Yet Another Year in Review - Year 03.5

Written By Behzod Sirjani

This is my annual-ish personal review for my professional activities. It’s something I write for myself, to be shared (I’m really straddling the line between authentic and performative vulnerability here). Read Year 01 or Year 02. 

Intro

It's been about a year and half since the last "year in review" which I recognize slightly misses the "year" part of the title. But it's been quite a year so I'm going to give myself some grace.

I’ve learned a lot about myself and my practice in the last year. While there’s been a lot to celebrate, the year turned out a lot different than I expected. Some seeds I planted prior to starting the studio are growing well and bearing fruit, while others needed a lot more tending than I made time for. 

Similar to previous years, I’m going to start off by reviewing what happened, then share some thoughts and themes, and close with notes about what’s to come.

Looking Back

This was a full year (and a half), no matter how you look at it.  

Talks:

Writing:

Teaching/Training:

  • I led Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 cohorts of the User Insights for Product Decisions program at Reforge, closing out my Executive in Residence (EIR) tenure with just north of 1,000 people having been through the live program in 2.5 years.

  • I built and led a short course on Designing Customer Pilots for Reforge (which I probably won't run again and talk about below).

  • I built and led the first cohort of Effective Customer Conversations for Reforge, which may be the thing I'm most proud of this year (and a half).

  • I partnered with Ely Lerner to build a workshop for founders and product teams based on his offense/defense framework (reach out if you're interested).

Other:

The 35,000 Foot View

When I look at all of this, it’s easy for me to see that I’ve been much more of a speaker, writer, and teacher than a consultant. I felt this tugging at me a few times this year, but it wasn’t until I slowed down this fall to start reflecting back on the last 3.5 years that it really became clear. I’ve built a practice of teaching/training and done some consulting along the way. 

At first this was a disorienting realization, not because "consultant" was a part of my identity, but because what I thought I was doing and what I was actually doing were different. After I moved past the disorientation, I felt quite empowered. I hadn't really built a consulting practice and I hadn't really tried. There was no clear thing that I sold, and the work that I do as "Behzod-as-a-Service" is often quite undefined at the outset. 

In last year's reflection, I called out a similar dynamic: "I thought that I’d be working tightly with small teams, but writing, talks, and teaching has taken up the bulk of my time." It looks like this year was no different, and that isn't a bad thing. In fact, I’m already scheduled to teach every month through May 2024 and I’m thrilled (more on that below). 

My friend Brian Dell likes to push people to ask "What would it look like if you took X seriously?" and upon realizing that I'm more of a teacher and coach than consultant, I’ve enjoyed spending time thinking about what it looks like to take consulting seriously (more on that below too).

Themes I’ve Noticed

Leverage

If you asked me what I was thinking about at any given moment last year, the likely answer would be “leverage.” Leverage is an idea that’s made its way through a lot of my work over the last few years, especially my talks.

In Yet Another Newsletter - Issue 004, I wrote:

“Over the last two years, I’ve tried to share a synthesized (and evolving) version of these ideas, starting with “You Are Not Your Research Report” at UXRConf 2020, then in “Democratization is our Job,” in “Building Organizations that Learn” on the Optimal Path Podcast, and finally at User Research London, highlighting the way that “Building a Research Team may cost you your Research Practice.”  

The core idea of the talk is that we’ve mistakenly oriented ourselves to believing that our primary (if not only) value is “doing research,” rather than taking a more holistic view of “being researchers” and recognizing that our special skills are rigorous curiosity and critical thinking and we have so many ways in which we can leverage those skills in our organizations. By believing that our value is only in doing research, we’ve mistakenly grown our practices only through headcount, alienating people who don’t have “research” in their title and failing to account for the reality that a research practice (healthy or not) starts as soon as someone has an idea for a company and is the sum of everyone who is engaging in research activities. 

I’ve made the talk slides available in PDF, both with speaking notes and just as slides themselves and will share the video when I have it.” 

This year, I built on that keynote presentation with my talk “Your company needs less telephones and more plumbers,” which I delivered at the TCV event in October 2023 (I’ll share more about this in the coming month). The core idea of that talk is that too often we think about the highest leverage thing to do as a company and too rarely we think about the highest leverage ways to contribute as individuals or a discipline. 

