figure out what the most important projects are?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/CgCPA60bDDHoOteN7Lmb/how-to-figure-out-what-the-most-important-projects-are/)

The Core Principles Behind Writing Great Performance Review Feedback

- Don't procrastinate writing performance review feedback, especially for your peers! It's such a intimate, powerful thing, and if you truly enjoy working with your peers, they deserve meaty, thoughtful feedback from you.
- Keep it organized
  - Have clear sections. If your company has performance review axes, these can usually be used as your sections.
  - Use bullet points. People hate reading essays and paragraphs.
- Be concise: Use your word count efficiently and avoid repeating yourself.
- A lot of resume feedback applies to performance review as well. Use strong verbs, show the impact, and "Show, don't tell".

The Key To Avoiding The Performance Improvement Plan (PIP)

Getting hit with a performance improvement plan (otherwise known as a "PIP") is one of the worst things that can happen to you as a software engineer. This makes avoiding a performance improvement plan one of the most important things for you to do, especially in the currently layoff-rich economy.

Here's the core points from the video.

- Your performance review rating should never be a surprise: Regularly check in with your manager to figure out how you're trending to avoid the dreaded PIP.
- On top of asking for constructive feedback regularly, you shouldn't be afraid to ask every 2-3 months if you're on track to get the rating you want once the formal performance review happens. The clearest way this manifests is a hypothetical rating: *"Would you give me at least a \[Meets Expectations\] for my performance so far?"* This is the most powerful way you can stay in sync with your manager.
- Make it clear with your manager that you'll take any hypothetical rating with a grain of salt, so they're more comfortable giving it to you. If you're brave enough, you can even ask them to err towards the lower-end so you don't overset expectations.
- Keep your eye on the ball: Keep referencing the expectations plan you made at the beginning of the cycle and evolving it as necessary.
- Turn it up at the later end of the cycle. Humans have bad memory: It's unfair, but recency bias is huge. Try to land your bigger wins just a few weeks or months before the formal performance review process starts.

Related resources:

- ["What's the difference between a low performer software engineer and a high performer?"](https://link.jointaro.com/QHkWNXoJV5Y9VYvH9)
- ["How do I help my manager (who is also my mentor) be a better manager and mentor?"](https://link.jointaro.com/eG5c6usaJNY9wopP8)

Make Sure To Set This Up With Your Manager To Ace Your Performance Review

- Work with your manager to figure out which peers you should request feedback from at the end of the cycle: They may already have a bunch of peers in mind!
- Once you figure out these key peers, talk with them upfront about your goals, especially if they're ambitious and you're gunning for promotion. Work with them early to build this relationship, especially if they're more senior.

CRUCIAL Ingredient For Senior Engineer Performance: Assembling A Feedback Team

Here are the core points from the lesson:

- Be deliberate about who you request performance review feedback from: Don't just go through your half or year without a plan here and just request feedback from those you happened to work closely with at the end.
- Work backwards from how you want to be perceived at the end of the performance review cycle. Figure out the picture of your performance you want to paint and come up with the bench of peers who can paint that picture for you. From there, strive to build deep relationships with those peers (for advice on how to do that, here's [our course on Effective Communication](https://www.jointaro.com/course/effective-communication-for-engineers/)).
- Make sure that feedback isn't duplicated: You don't want to waste your peers' time by having them write effectively the same thing about you.

Understanding How To Empower Your Manager To Get The Rating You Want

- Come calibration time (i.e. when managers and very senior engineers come together to calculate your manager), your manager is going to have to defend you to get the rating they're proposing for you.
- This is another reason why it's so important to have a clear expectations plan. By setting the baseline, your manager has a concrete anchoring point to argue your case, in particular when you have gone above and beyond the baseline.

Avoid This Performance Review Death Trap - Creating An Expectations Plan

- Work with your manager at the beginning of your performance review cycle to create a plan. Do this no matter what: Even if your goal isn't too ambitious and you just want to get an average rating.
- The plan should outline expectations for you very clearly, ideally as a checklist:
  - What does it mean to hit your baseline expectation and not be in danger of a performance improvement plan (PIP)?
  - What does it mean to knock it out of the park?
- Things will change, especially in high-performance tech companies. This document will change over time, and you and your manager should be 100% aware of this and adapt.

360 Feedback: The BEST Performance Review System Top Companies Use

- The goal of 360 feedback is to generate as holistic and fair a picture of employee performance as possible.
- It does this by getting feedback from all directions:
  - Within (yourself)
  - Above (your manager)
  - Below (your reports if you are a manager)
  - Laterally (your teammates)
- This system prevents employee performance from reducing down to sucking up to the manager, which is the case in more traditional companies that aren't using this system.
- 360 feedback also makes the power dynamic between manager and report more equal. A manager will have a bad feedback packet if their reports all share bad feedback about them. This holds bad managers accountable.

