..

Succession planning

The aim of succession planning is to level up in your career by delegating and/or building better process and products.

Succession planning is a concept where you try to make yourself redundant in a workplace.

This seems like a counterintuitive idea. Why would you make yourself redundant? Wouldn’t that mean that you are no longer needed at a workplace?

Contrastingly, this is a nice way to level up in your career. Once you have built a product/team etc, you can delegate it to someone else for whom it will be a learning opportunity and you can work on tougher, more challenging problems or newer problems.

This is done by:

  1. Building better processes and products which can run on auto pilot or with minimal maintenance
  2. This can also be done by levelling up a junior who can take responsibilities of the products/areas that you are responsible for
  3. Delegating more and trusting in others to take good decisions
  4. Make a list of what you do: Audit meetings, to-dos and inbound chats
    1. Delegate or document the process so that most folks can learn abiout your work asynchronously
    2. Close the gaps wherever you can

This concept was taught to me by my first manager when I cribbed to him that I am getting too many PRs to review!

Reference

  1. Article