Team Building
Luxi Huang’s User Guide: the human behind the resume
About me
From previous trust building exercises, I learned that I’m an ENTJ (MBTI) and a Venturer (Predictive Index). In my own words, below are defining points in life that shaped my values and behaviors at work today.
Origin
I was born into a loving middle-class family in China during the one-child policy era; my mom was a teacher, and my dad an electrical engineer.
My mom invested a stupid amount of energy and money to develop my musical talents.
Life trajectory change #1: immigrating to the U.S.
At the age of 11, we immigrated to the U.S. to give me a chance at a ‘better life’; our lives changed because we didn’t speak English. My dad worked electrician and assembler jobs. My parents encouraged me to go to college to achieve the ‘American Dream’. In my attempt to close the gap, I learned to outwork anyone, and to get back on my feet whenever I failed.
Life trajectory change #2: a piano teacher took a chance on me
When I was 13, Mr. Wang, a piano teacher spotted me at an audition, and found my mom (this is pre wide-spread internet adoption!). He took a chance on me, and gave me lessons at 50% discount.
To make up for the 3-year gap without a piano at home, I worked my a$$ off. Later I competed and performed at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.
Fast forward, I went to Cornell and loved double majoring in economics and psychology. After school, I worked at EY then at Goldman Sachs.
Life trajectory change #3: Three entrepreneurs took chances on me
I’m the product leader I am today because 3 entrepreneurs (Rex Briggs, Jon Sherry, and Anand Sanwal) took chances on me. In each instance, the leader saw my potential, and gave me a shot at doing something that stretched me. In response, I put 150% into work everyday, every month, and every year; it helps that I genuinely enjoy work.
Today, I’m a people-first leader; I coach, challenge, and take calculated chances to stretch people.
What I value
- People, and developing people
- Setting clear vision, goals, and milestones together: clarity enables autonomy. While in startups and growth companies, ‘where do we need to be as a business in 6 months’ may be theses, putting a stake on the ground allows the team to regularly review ‘where are we off, do we need to adjust quickly’
- Proactive communication
- Scrappiness, adaptability, and creativity to achieve goal
- Disciplined operating cadence that enables the team to communicate milestones and work through challenges and necessary adjustments
- Hard work
- Intellectual honesty and respectful debate
- Direct and honest feedback
- Extreme ownership and accountability
What I don’t have patience for
- Making excuses, and not owning up
- Decisions without evidence-based rationale
- No communication: I can’t read your mind 🔮
- Treating end user experience as a second thought
- Execution without big picture: missing the forest for the trees
- Repeating the same mistakes
- Meetings without purpose; everyone’s time is valuable
- Moving slowly: speed is a startup’s weapon
How to best communicate or share information with me
- Topics that require a debate or a deeper conversation: Email me context and / or materials on topics before we meet. I will do my homework and come prepared, so I can be most helpful to you.
- Updates: email.
- Urgent matters 🆘: email or text.
- Share wins 🎉: Slack, I want to hear your wins so I can celebrate with you.
- Product ideas 💡: Creativity and ideas come from all parts of the organization. I capture these ideas async (method differs by company stage) to avoid reacting or over-allocating resources to one-off ideas / requests, and neglecting true trends in user pain points and company strategy. I will ask you to articulate the problem observed and aggregate anecdotes from users who experience this problem.
My known weaknesses
- I can make decisions too quickly. If you believe we haven’t considered key information, I’d value your debate ‘have we considered X’
- I’m working on being more succinct and slowing down when I talk
- I’ve been working on being clear about expected outcomes. If I’m not being clear, please ask me e.g. “what do you mean by keep a high bar on user experience?”
- I work quickly, and used to send emails without looking at the timestamp. On larger teams, this had caused misperceptions. My hack now is to schedule the email to send in the morning, and I keep moving 😎
