Career
#WIMDIwins – The Million Dollar Idea
- by Holly Burton
Ready for another inspiring #WIMDIwin story? Check out the astounding story of Andrea, a Game Changing Year client and Product Manager.
Andrea went from almost-fired to pitching – and heading up – a literal million dollar idea for her company.
Wowza. That’s as much money as The Barenaked Ladies could conceive of in their capitalist fever dream anthems.
WIMDIs, let's see how she did it so that you too can pitch delicious ideas to your company and then buy yourself a nice chesterfield or an ottoman.
If I Had a Million….Tasks On My To Do List
Halfway through The Game Changing Year, Andrea was stuck. She was a product manager running a small team that was in charge of the company’s profit engine, but she wasn’t exactly basking in the warm glow of success.
Even though her team was keeping the lights on, she was in full-on firefighting mode every day, using her technical expertise to keep the team afloat and fix customer escalations. She was exhausted, and it wasn’t leading to any career growth.
Even worse – her boss saw her as a complete failure.
"We’re Putting You On a Performance Improvement Plan”
When her boss gave her a terrible performance review and put her on a performance improvement plan, Andrea didn’t know what to think. He told her she had terrible time management skills. He was worried about her progress and didn’t understand what she was spending all her time on.
Couldn’t he see everything she was doing? She was working on the most important project in the company! The CTO said she was a rockstar! Her colleagues sent her superhero emojis in Slack! The company’s revenue grew by $500k because of the 16-hour days she was pulling!
It didn’t matter. All he saw was her failure to get the strategic work the company was focused on done.
She knew she had to make a big change: Get out of the weeds, and get strategic fast!
Game Changing Skills To The Rescue!
Andrea started to change her approach to work to help her boss see her capacity for strategic work. She had to get away from her day to day firefighting, but she also had to find something more high-level to work on that would impact the company direction.
She started listening for business challenges in her conversations with higher ups and customers. She used the need-identifying frameworks we teach in The Game Changing Year to tease out their high-priority business-critical problems – and pretty soon she had a juicy project in her sights.
Jackpot!
Andrea knew that if she could get buy-in from Senior Leadership, this could be a career-making proposal – so she got to work making that happen!
The Big Pitch…& The Big Tragedy
She pitched the idea to the Chief Product Officer. He liked the idea and gave it the green light. Hooray!
…but hold the confetti for a second, WIMDIs.
Even though he loved the idea, he was still nervous about her ability to execute, given her recent PIP.
So he gave her idea – her amazing million-dollar idea – to her boss instead.
WHAT!?!?!?
Andrea was floored. She did everything they asked. She got more strategic. She brought them a huge money-making idea on a silver platter. And now someone else was going to get all the credit and accolades while she…..kept doing the same ‘ol firefighting that was killing her career?
Oh hell no!
Game Changers To The Rescue!
Andrea brought her situation – and her frustration! – to her cohort of Game Changers:
Game Changers, am I losing my mind? I should have been given this project, right? Should I fight back or just….lick my wounds, give up, and move on?
The response was unanimous:
Hell no! Go get your project back!
The Game Changers reminded her that she not only deserved to be able to execute on her amazing idea, but she had the skills to do it. Andrea reconnected to her strengths – her top notch technical skills, but also her interpersonal skills – and used them to make the case for her project again.
The Big Pitch…& The Big Win
This time Andrea switched up her approach. She met with the C-suite players who were interested in her idea, and worked to slowly socialize her plan, understand their objections, and build credible plans to move forward.
She finally had a breakthrough in a conversation with the Chief Revenue Officer.
They were meeting about her firefighting work – work which the CRO loved because it helped the company make money they desperately needed that year. He was complimenting her work, and she saw her opportunity to pounce.
The CRO was hooked.
“You’re bang-on. Let’s make time for you to work on this project.”
With the support of the CRO, Andrea worked with her boss to get the busywork off her plate, and make room for her amazing new idea.
The Big Lesson
WIMDIs, despite what her bosses thought, Andrea didn't have a time management problem. She had a strategic work problem and a building buy-in problem.
She had to learn how to come up with ideas that solved the big, strategic problems in the business – and then pitch them to the right people and build buy-in.
So that's exactly what we worked on in The Game Changing Year:
Andrea's Million Dollar Idea Blueprint
- She developed her ability to truly understand the needs of her boss and the business so she knew what problems to solve.
- She learned how to ask insight-building questions that illuminated the challenges she saw, so decision makers could see them too.
- She built out business cases for her ideas so she could clearly and concisely articulate exactly why her projects were essential moneymakers – in language the C-suite could understand.
- She used her strengths and top-notch interpersonal skills to socialize her amazing idea and build buy-in with the right people who would say yes to her running the show.
And you know what? Those four things got her out of her firefighter role and put her in the driver’s seat on a reputation-making project.
The Big Wins
WIMDIs, I know I spoiled this story at the beginning, but let's do it one more time for good measure:
She convinced the C-suite to let her execute on it – and give her the credit!
AND she took back control of her career after being put on a PIP.
After she learned the right strategic business skills and tools, Andrea made all that happen in less than ten months.
Yay Andrea!
Win Like Andrea
WIMDIs, I love Andrea's story – and I want to write one about you one day!
So I built a program -- The Game Changing Year -- to help you learn how to pitch strategic business ideas, increase your influence, and move up the ladder.
Check it out:
The Game Changing Year
Join me and a whole bunch of Andreas-in-Training for 9 months of billion-dollar-idea-building, busywork-eliminating, strategic business education.
(and I promise it'll be way more fun than strategic business education sounds on paper)
