Why should I have a career development plan?

Chances are that in the past few years, you’ve been asked about your Career Development Plan; you’re probably thinking “why do I need a development plan? Is my performance not up to standard?” or “My development plan is to start another job” or better yet, “I’m happy where I am, can’t you just leave me alone”.

Truth be told, working on a Development Plan is not easy; just ask your manager on how they’re doing with their own development plan. It requires a mix of abstract thinking, future projections, and asking yourself some tough questions. In its simplest form, a development plan is the roadmap or the journey, while a "Performance Evaluation" is the milestones and objectives to help you reach your destination.

The value of an effective development plan is that it helps the individual focus their growth and progress in a consistent direction; having a point of reference allowing for frequent checkpoints to make sure the individual continues heading in the right direction, despite occasional noise or distractions. In addition, sharing the development plan with the right audience has a multiplier effect of developing a personal network of agents and advocates who indirectly work to increase your chances of getting to your destination by bringing suitable opportunities to your attention based on what they’ve understood from your development plan.

So what makes for an effective development plan? It really should start with a detailed introspection, a 360 degree view of one’s profile. This includes a self assessment on a professional and personal level; what brings you satisfaction of time and effort well spent?

Ask yourself: how would I want my story to unfold 5 years from now? looking back, am I where I want to be in my personal and professional life. Don’t over think it, the simpler, the better. The German scientist/philosopher Goethe shares that “To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking.”

Where to start? well, the best place to start is having a direct and honest conversation with someone who’s opinion and perspective you value and respect. A family member, a colleague at work, a friend, a spouse and/or a professional counselor. As you discuss your profile, listen to your own story, look for clues; all the information needed is there. Identify a couple of areas and do a second round deep dive; is there a compelling story? yes, capture the highlights, otherwise keep looking.

Even the best plan needs to be checked every once in a while; our world is dynamic, change is all around us; when you least expect it, events might create opportunities. Those who are aware of their environment and keep an open and flexible perspective see the value and pounce on it.

Career management is more than just applying for a job opening; it’s a skill, you get better at it provided you’re investing in the most important thing: yourself!

So how’s your development plan coming along? 

Retail Checkout Lane Strategies

I read an article in the Wall Street Journal (Thursday Dec 8th, 2011) breaking down the physical logistics of the checkout lane; the science and strategy is very interesting and provides for incremental opportunities for processors. 

The fundamental premise is that retailers want to get the consumer through the checkout lane as fast and as conveniently as possible. This is driven by the fact that many factors may lead to shopping cart abandonment including the time it takes to get to a cashier, the consumer profile, actual vs. perceived wait time, and the overall checkout experience.

Research has shown that customers’ perceived wait time matched actual wait time in the first 2-3 minutes; however, it doubles after that…so if a customer actually waits 5 minutes, their perceived wait time is 10 minutes. Moreover, research conducted by INSEAD international business school indicated that customers expressed dissatisfaction if the lane moved slowly; their dissatisfaction was not only with the lane, but sometimes manifest itself with the store and the brand. Conversely, customers ex-pressed positive feelings about the experience and the store if the lane moved swiftly.

Retailers may employ one of several tactics to make sure customers waiting in a checkout lane are occupied or distracted until they reach the cashier; one such tactic, dubbed ‘lane chock-a-block’, lines the lane with inexpensive impulse items such as magazines, specialty sodas, or glitter covered piggy banks (think of Fry’s Electronics and Best Buy). Another tactic is to prescan shoppers items (Costco), or have checkout agents roaming in the store offering checkout services (Apple). A third tactic is to provide some sort of entertainment for customers especially in retail stores catering to kids such as Toys R Us.

Innovators such as Paypal, have opportunities to introduce innovations to cut down the actual and perceived wait time; such as prescanned shopping cart on a mobile device, auto applied coupons and discounts so that the consumer is not fussing for paper coupons, e-receipt capability to cut down on paper printing, and an integrated checkout leveraging all these capabilities.

