An Awkward Engineer’s Guide to Professional Networking

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I am at a holiday party with my wife, music is blaring, and lights are flashing. My wife is excited to introduce me to a man who recently donated a computer lab to her school. After some pleasantries, he asks me, “What do you do?” I, awkwardly, respond, “Um. Well. My company is an IT provider. We sell...umm…computers.” Afterwards, my wife asked me, “What happened? Why couldn’t you answer that question?” I don’t know what happened that day, but professional networking is not something that comes naturally to me.

Since that time, I’ve improved my conversation skills, and learned more about the value of professional networking. As a former computer science student, and someone who deeply relates to the awkward feeling of not knowing what to talk about at a party, what follows is my approach to professional networking.

Step 1: Decide Learning Goals

One of my first steps to professional networking is understanding what I want to learn, what questions I am facing, and what decisions I need help with. Some topics that I have been interested in recently include:

• Writing
• Product Management
• Quality Assurance (QA)
• Business-to-Business Marketing

I have seen others who are interested in general networking to find future employers, business partners, or colleagues - without a specific project in mind. The more specific and targeted the learning goal, the better.

Step 2: Build an Integrated Learning Plan

Historically, I have struggled with professional networking because I do not know what to talk about. On the other hand, I am comfortable in conversations that have a purpose or expected outcome.

Treating conversations as part of a learning plan gives them a purpose. As an example, if I want to learn more about QA, I will:

• Read as many books, articles, perspectives, and articles about the topic.
• Join meetups
• Subscribe to podcasts
• Email or meet with experts, as needed, to help me tackle day-to-day challenges related to QA

Meetings as part of an integrated learning plan feel more organic and authentic to me. Conversations flow better if I am genuinely interested in learning more about a topic.

Step 3: Create a Target List of People to Learn From

Next, I create a target list of people that I want to learn from on a topic. I do not only target super successful people. My target list will include colleagues, friends, mentors, managers, bloggers, or even people I read about in books. Sometimes, these lists can be over 100 people.

Then, once every few weeks, I set up a meeting or phone call with someone on my list.

At the end of each meeting, I often ask, "do you know any other interesting people that I should meet with to learn more?" I also take hand-written notes during the meeting and try sending a thoughtful email follow up within a couple days.

Step 4: Learn from Everybody

Beyond just learning about the direct topics I am interested in, I try making an effort to learn from everybody. Colleagues and peers are some of the best people to meet and learn from. I enjoy meeting with younger people because they have so much optimism and energy. I like conversations with older people because they have interesting life experiences to share.

Step 5: Categorize Experts by Topic

There are many different areas of my life that I want to learn more about. Whenever I meet someone who I respect and seems willing to collaborate with me in one of those areas, I add them to my list of "mentors" and categorize them into their respective topic. I have a monthly recurring calendar event where I review this prioritized and categorized list of mentors by topic.

Whenever I have a question that I am struggling with, I will email my personal mentors or set up calls with them.  For writing, I have “writing buddies” to share early drafts of my articles.  For product management, I have a group of 3-4 product managers that I email questions to.

The list is currently around 30 people, but always changing. The topics that I have mentors for include:

• Writing
• Product Management
• Analytics and Statistics
• Life
• Product Marketing
• QA
• Wellness
• B2B Marketing
• Business
• Technology
• UI/UX
• Creative / Copy editing
• Public Speaking

Many people who help me in these areas may not even realize that they are on my lists.

Step 6: Teach Others

Some of my most successful professional networking has been the result of teaching others. In 2007, I became interested in personal productivity, read books and blogs about the topic, and started experimenting with strategies in my personal life.

I decided to teach others by giving presentations and writing about the topic. As a result, I was invited to guest lecture in my business school, met people through Twitter, and got my article distributed in internal listservs for top consulting firms.

This same pattern repeated itself with my article about finding a job in product management. I wanted to help others learn more about job seeking. This led to several people reaching out to me to learn more about product management, developing relationships with senior product management professionals, and even being featured in Fortune Magazine.

Teaching others is one of the best approaches to professional networking.

Step 7: Start an Email Newsletter

I often feel inspired to share interesting links, articles, and book summaries with my friends. Over time, I noticed that more and more people were interested in reading this material. I kept sharing articles and adding people to my list. At some point, I reached a limit on Gmail and moved over to Mailchimp to manage the list. I still maintain these two email lists:

• Life updates to my close contacts and friends
• Random articles, links, and book summaries. (Sign up here.)

Getting permission to share information directly to someone’s email inbox is a privilege, and a great way to stay connected with a large group of contacts.

Step 8: Rate Limit Random Meetings

I have a daytime job as a product manager and an evening job as a father and husband. This prevents me from spending evenings or weekends going out and meeting people. One strategy I use to make sure that professional networking does not take over my daytime activities is to put a fixed amount of time per week that I invest in meeting or talking with random people.