I probably think about this more than most because being an advisor (and the consulting work I do) is me being hired as leverage. Unlike consultants who are not domain experts, I’m more of a coach who played the game (and continues to play). This gives me a unique perspective on not just what has worked for me, but why those things worked and what may or may not work for the people I partner with. It means I can more quickly assess problems, identify potential solutions, and provide guidance and feedback as they solve those problems. And I do this from a place of practice, rather than just theory. I also am incentivized to make myself obsolete, or at least to develop competence and confidence in the people I’m supporting. This is in contrast to many consultants, who are incentivized to have you keep coming back every time you need that problem solved. 

I’ll give this topic a lot more space in another post, but I think that it’s something that differentiates my work (and how I see my work). It’s also why I find more joy and energy in these engagements than others I talk to who are also “consulting.” I’m not looking for any place I can be useful, I’m trying to find spaces where partnering with others can amplify their output or be a force multiplier in their systems, especially where I’m uniquely qualified to do so. I’d encourage many of you to do the same regardless of your current job configuration. I imagine it will open you up to much more interesting work and a different perspective on what you do and how to do it.

Taking Teaching Seriously

I love teaching. Both of my parents taught at various points in their lives. I’ve worked as a tutor, in a writing center, and as a teacher all before I started my career. Something I value about teaching is the way that it forces you to look so closely at your subject matter. You have to deconstruct and reorient yourself to the subject in such a way that you can not only explain how to do something, but how to do something from a starting point and a perspective that is different from your own. Doing this changes your relationship to that subject.  

One of the things I'm most proud of this year (and a half) is building the Effective Customer Conversations course. Reforge made some product and business changes over the last year which opened the door for people like me to remix our old programs into new ones and facilitate them ourselves. The biggest thing I've wanted to do since I taught the first cohort of User Insights for Product Decisions (UIPD) was go deep on interviews and customer conversations, and the number one request I got from members was for activities and practice time.

So this fall, I sat down and built a new course from the ground up. I wanted to be intentional about all the pieces — what made sense as asynchronous content, what would be ideal for me to deliver live, and how best to use our sessions together to give people a safe place to practice core concepts. I also wanted this to be something that was short enough for a founder/CEO to consume it and detailed enough for them to be able to put it into practice immediately. 

Beyond being proud of the quality of the course, I'm also proud of the volume of material itself. The course includes over 15,000 words of asynchronous content and over a dozen new diagrams. The only piece of connective tissue to UIPD is the decision-first framework (which I started sharing publicly in 2019). I also owe a huge thank you to Sean Rice and Ellen Naruse at Reforge for their feedback, without which the course would be much longer and considerably worse.

While I've only run the first cohort so far, it seems to be a much better experience to help people become confident and competent when engaging with customers. Because of that, I’m currently scheduled to teach the course every month from December 2023 through May 2024, and will likely pick up again after summer. In this new model, I’m also able to offer this course privately to companies. If you'd like me to help you/r team be better at engaging with customers and using those conversations to inform real decisions, send me an email.

Designing Customer Pilots

I mentioned earlier that I built and led a short course on Designing Customer Pilots for Reforge and probably won’t teach it again. This is largely about focus and how different it felt to teach this course from Effective Customer Conversations. 

I’ve run dozens of pilots in my career, but I haven’t taught them up until recently (beyond engaging with colleagues as necessary). In contrast, I’ve conducted hundreds (if not thousands) of interviews in my career and have taught people about interviewing for almost a decade. 

While my teaching style is not “I have all the answers” so much as “here’s what worked in my experience — let’s deconstruct it so you can learn from it,” I’ve realized that teaching something I am excited about and want to continue getting better at (interviews, talking to strangers, etc) is much more energizing than teaching something I’ve done and feel confident about. This isn’t how everyone approaches teaching, but I believe that teaching is one of the best ways to get better at something. Since there is only so much time in the day, when I teach, I want it to help me improve my practice, not sit outside of it.

As I was building the content for Designing Customer Pilots, I had a suspicion that I would feel this way. Writing didn’t feel like an uphill battle, but it never came as easily as my writing for Effective Customer Conversations or any other interview training I’ve ever put together. I’m not someone who actively avoids all forms of friction (I’ve written about meaningful friction here), but by simply paying attention to my energy, I felt like Designing Customer Pilots may not be a recurring offering. 

I’m glad that I did it. I had some great conversations with the people in the course, it gave me exposure to the new Reforge content format, and it also helped me rekindle a deeper form of working, as I would spend 6-10 hours a day writing. This practice was critical to me putting together Effective Customer Conversations later in the year. 

