On making things happen

One of my main responsibilities is to make sure things happen, but not just anything happens, to make the right things happen. I take responsibility for guiding our products to success.

A hard lesson to learn while growing in scope and caring for larger product surfaces is that you can't be everywhere at once. So, you should empower your team, remove obstacles, and give them the information they need to make good decisions. You are accountable for the team having the right context to make the right call.

Another failure mode you might fall into and you should avoid is to keep adding things until no more things can be added. Making things is not just adding things on top of things if that makes sense. Your ultimate goal should be to make something that doesn't allow you space to remove anything from it.

Also, don't forget that you are not managing an engineering project, something doesn't end just because it's implemented. The job is usually never done, you should be ready to iterate on the problem until the problem doesn't exist anymore. You are accountable for solving a problem, not for shipping a solution. And problems evolve over time.

One last thing is that in the process of making things happen, you should build strong partnerships, and empathize with their perspectives (colleagues, customers, etc). But you should also have your own opinion, which should be strong but flexible enough to adapt at the right time.