I was having a conversation with a friend and we were talking about how “American” it is to think of a job role as a very 1:1 need to skills ratio. Most roles are posted because a company has experienced some amount of pain in a particular department and now needs a specialist to handle that pain.
It makes complete logical sense – people are expensive, so you probably want to hire them to get a specific job done. Also, it’s much easier to vet someone 1:1 to a job requirement that is better understood (“coding an app”) than something nebulous (“create a cohesive user experience across our brand”), so it’s unsurprising that hiring approaches try to be as data driven as possible.
That’s where warm introductions come in – you’re borrowing trust established from someone else you already know to do the prevetting for getting you a candidate that you can also trust. They are reputation introductions. There’s an incentive on both sides to make it work… a triangle of trust between all three people to keep the relationships intact.
I’ve been having a lot of conversations with early stage companies, often about creating roles out of thin air, and sometimes those conversations are just me firing off a cold email. Sometimes it works, like with Bird, but a lot of times it’s a shot in the dark.
Sometimes if I feel like a team may be hiring for a generalist, I’ll send along a menu of things I’ve done and can do. I call this document “Daniel’s Work Strengths” and it consists of two parts:
My Top Gallup Strengths Motivators and a bit of a reflective “pros / cons” section on them. If you haven’t checked out Gallup Strengths, I’ve found it to be particularly useful in uncovering what I am most motivated by in my work. The great part about the assessment is that they give you the top themes that are permanent with your personality throughout your life. You can browse all of the strengths here, but the assessment will help you rank them.
A bulleted list of all of the various things I’ve done, organized into categories. This list repeats for some categories, but I have personal examples of every item in the list that I can point to.
It is an unconventional approach, but it can be a good way to standout when it is curated for a specific company or role.
Below is my document fully copied-and-pasted into this newsletter. If you’d like to look at a PDF of it, you can see it here.
My top work themes
Paraphrased from Clifton Strengths
My skills
**Not organized in order of proficiency, but as a general overview
1. Launch, New Business, Government Relations (Early Stage)
New business – Going from 0 to 1 with new ventures.
Driving projects from little to no requirements to established, long-term systems.
Account management of new partners
Authoring operating procedures
Opportunity, market analysis
General scrappiness
Product support for customers, partners, launchers in the field.
Product prioritization feedback for HQ
New city launch – Drafting and executing a launch playbook.
Cross-disciplinary collaboration across product, engineering, marketing, ops, government relations teams
Executing operating procedures on the ground
Coordinating the delivery and storage of assets to market
Contractor management and onboarding
Launch documentation
Deploying and troubleshooting vehicles in-market
Troubleshooting product issues and outages
Setting up a market using internal tooling
General scrappiness
Customer support
Community engagement events
Government relations events
Authoring and coordinating press releases
Booking venues and negotiating pricing for events
Operations – Iterating to build a more efficient organization.
Drafting the account management playbook for contractors and partners
Building a contractor training program
Product troubleshooting and feedback to HQ
Authoring Product Requirements Documents
Scaling operational improvements
City sales – Selling to government officials and stakeholder management
Analyzing and ranking markets
Sourcing government contacts, partnerships
Designing external presentations
Pitching to government officials
Nurturing government relationships leading up to an RFP
Government relations events
2. Expansion Strategy (Growth stage)
Market analysis – Vetting market opportunities domestically and internationally.
Ranking domestic and international markets
Researching geographies of markets
Building internal and external presentations
Outlining detailed geographic operating areas
Market performance monitoring infrastructure
Designing internal presentations
Finance & Corporate Development – Analyzing costs, data, and building forecasts
Building models forecasting performance in markets
Building models for JV opportunities
Analyzing JV and partnership opportunities
Surfacing risks and opportunities to cross-disciplinary teams
Synthesizing analysis in presentations
Competitive RFPs – Authoring, writing, managing a team around tight submission deadlines.
Leading cross-disciplinary teams to draft RFPs
Building models for bids to competitive RFPs
Writing templates for future RFPs
Drafting product feature pitches
Growth Marketing – Reaching people
Setting up analytics
Drafting cross-channel marketing plans
Running paid campaigns
Monitoring performance metrics
Guerilla marketing
Ideating and running growth experiments
Executing a social media strategy
Managing budgets
3. Design, Creative, Product Management (Early Stage)
Product management – Empowering organizations to build high quality, useful products
Authoring Product Requirements Documents
Leading a team to launch a product
Interviewing customers and collecting feedback
Analyzing performance metrics (Mixpanel)
Running design thinking workshops
Digital product design – Producing high quality digital products
User experience design
User interface design
Desktop and mobile product design
Design team management
Product requirement research and drafting
Basic proficiency in Swift UI
Brand design – Everything related to a brand from start to finish
Logo design
Packaging design
3D design (Blender, occasionally SolidWorks)
Illustration design
Drafting creative briefs
Managing contractors across all creative fields
Presentation design
Design system design, planning, and construction
Figma, Sketch, FL Studio, InVision, InDesign, After Effects, iMovie, copywriting, brand strategy, design systems
Website design and development – Making a meaningful, high-value web presence
Managing contractors
Setting and achieving deadlines
Running exploration workshops
Producing high-fidelity mockups
Quality assurance
Google Analytics, Hotjar, general analytics.
HTML/CSS, Framer
Hardware – Conceptualizing physical objects
Authoring Product Requirements Documents
Low fidelity prototyping
3D design (Blender, occasionally SolidWorks)
Sketching
Budgeting, project management
Basic proficiency in Swift, C, MATLAB, LabView, SQL
4. Partnerships & Sales
Account management – Building, meaningful, long-lasting relationships with 3rd parties
Sourcing and managing Fortune 500 partners and smaller niche firms
Managing contract labor
Sourcing and managing 3rd party logistics providers
Managing contractors – Teams and freelancers
Managing creative contractors
Managing product design contractors
Managing website agencies
Managing third-party logistics companies
Managing packaging agencies
Managing social media contractors
Managing interns
Sales – Finding the right partners
Sourcing and qualifying partner opportunities
Sourcing and qualifying city opportunities
Sourcing and qualifying contract labor opportunities
Authoring a sales playbook
Sourcing RFP-relevant partnerships at the local level
Salesforce, Close.com, CMS
5. Culture
Team Culture
Leading culture-driven teams
Writing unique, meaningful values
Marketing values
Designing and running workshops
Generating ideas for culture experiments and feedback
Organizing culture-nurturing activities
Hackathons
Leading a hackathon organizing team
MCing hackathons
Marketing events
Recruiting participants
Booking guest speakers
Coordinating activities
Managing a budget
Assembling teams
Operating in-person and virtual events
If you’ve had a great introductory call and you’re trying to craft a role for yourself at an organization, this could be a useful tool to help provide more context for a leader. At worst, it could give you a long list of examples to pull from during your interview process that can help better prepare you for your later conversations.
Good luck!
Thanks for writing this Daniel. Curious to know what kind of cold email you fire for a role to be created just for you ? :)