Leaving a Sport

Over the last few months, I’ve started working with a coach again. I can say a lot of positive things about working with a good coach, but the big unlock for me early on in our sessions was him helping me see my career differently through a metaphor using sports. 

While the first part of my career was me playing a sport on a team and then playing that sport as more of a free agent, I’m now in a period where I’m less interested in any specific sport. Instead, I’m excited to create games I want to play and enlist people I want to play with. 

This realization came from examining past projects I was proud of and thinking about what I feel drawn to moving forward. I’ve realized that I don’t have any specific industry or problem space I care deeply about. The most important aspect in anything I do is the people. Every project I haven’t loved has come down to the people, and every time someone I respect says they want to talk about a potential project, I’m halfway sold before I even hear about what it is. 

This has been a helpful orientation for me on the business side too, because it made it easier for me to pass on things where there’s too much of an open question about my potential partners. I’m sure that I’m missing out on interesting work because of this, but in the spirit of choosing my stresses, I would rather be stressed and working with friends instead of stressed and working with strangers any day. 

(Note – For those of you who may also feel like you are in this transition out of your sport and into games, Paul Millerd talks about this as “the pathless path” and has a great book with the same name.) 

Unlearning the Silicon Valley in Me 

I don’t run a venture-scale SaaS business. 

This is obvious. But thinking about how things scale is something I’ve spent many years doing (and still do as a part of my work with El Cap, TCV, and some clients). 

At Facebook, most of the numbers I paid attention to had two commas and six zeroes after them. We regularly killed off products that didn’t make sense from a business perspective, even though they were larger than many other businesses that exist in the world. 

But my audience today isn’t necessarily millions. There are things I want to do — things that I should do — that make sense in the scale of 1 or 10 or 100s of people, and not just at MVP stage, but running at full steam. So I’ve had to actively unlearn the habit of killing (or challenging) ideas that aren’t venture scale. 

Scale doesn’t implicitly mean “massive” though that’s often how we use it. I’ve been working on pushing myself to ask “At what scale would this be sustainable?” and “At what scale does this break (or break me)?” 

This has opened me to a number of different questions to ask as I think about  self-directed projects or potential partnerships moving forward: 

  • Does this feel like something I’m uniquely capable of? 

  • Is this how I want to spend my time and energy?* 

  • What is the right shape/size for this project? 

  • What stresses does this add to my life?

  • How should this feel if it’s going well? 

These are all wildly privileged questions to be clear. But it is a privilege to work for yourself and an even greater privilege to work with people you respect and admire. As I’ve looked back to help me look forward, this reflection has helped me question what else I need to unlearn (I’m sure I’ll write more about that soon).

*Justin Duke phrases this question as  "what am I willing to say no to in order to say yes to this?" I love this phrasing and will definitely borrow it in the future.

Looking Forward

Sustainability and Sabbaticals

Perhaps surprisingly, I felt overwhelmed and uninspired for days or weeks at a time this year. As I’ve reflected more on this, I’ve come up with a few different explanations. 

The first one is perhaps the most straightforward — I did a poor job managing my time and energy. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed if you’re working on too much, and feeling uninspired in conjunction with this means I’m probably working on the wrong thing. Getting into this state is often the result of a scarcity mindset where — as an independent consultant — you’re worried about where your next meal is coming from and/or take on projects that aren’t a good fit (or spend too long qualifying a client).  

The second explanation builds off of the my notes in the section above — my expectations were out of touch with reality. I had no false preconceptions that I was trying to build a billion-dollar business, but I need to play the game that’s on the field, not the one that is in my head. I probably didn’t appreciate a lot of what I was doing this year as I was doing it because I was looking at it incorrectly. Having expectations that are removed from reality is the quickest way to be unhappy, and I needed to have an honest conversation with myself about the shape of things I was doing so that I could more accurately calibrate my efforts and outcomes. 

The third explanation is one that’s popped up in different places in my life over the last few years — I stopped listening to myself. At different points this year, I found myself doing the thing I thought I should do, rather than the thing that I felt pulled toward. One of the hardest parts of being independent is not having other people in the business with you to think about and talk about the work. I’ve gotten much better at having a close set of friends to sanity check things with or help me work through my own thoughts. But I was too slow to engage those people at the right time this year in a few places, and I paid for it with my time and my energy.

One of my favorite posters from my time at Facebook.

The recurrence of these feelings led me to take a “sabbatical” this winter, ending all client work and almost everything else for November and December. The goal was to take time to slow down and shift from working in the business to working on the business. I knew I wanted to do things differently and do different things, but I didn’t know what those were. So I carved out time to figure it out. 