I try to limit random non-work related meetings to 30 minutes early in the morning (6:30AM) or in the evening (5:00PM) during my commutes. I will make exceptions once in a while, but this has been a good strategy for me to feel that I am not overwhelming myself with random meetings. I have also found value in setting up phone calls or meetings during typically unproductive times such as 4:30PM on Fridays.

Step 9: Expose Myself to Bulk, Positive Randomness

One of the most influential blog posts that I have read is Ben Casnocha’s, “Expose Yourself to Bulk, Positive Randomness.” Here is an excerpt:

I firmly believe that if we keep our mind open and explore the unknown, good things will (eventually) happen. If I reflect on some of the best things in my life they are more a result of random events (which I took advantage of) than a concerted effort towards any single outcome.

I do my best to be open to randomness. I will email journalists or bloggers to express appreciation about their work. If I am at a bachelor party, I will share professional challenges I am facing at work. I will email an old friend that I haven’t heard from in a year if I read an article that reminds me of them. Each of these random actions I just listed have led to some of the most positive breakout opportunities of my career and reinforced my belief that randomness often leads to the best outcomes.

Step 10: Prepare for High-Value Meetings

There are some people who are so helpful and thoughtful, and I want to be extra sensitive about any time I invest with them. These individuals are similar to how Ben Casnocha describes Reid Hoffman:

Yet, when I take stock of the past four and a half years, what I’ve learned from Reid feels more all encompassing than a tidy set of specific lessons. The learning feels more infinite...that person’s impact on you becomes so foundational that it’s hard to disentangle where his influence starts and stops.

For meetings with individuals like this, I will sometimes invest 8+ hours preparing an agenda for just one meeting. My agendas will usually be Google documents and more focused on the content rather than the formatting. I may also spend over a month thinking about the meeting and refining my agenda. My agendas are typically structured as:

• Personal Updates and Challenges
• Professional Updates, Problems, Opportunities, Priorities, and Alternatives

As an abbreviated example, here is a sample of my 29-page agenda that I used to prepare for a meeting with a trusted high-value colleague:

• P. 1: Agenda
• P. 2: Detailed sentences or bullets point on Personal Challenge #1
• Key Questions with my best guess of answers
• P. 3: Detailed charts on Personal Challenge #1
• P. 4: Detailed question on Personal Challenge #2
• P. 5-9: Written paragraph and key questions on Business Update and Problem  #1.
• Initial ideas on next steps related to Business Problem #1
• Key question: “Does this plan seem sound?”
• P. 10-11: Written paragraphs and bullets related to Business Update and Problem #2
• Key comment: “No questions, but open to comments.”
• P. 12-15: Written narrative, plan, and questions on Business Opportunity #1 and #2
• P. 16-17: Describe Client Issue #1 including an email I wrote to someone else on topic
• P. 18: Describe Business Update #3 and Questions
• P. 19-23: Clarification Questions from Previous Agenda and Discussions
• P. 24-29: Detailed narratives on Key Negotiation with Specific Questions

Then, when I meet the person, I will listen intensely, take excellent notes, attempt to follow through on everything discussed, and plan another meeting at the appropriate time. I will sometimes spend hours processing their feedback, printing it out, and re-reading it over the next several weeks.

My other approach is to ask precise questions via email where I have already laid out my perspective and proposed alternatives. Ideally, these questions should be able to be answered in an email response or a short phone conversation.

Given the energy it takes to prepare for meetings like this, I may limit this type of preparation to very few (2-3) people or meetings per year.

Step 11: Personal CRM

One habit I have maintained over the last 8 years is to take notes whenever I meet with someone. Then, I will email my notes and observations about the person to myself (such as njulka+observations@gmail.com) with the person’s name as the subject line. I also have a filter set up that will automatically apply the “observations” filter to these e-mails. If I meet that person again, I reply to the original message.

This way, I create mini blog entries or a personal dossier about each person I meet stored privately in my Gmail. I can then do searches on the label (eg. “tennis l:observations”), and this way I have created my own personal, searchable CRM system in Gmail.

Conclusion

As you can tell, I think professional networking, staying in touch, and remembering what people say is one of the most important and rewarding aspects of my life. As Ben Casnocha and Reid Hoffman write in "Startup of You," leveraging network intelligence is a critical skill that anyone can learn, and can lead to more meaningful relationships and a more successful career. And while I am still not the smoothest conversationalist at the party, I have found that focusing on learning, teaching, and staying in touch has helped me create a powerful professional network.

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Nitin Julka is a Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn and always interested in meeting with interesting people! He can be reached at njulka-at-gmail.

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Previous Articles

How I Got my first Valley-Based Product Management Job in 5 Weeks
Personal Productivity Principles

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Thank you to Jason Yau, Allison Hartnett, Enoch Shih, and Janet Pomeroy for reviewing drafts of this article.