The 3 Core Performance Review System Archetypes

- 3 archetypes:
  - Ad-hoc spaghetti (small companies): No ratings, no recurring timeline, no formal process to get feedback
  - Manager determines all (traditional companies): Manager determines 90%+ of your rating. Used by most companies.
  - **360 feedback** (modern, mature companies): Get feedback from all directions.
- 360 feedback is the best system, and it's used by pretty much all the top companies like Meta and Google.

[Case Study] Becoming A Tech Lead Again In Just 1 Month After Joining Robinhood From Meta

- The expectations for an L5+ (senior+ at a FAANG or similar company) engineer are high. You won't get 12 months or even 6 months to fully onboard: You need to start having huge impact and showing your depth within 1-2 months.
- After starting, Alex told his managers that he was happy to offload any responsibilities they had so they could focus on higher-level issues and expand their scope. As a tech lead, you need to view your manager as a partner, not just a boss. "Treat me as a resource."
- The project that Alex was first put on was to make settings more server-driven within Robinhood
- The most impactful thing to do was to add color to the project:
  - Stabilize and then drive the workstream meetings
  - Create a thorough tech spec
  - Align XFN to figure out how to treat each settings section properly, especially in places where there were inconsistencies
- How Alex added his depth:
  - Wrote a 5+ page Android spec for his portion
  - Manually audited all of settings and compiled a detailed spreadsheet of inconsistencies to fully capture impact
  - Thorough data analysis spec, doing complicated SQL queries himself
  - Mentored an L4 engineer in the process, giving them L5 scope
- Recap (how you can incorporate the learnings here into your work):
  - Earn trust quickly: Be "aggressively" nice. Find out how you can add value to others and be very sincere and upfront about it.
  - Fill in the gaps: View your projects holistically and figure out what's missing to move the project forward. This will often times be "less flashy" non-coding work.
  - Bring people together: Don't be paralyzed by your lack of knowledge. Especially if you're new to a company, you will be clueless in a lot of scenarios. If you're in a cutting edge company like Meta/Robinhood, there will be a smart person(s) somewhere out there with the answer: You just need to bring them together in a healthy way.
  - Go deep: There's far more to a senior engineer than their ability to code. If you're a new L5+ engineer, even the tenured L3/L4s at the company will code circles around you in the beginning. If you're an L5+ engineer, figure out what behaviors and fundamentals you have that more junior engineers don't and show those as much as you can. This generally involves shipping software in a much more holistic way.

Related resources:
- [Presentation slides](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1j5Lj_IGrtCRUpobj0f8k9egrBAej9apzikGp_V_iTCk/edit?usp=sharing)

The Breakdown Of A Good Technical Question

Asking effective technical questions: 
- **Intention**: What is your high level goal?
- **Expectation**: What do you expect to happen? 
- **Mismatch**: What is actually happening?
- **Investigation**: What have you tried?

If you're interested in learning Android, check out the tutorial Rahul references:  [Tip Calculator - Build Your First Android App](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7NYbSE8uaBCMVBVg6cskGzdYguj3CUP-)

Performance Review Ratings Example: Meta & Google

- Meta:
  - Meets Some Expectations (MS)
  - Meets Most Expectations (MM)
  - Meets All Expectations (MA): Need this or above to be doing okay.
  - Exceeds Expectations (EE)
  - Greatly Exceeds Expectations (GE)
  - Redefines Expectations (RE)
- Google (these are the old PERF ratings):
  - Needs Improvement (NI)
  - Consistently Meets Expectations (CME): Need this or above to be doing okay.
  - Exceeds Expectations (EE)
  - Strongly Exceeds Expectations (SEE)
  - Superb
- Other companies will use a 1 to 5 system which roughly maps to the above, Google in particular

If you fall below MA at Meta or CME at Google, you will either immediately be put on a [performance improvement plan (PIP) or be at huge risk for one](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/7SsdpweHE4sbyTtz2kxQ/the-key-to-avoiding-the-performance-improvement-plan-how-to-figure-out-where-youre-trending/). Learn how to [avoid or manage a PIP from our course](https://www.jointaro.com/course/the-ultimate-performance-improvement-plan-pip-guide/).

Related resources:

- ["What's the difference between a low performer software engineer and a high performer?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/nMxx2EMVIlJbl1oK4SGu/whats-the-difference-between-a-low-performer-software-engineer-and-a-high-performer/)
- ["How do I help my manager (who is also my mentor) be a better manager and mentor?"](https://www.jointaro.com/question/LbHgSEtXcb5QR5nVu8xt/how-do-i-help-my-manager-who-is-also-my-mentor-be-a-better-manager-and-mentor/)

Tech Career Growth Videos

Our instructional videos provide software engineers with insights needed for career growth. Masterclasses go incredibly in-depth on a specific tech topic while case studies are real examples from established engineering leaders.