Some of the things I reflected on:

  • What have I enjoyed the most over the last 3.5 years? What was it about those things that I enjoyed? 

  • With an empty calendar, what am I drawn to? How do I want to spend my time? 

  • Who have I learned the most from? Who do I want to learn from? What kind of games could we play together?

  • What are the rituals I need to develop to continue being able to play games on my terms? 

  • What do I want 2024 and beyond to look like?

I’ve found that talking to myself on walks has been one of the best ways to give space to these questions and get to the core of what I think and feel. More than anything, it’s nudged me to experiment next year, and plant some new seeds. 

As someone who is not very good at taking time off and has already cut his sabbatical short (I’m teaching again in December), my biggest takeaway has been to figure out how to make this way of being more sustainable. Teaching has given the first half of next year a rhythm, and I’m building a calendar around it to give myself “on weeks” and “off weeks.” I’m hoping that present me can do some of this work to help future me. We’ll check in on that mid 2024.

Building Systems in Service Of The Work

I used to ride my bike a lot. A lot. Towards the end of my time in San Francisco, I was on my bike at least three mornings a week. When I started the studio, I embraced “no meeting mornings” to honor this activity and its role in my health and mental wellbeing. 

Since moving to Seattle, I’ve ridden my bike a lot less, to the point that “no meeting mornings” don’t make much sense. They’re open spaces on my calendar where I’m often doing deep work, but they don’t serve me the way that they used to. In fact, when I do ride, it’s often in the middle of the day. Instead of blocking off each morning to be able to ride, it would be much more beneficial to block off extended “no meeting lunches.” 

This is one example of how easy it is to forget why a structure served you in the first place. When I realized this about my calendar and riding, I took a moment to reflect on a few other practices that felt like they may be out of date. 

One of the big ones was how I take notes. Thanks to a few friends (and my dogmatic insistence that I have notes available to me offline), I started using Obsidian this year for all my notes. But it wasn’t just switching to Obsidian that mattered (we all know it’s the tool and the ritual, not one without the other that is important). I started doing two specific things with Obsidian that helped:

  1. Every time I open the app, it creates a daily note that’s titled YYYY.MM.DD.HH so that I never have to think about “where to take notes” or “what to call this.” I just open Obsidian and start writing. 

  2. Every Friday afternoon, I have a calendar block to review the week’s notes. I review them more frequently than this, but the hour that’s dedicated to review has been useful for me to make sure I don’t miss anything and am prepared for the following week. 

This may feel small, but every big thing starts small, and let me tell you — this has become a big thing to me. I’m much more on top of things as a result of this switch and more than anything else, I don’t have trouble finding things anymore or wondering whether something lives in Drive, Dropbox, or iA Writer (don’t ask).

Another system change for me has been committing to longer time horizons. I talked about this a little bit in “Taking Teaching Seriously,” but over the past few years I stayed away from being “locked in” to longer projects. As I get more confident in what running the studio means, even the experiments, it’s become easier for me to plan further out. This has led to the added benefit of freeing up a lot of the energy that went into figuring out what to do and allowing me to put that into how I do things. Again, this sounds obvious, but it was a lesson I had to learn over time. 

All of these changes — no meeting lunches (or days), how I take notes, and the longer time horizons — are systems and structures that I can see help me be the best version of myself and do the best work that I can. In a professional mode that often encourages you to work on others’ terms (consulting), I’m trying to do my best to structurally ensure that I show up in the best way possible. 

Personal Projects as a Commitment to Curiosity

Last summer I did something out of character — I sold almost all of my photography equipment. Cameras have been a big part of my life for more than a decade. They’ve connected me to some of my closest friends, opened doors that would have otherwise stayed shut, and taught me how to really look at the world. 

I sold everything because I wasn’t using it. Similar to riding bikes, the pandemic and my move to Seattle changed my relationship to photography. I wasn’t going to concerts as much, my friends (and the Slack Marketing team) didn’t need portraits as often, and carrying a gripped DSLR around each day rarely seemed worth it. But I knew I didn’t want to stop shooting, I just wanted to shoot differently. 

I realized that what mattered to me more than having a camera that could shoot at ten million megapixels or one thousand frames per second was having a camera that felt invisible. A camera that I wanted to carry with me. So after a lot of thought (and ignoring Max’s persistent belief that I’d love it), I picked up a manual focus Leica. 

