Two sides of a coin — active listening and delivering (thriving in a high growth start-up as an engineer)

ContactOut is a high-growth remote-first start-up company.

🚀 “High-growth”

This means there’s a lot of opportunity for career growth, learning new things and working with great people. There’s various ways to make an impact as the company grows in the area of leadership, management, specialized skills and innovativeness. You are connected with people who are not only highly skilled and experienced but also diverse in thinking.

🏠 Remote-first

With great power comes great responsibility. It’s not for everyone, but there’s great benefit when working remotely.

Work life balance
Flexibility
Cost savings
Higher productivity
The list goes on…

While it’s a great setup for many, it also comes with its challenges.

Overworking (due to work anywhere anytime nature)
Prioritization
Loneliness

The two sides of a coin

There are many factors that can affect how your career goes inside ContactOut but so far, these two are the ones that stand-out most for me.

Ability to receive a ticket (active listening)
Ability to execute well on a ticket (delivering)

The first one is your ability to receive and commit to a task or a ticket. Sounds easy enough but this is often very indicative of how the outcome will turn out. This is the “listening” part of the communication process where you try and understand the why, how, when, what it is you are trying to accomplish.

Asking the right questions to understand fully
Identifying the unknowns and bringing it up
Foresight — Assessing the risks or potential blockers
Understanding the complexity and raising concerns early on

The other part is the ability to deliver. Following through on your commitment. This is where your technical skills play a more meaningful part but then again, it is just one piece of the puzzle.

“Smart” and timely execution of the plan
Coordinating dependencies such as QA, code review, server requirements, scripts that needs to be run,
Clearly communicating updates and status

Case Study — Restrict user feature

Ticket — https://contactout.atlassian.net/browse/GRASS-190

Stacked PRs

This is a recent task I worked on that gives Sales Rep the ability to restrict a user and show an in-app message to the chrome extension. Planning started around June 28, 2022 and the feature was already live on August 8, 2022.

Planning

Planning involved visualizing the requirements to understand fully the end-goal and requirements
and asking classificatory questions
Going through the requirements with Joseph, Sarah, Sushi and Mark
Identifying test cases that needs to be written
Consulted Peter on planned DB changes

Execution

Execution started by writing unit tests for the back-end
During deep-dive I make sure to show progress to get confirmation and feedback
Iterative development of needed components to ensure progress but at the same time allow for urgent tasks and meetings
Scheduled a call with Mark to go through the code — focused on back-end as its the most crucial part of the code to review
Used Stacked PR to ensure smooth code review process separating out the back-end and front-end
QA — Created a demo video to explain the whole process of restricting a user and the expected outcome as well as different use-cases

Overall, very happy with how things turned out. Looking back, the most impactful step for me would be the planning part. There have been times where the last 10% of the project often takes as long as the first 90%. Having a good and thorough understanding leads to better planning and execution.

“Of all the skills of leadership, listening is the most valuable — and one of the least understood. Most captains of industry listen only sometimes, and they remain ordinary leaders. But a few, the great ones, never stop listening. That’s how they get word before anyone else of unseen problems and opportunities.”

— Peter Nulty, Fortune Magazine