Specifically, PayPal’s value proposition in this payment ecosystem highlights its unique ability to be a tremendous enabler for an exceptional checkout experience; working in tandem to complement and improve retail best practices aimed at delighting our customers.

Additional references: 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204770404577082933921432686.html?KEYWORDS=find+the+best+checkout+line

A blueprint for getting a promotion...

2012 is in the history books with all of its challenges, opportunities, accomplishments, personal growth, successes, and failures. Companies are in various stages of performance evaluation and promotion planning. One of the frequently asked questions this time of the year is: what do I need to do to get promoted to the next level?

First of all, asking this question now is like asking your accountant for tax saving strategies before the tax deadline (Monday 4/15/2013, if you’re wondering). Getting promoted is all about preparation. Having the right conversations with your manager to get on a ‘promotion track’. Practically speaking, if your candidacy for a promotion comes up for discussion, there should have been enough preparation along the way, such that the verdict is a clear and confident ‘YES’. You do not want a lot of debating and second guessing, nor do you want multiple submissions of your candidacy for getting promoted to the next level. These are guidelines more for your manager to properly and effectively handle the submission/advocacy process.

So where to start? One exercise that has tremendous benefit from the get go is an effective 360 feedback. Compile a list of 15-18 individuals, across the organization, from whom you want feedback. You want a balanced mix of managers, peers, team members, horizontal teams, and even folks from sister companies in the eBay Inc family. Deliver the list to your manager, who in turn would ping these individuals for feedback by a certain deadline (preferably 2 weeks), with regular reminders. You’re aiming for 60%-80% participation.

Ask 4 simple questions: 1) What are 2-3 strengths? 2) What are 2-3 areas of improvements in the next 6-8 months? 3) What should you start/stop/continue doing? 4) How would you rate overall performance?

Your manager consolidates the responses (anonymously of course), and highlights patterns or themes. Discuss this feedback in a open, honest, and direct spirit.

It’s what your peers are telling you, so *listen!* They took the time to share their perspective, so *listen!* There are enough actionables on average in a 360 for at least 6 months worth of work, so *listen!*

Based on the 360 feedback, Work on a *written* plan with your manager to actively manage the promotion track, calling out the checkpoints for various accomplishment. The plan should align with your performance objectives, and your manager will work to get you the opportunities needed to showcase your capabilities. Building the right relationships should be a line item in your plan; the audience may change depending on your area of specialization, but the fundamental premise of getting to know people , and adding value by leveraging those relationships, is the strongest contributor to your career management.

Work on your 30 second elevator pitch, what’s your story? What are you passionate about? It doesn't have to be work related; maybe you’re passionate about a charitable cause, or a sporting activity, or family, or hobbies…you get the idea…share these interests with your peers. You’ll be surprised how many folks might share one of more of your interests, which becomes a factor that strengthens the relationship. Professionally,  you should be operating at the next level already, and comfortably so. You should be demonstrating your resourcefulness and elasticity, with tangible results.

Having done all that, you feel pretty good that the promotion is coming next cycle…Not so fast! Generally speaking, the promotion timeline is governed by several factors that might be outside of your control or your manager’s control. Maybe others have followed a similar blueprint, and done a better job preparing themselves. But rest assured, if you follow this blueprint with an Open, Honest and Direct spirit, you’re promotion is not too far off. Good luck!

Snapshot of what I'm passionate about...

Can you share a bit about your background in POS and payment processing in general?

My first foray into payments processing was by writing POS applications for Visa, MasterCard, AMEX, and Discover. AMEX is a closed-loop processor, so POS applications had to also support split dial payments. I then went on to work on the networking stack connecting POS terminals and backend servers. This provided me exposure to multi-lane environments such as grocery stores and amusement park environments where there are multiple transaction channels including checkout lanes, kiosks, merchandising, ticketing, and more. The system aggregated all transactions for settlement at the end of the day through a central server. The first POS mobile application I worked on was for taxi cabs in one of the APAC countries. We had to deal with challenges such as signal strengths between tall buildings, and driver training.