Ignoring the camera brand for a moment, I cut my teeth working for the school newspaper and photographing concerts, so having trustworthy autofocus was something that mattered whether it was capturing sports, solos, or a fleeting smile. But I wanted to change my relationship to photography and particularly force myself to slow down and look differently at the world. 

To hold myself accountable to that, I also started a personal project called Yet Another Memory, inspired by one of my favorite photo projects — Daily Dose of Imagery by Sam Hassas. The initial project was meant to be a daily-ish “postcard” of a single image and some words. In the spirit of looking differently, I told myself that all photos needed to be taken with the new camera and I could not post any portraits or similar posed photos of people. The goal was to look at new things in new ways. A commitment to curiosity. 

This project has been one of the most rewarding for me personally. In addition to nudging me to carry the camera around and walk more, almost every postcard results in a conversation (even though the subscriber count is mid double digits). In a year that I struggled to listen to myself, this project has been a constant source of fuel and inspiration and a reminder to trust myself a bit more. So thank you to everyone who subscribes and, more importantly, responds.

(If you want to see more photos, check out Glass, since my photo page is quite out of date at the moment.)

People as Partners (Long Live Squads)

Another conversation that has emerged from coaching is the recognition that my work has had a few different phases — working for companies, working with companies, and now working with people (more directly). Teaching is very much a direct to consumer business, and my point above that people are the priority has helped me get clarity on things I’m excited to explore next year. 

While I’m still going to spend some time working with organizations, I want to do more work directly with people — not mediated by their companies. I’ve realized that a lot of what I care about (and what I enjoy) is helping people get out of their own way. Whether this is a one off conversation or walking a path together, I’m excited to explore new formats for this. I already have a few things planned, including coaching, in-person events, and a virtual conversation series I’m calling “A Book Club Without Books” (sign ups open soon).

The other side of this is that I’ve got a lot more partner projects coming up. A handful of existing conversations this year have grown legs and taken on a life of their own, and I’m looking forward to launching a few new things with friends. Working for yourself doesn’t mean you have to work alone! 

So if you have an idea and want to play together — please don’t hesitate to reach out. 

Taking Consulting Seriously

Something that became clear as I reflected on consulting was that I’ve missed the extended, deep work that I did earlier in my career and in Year 01. I want to be in it. 

On the surface, it could look like there is a tension here between leverage and deeply embedding within an organization for a project, but the dose makes the poison. The projects that I’ve shied away from are those where I’d be more of an extra set of hands, whereas the projects I’ve been excited about (and the ones I’m looking for) are where I get to be an extra brain alongside those hands. I can tell what’s going to be a potentially good project based on whether we’re talking about activities (bad) or outcomes (good). The best partners I’ve had trust me to shepherd them to a destination with less concern and oversight for the path that we take. 

As I’ve looked ahead to 2024 and beyond, I still feel that I don’t want to do many consulting engagements, but that’s because I’ve realized I want to do more deep work — which often takes time. The work that I find myself drawn to is very much in the realm of helping people improve the way they work and work together – a unique blend of hospitality, service design, and organizational design that I love.

While I still believe that illegibility is an asset and am grateful that friends come to me with loosely defined “Behzod-shaped problems,” I do think I’ll more actively reflect on what (else) makes a good project and partnership for me in the coming year (for internal clarity, if nothing else).   

Yet Another Dot Com

After far too long, I’ve started putting together YetAnother.com. 

I’m including a very blurred in-progress screenshot below because first drafts are never that great, but this post has a lot of words and not enough images.

In the spirit of leaning into more directly working with people, I’m building a new home just for that. It’s been fun to start with a blank canvas and lean into the spirit of play (the colors! the colors!). In the spirit of YA being a portfolio of play, the site is a collection of ways to engage – both with me and each other. It’s where you can learn about A Book Club Without Books and all the other experiments moving forward, just sign up for Yet Another Mailing List (isn’t this fun?).

Wrapping Up

I mentioned above that working for yourself doesn’t mean you have to work alone, and this past year plus I have leaned on a number of people to keep me going. It takes a village, as they say. I’m grateful to Tom, Elan, Coleen, Sanford, Liza, Lena, and the whole Little Futures crew for being sources of inspiration, feedback, and friendship. 

I’m excited for next year, which is something I don’t think I could have said confidently prior to this time away. But distance creates perspective and stepping away from the work for a minute was more than necessary. 

If you have questions or want to dive deeper into any of this, just like my footer says — cold emails welcome.

Behzod Sirjani https://behzod.com
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