✅ Sarah E. Danzl

You already have the core skills - it’s how you got your degree. Now think about business skills that will make you successful in the corporate environment. Teamwork, communication, project management to name a few. Get a mentor - this will help you get regular guidance on how to “show up” successfully in the new world. Be bold, take chances and work hard!

Customers want a partner, not a vendor. They want a team that doesn’t have all the answers but will work through the times when things aren’t going as expected. Being proactive in updates and fixes is the easiest way to build trust. Many customers also want the opportunity to improve their personal or organizational brands, so offering opportunities for advocacy that are easy for them to participate in or achieve can be a big win.

Taking this a step further, each team should have goals dictated by the top-level company goals. For example, if your organizations goal is to lead the market, each sub team should have goals that relate back to that in terms of their specific role and impact. Marketing = grow share of voice, product = x number of customer feedback sessions, etc. Goals should be located centrally, communicated to everyone and touched on frequently after including QBR, exec touch points etc Your team has to feel connected to how they are contributing to moving the org forward and a good way to benchmark progress is through defined goals. 3-5 has always been my sweet spot.

Take time at the beginning of new projects to just brainstorm with the team - nothing is off limits. Make it a free space to think, collaborate. You will find the freedom, diverse perspectives and people iterating off each other makes for many new and creative solutions.

People learn differently, and a variety of modalities is important. Hands-on or experiential is often overlooked but a crucial part is the process. High impact organizations offer ways for people to practice in a safe environment, which leads to the only true way to validate capability = performance.

Learning must also be personalized to job role and organization. For example, though the content might be built for a “project manager” as a way to personalize, a pm in engineering is very different than a pm in marketing. This also goes for industries.