Building your personal board of directors
And Nickey's cringey holiday thank you email example!
Last week I got a holiday card from a family friend. She’s in her 70s and every year finds the time to pen a “Christmas letter” which is, without a doubt, the best piece of mail I get each year. I opened it so fast this year that I got a paper cut! Why is it so great? It’s because she walks the fine line of being reflective and thankful (I am, and will always be, a growth mindset gal) and being an oversharer (does cringe lessen with age, if so I am looking forward to it!). The tightrope she walks is true art and I read every word each year with unfettered gusto.
When I got this letter, I had already started writing a “thank you for the support this year” note to a group of people who I consider to sit on my personal board of directors. Folks I know both personally and professionally who are invested in my long-term success, who I hope to continue relationships with over time. This letter made me reflect on how we communciate with the benches of people that we’ve built through our lives and careers, and was so inpsired by letter lady that I’d love to share my end of year thank you here. More below!
Building a personal BOD
Recently, I read a post from
on putting together a bench of people, let’s call them your personal board of directions, who are invested in your success. From Deb:Having a personal board of directors or advisory group can help you vet opportunities and explore new avenues of growth. Just as the PM needs the support of their team in order to successfully launch a product, you must also enlist your allies and sponsors to help shape your career. This will enable you to build faster and better.
Without doing this intentionally, over the last decade of my career I, like the letter lady, have built a bench of people who I regularly reach out to for advice, help, connections, and the like. As with many fundemanetal career-building skills, there’s few teachings out there on how to do this well. Some people are natural connectors and relationship builders, yet for others this takes more thought and intentional effort.
An important part of having an established bench is building rituals around how you keep in touch with them that are aligned with your goals. David Hoang writes about this in his newsletter
about sending timely and thoughtful emails to your board that foster your relationship with them. He writes:The best updates are relationship-based vs. not transactional. We've all experienced that icky feeling when someone comes out of the woodwork, wanting to catch up, only to reveal they need a favor from you. This doesn’t feel great. My rule-of-thumb is continually fostering relationships and if there is an ask, it naturally arises.
Letter lady addresses hers each year via snail mail but as a creature of the Internet, I prefer to send my updates through the cloud. I sat down to write an end-of-year update and thank you to my bench, but then I got THE LETTER, and it got me thinking. What if I just got over my ick and published it as an example here for you to read too?
Nickey’s holiday thank you
Hello there <insert name>,
Happy holidays! Wanted to send a quick email and say thank you for having an impact on my 2022 (even if we didn't get to catch-up this year). You're someone who has impacted my life and career, and I just couldn't let the end of year slip by without reaching out with some gratitude. SO THANK YOU!
2022 was a fun year for me, and I feel like I’m finally coming out of the lingering covid fog that drastically shifted my life in an un-planned-for direction. This year I had some professional highs and lows, shipped a bunch of cool shit, read an absurd number of books, argued with trolls on TikTok more than was healthy, and generally am riding high into next year. What were some of the highlights?
Duolingo 💚
As you know I joined Duolingo to lead a new 0-1 product initiative in September of 2021, called Duolingo Classes. I’ve already been a year on the job. This year we rebranded, re-merchandised, hacked on the class format, grew it exponentially, and then after all that, decided to sunset it. Can’t go into detail obvs but it was a whirlwind, and the ride was super fun! After a couple of tumultuous covid working years, it reminded me how fun it is to build and ship shit with good people and how lucky I keep getting to land on world-class teams bursting at the seams with the best people. I’m staying on to help them with something else that I can’t really talk about, maybe more on that next year.
Angel investing 💸
This year a dear mentor pushed me to start angel investing and it’s been an awesome learning experience. I invested in 4 early-stage (pre-seed and seed) companies across different industries. As a builder it’s been really rewarding getting plugged into the early days of start-up chaos (which I have somehow blocked from my memory, Etsy people I’m looking at you). The email updates alone are worth their weight in gold. I’m hoping to do more of this next year and to be more active and helpful to the founders I believe in.
TikTok 📹
In 2021 I committed to starting a newsletter with the goal of trying to write about and share more about my professional undertakings. I had never really invested any time into any professional brand and was feeling the need to do something (even if it was small and sporadic). Turns out that writing 2k-word weekly essays is extremely time-consuming and it fell by the wayside during a year of building 0-1. That said, the urge to share is real, and what I did find time for was spinning up a TikTok to chat informally about the intersection of building a career and building products that was well received. Had a weird amount of fun making these!
Always be learning 📚
Having children is an 18-year exercise in being more home-bound than you’d like and it gives me time to read, and read, and read. I read 38 books this year and am setting a bigger goal for next. More business/product books next week in my second annual Books for Builders, but here were some of my non-product faves in 2022:
Motherhood 👩👧👧
And finally, it would be a disservice to my very essence to not mention where I spent the majority of my time this year, with my children. The actual work that keeps me up at night. We had a tumultuous childcare year (like many parents in America) with lots of sick time. I’m over the broken and deeply under-resourced systems that I rely on to keep my kids educated, cared for, and thriving. Yet we somehow perservered.
My girls are now 6 and 3.5 and they constantly blow me away with their curiosity, ingenuity, and refusal to wear appropriate clothing that suits the weather. This year Alma went into 1st grade where she’s learning French. She now knows 3 French swear words that she proudly whispers under her breath. Ethel is 3.5 and is squarely in that toddler phase where a tiny troll lives in your house that you need to constantly bribe to do simple tasks. She loves Frozen and her big sister, and her teacher described her as “someone with a big personality.” God help us all.
Thank you 🥰
My only regret this year is that I didn’t get to say hi or to help you in some way, shape, or form. What can I do to help you next year? Please reach out if you need ANYTHING.
Happy holidays from mine to yours!