TL;DR: It’s hard to learn from circumstances. It might be easier to learn from people. I’m joining a company with two experienced founders, because I want to see how they work.

So I just switched jobs again. The pre-mortem didn’t capture this– that is to say, I failed to foresee how much I would hate the 1h20m commute down to Mountain View, and how little energy it would leave me to work side projects.

I also failed to foresee how difficult it is to “learn-on-the-job.” At H2O I built from the ground up a team of seven – designers, UI engineers, and even had the legendary statistician Leland Wilkinsen on my team. I was supposed to lead building a killer visualization product. I couldn’t do it, I didn’t know how to organize the team and protect them from noise and distraction. I didn’t know how to keep them focused. Hell I didn’t know how to stay focused myself in the storm of competing priorities.

What I realized was that, I was hired on the strength of a side project, where I only had to manage myself. I had one other person to collaborate with, but I didn’t have to deal with prioritizing and saying no to a team, or a boss. When I decided I had to leave, one of the things I knew I wanted out of my next gig is a role model in organization and management. I want to see how a well run team looks like.

This week I started at Noodle.ai, which calls itself an Enterprise AI company. The founders are experienced consulting folks, having been partners at Deloitte and Infosys. The place is run like a consulting shop, and my role as a principal designer will, at least initially, be focused on delivering data visualizations and dashboards as the front-end to our data scientists’ work. It’s individual contributor work that I am well equipped to do.

What I am really looking forward to though is seeing how these people work. One week in I am already keenly aware of how different the culture is, particularly the focus on documentation and communication. Stephanie said this is exactly how consultants are trained to work. Before any piece of work begins, they check:

• are we internally aligned on this?
• are we aligned with the client on this?
  
• when can this be delivered?
  
• who is responsible for the success this piece?
  

The focus on converging and getting to specifics is … refreshing.

Last two times I started a new gig, I wrote pre-mortems. I don’t know that I will write one for Noodle. I wrote those as if I were about to invest in those companies, and clearly I was investing time. In retrospect I think it set the wrong tone for how I approached my role. Thinking as an investor focused me on the valuation and the upside. This time, I think want to focus on what I want to get out of the experience.

…and there’s really only one thing I want to learn. Steve Pratt and Raj Joshi, the founders, have worked together for more than a decade, and built two very successful consulting practices together. They clearly have a great rapport, and it seems that they are able to extend it to the teams they build. They speak with confidence and humility, and are comfortable with uncertainty. The team they’ve built reflects that as well.

How do they do it?