{"id":135,"date":"2021-04-19T15:58:08","date_gmt":"2021-04-19T15:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.harvard.edu\/liana\/?p=135"},"modified":"2021-04-19T16:52:36","modified_gmt":"2021-04-19T16:52:36","slug":"glue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/liana\/2021\/04\/19\/glue\/","title":{"rendered":"Glue"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the most undervalued skills in engineering is knowing how to be the glue. This is how I transitioned from engineer to product manager.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Like noticing when other people in the team are blocked and helping them out. Or reviewing design documents and noticing what&#8217;s being handwaved or what&#8217;s inconsistent. Or onboarding the new people and making them productive faster. Or improving processes to make customers happy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Check out this blog post\u00a0 for some very valuable thoughts on the importance of these soft skills, <a href=\"https:\/\/noidea.dog\/glue\">Being Glue<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In a similar vein is this blog post,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/hbr.org\/2018\/07\/why-women-volunteer-for-tasks-that-dont-lead-to-promotions\">Why Women Volunteer for Tasks That Don\u2019t Lead to Promotions<\/a>. But I think the Harvard Business Review misses the point. They call many of these soft skills, Non-promotable Tasks.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Workers who spend more time on non-promotable tasks are held back from demonstrating their full potential.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>If something needs to be done and benefits the organization, then it has value.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the most undervalued skills in engineering is knowing how to be the glue. This is how I transitioned from engineer to product manager. Like noticing when other people in the team are blocked and helping them out. Or reviewing design documents and noticing what&#8217;s being handwaved or what&#8217;s inconsistent. Or onboarding the new [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1911,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","post-preview"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/liana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/liana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/liana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/liana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1911"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/liana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/liana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":143,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/liana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions\/143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/liana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/liana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/liana\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}