Working on the server side was the logical next step which reinforced the importance of availability, reliability, fault-tolerance, uptime, and consolidated reporting. From there, I went on to work on clearing and settlement for high-end hotels, and learned about how to intermediate transactions the right way to add tremendous value. My team basically analyzed and re-qualified transactions back to the processors to negotiate a better rate for these large merchants that have pretty tight margins. Finally, I joined PayPal, which is an online culmination of all those functions, so that was a natural progression for me. 

What factors do you feel are important for successful and mass adoption of new digital wallet programs integrated with brick & mortar POS infrastructure?

Infrastructure: The first requirement for mass adoption is minimizing change in the POS infrastructure. The change is very costly and labor intensive, as it would sometimes require recertification of hardware and applications with the various processors/associations. The offering has to be simple, straight-forward, and easy to understand, and perhaps focus on specific niches that will allow learning from our customers, and rapidly iterate and improve the offering. 

Value proposition: The solution must also add value for the customer, so they see the benefits of changing their habits. As you know, swiping a credit/debit card at a POS is second to nature and very convenient. How can we make it compelling enough to change consumer behavior to use phone#/pin for example? A POS transaction is a much more powerful concept that transcends the money aspect. There are various services that can piggy-back on the money transaction that will add value to the customer. We are used to credit cards, we’re trained, and we’ve been doing it for decades. However, if we add value to that transaction, then it makes all the difference. Adding benefits such as stored coupons in the digital wallet, merchants’ reward/loyalty programs, and a digital receipt store for returns/exchanges. All these benefits can be enabled

as part of the transaction, paperless, within my digital wallet.

It is difficult to estimate when new technology, such as NFC/mobile payments, will become main stream. When do you think that will happen?

The POS industry in the US has very strong fundamentals that have held true for the majority of the 80s, 90s, and most of the 2000's. We are seeing a shift in the last couple of years that will change the game, powered mainly by the proliferation of smart mobile devices. We are seeing an appetite to retool the POS infrastructure with chip card/NFC enabled terminals. That, coupled with the introduction of mobile phone peripherals such as Paypal Here mobile card reader will allow easier integration from the online to the offline transaction environments. On average, US consumers change their phone every 18-24 months, so I believe we are probably about that far away from achieving critical mass of consumers equipped with smart phone and “smarter” terminals that our customers can use. 

Shifting gears a bit to talk about latency, which is a primary concern especially in the offline world. Site speed is paramount when we look at the online/web checkout experience. Can online capabilities be leverage to improve performance for the offline market?

I would answer this from two perspectives. Site speed is mainly focused on improving the stack for the online shopping experience. Transaction API performance is another dimension, which is geared towards both environments, but is especially important for the offline world. If we look at the major processors, the payment authorization is super-lightning fast. They apply the minimum amount of risk analytics, with the understanding that they will deal with the capture when and if it comes. 

When we talk about latency offline, we need to be mindful of the components of the transaction processing flow that contribute to the latency; the authorization latency is not the only latency that will add to the overall transaction response. In a multi-lane environment, there is a store concentrator that connects to a gateway, in addition to other hops, before it gets to the issues. So if authorization takes a second, and the multi-lane latency up and down the chain is adding one more second, we just added two seconds to the overall transaction response time, which is unacceptable. 

The other critical requirement is consistency; no matter when the authorization request comes in, the response has to be within SLA, even at peak times when our customers are lined up and ready to checkout. Those principles apply for both online and offline, but are more relevant offline. 

Do you have any parting thoughts that you want to leave us with? 

Engineers are enabled more than ever to play a critical role, sitting at the table with business and product partners to develop the right solutions. I firmly believe that Engineering can be enhanced by orders of magnitude when coupled with industry knowledge. This is because we are not just producing solutions or code without considering the customer’s buying habits and operating environment in which that transaction is going to take place. This is , in my view, a must have, because this is the only way we can sit at the table with product and come up with compelling requirements and products that our customers will love.