An interview with Claire Highes Johnson
THE UNDERRATED TRAITS OF THE BEST ENGINEERS
The best engineers I’ve worked with aren’t necessarily the ones who write the most complex architecture, they’re the ones who can think through a problem really deeply and are endlessly curious.
They’re crisp writers and communicators.
- Concise. “People often think being a strong writer is about using flowery language. But one of the biggest steps is actually figuring out how to be concise. How can you convey the most important information, like updates, blockers, highlights, risks, etc. with just a short summary?”
- Tailored. “It’s about learning how to read the room and understanding your audience. Whether it’s talking to non-technical folks or talking to customers, you need to be able to put on different hats and adjust your communication accordingly. What’s the essence of what this audience needs to know?”
- Anticipate and address the FAQs. “Whether you’re writing a doc, an email or an announcement, you’ve got to anticipate what questions might come up. You can even ask folks around you what their own questions are about your project. When you force people to go through that thought exercise, they start to put themselves in the shoes of whoever is reading the email or the customer update.”
Great communication is about more than just saying what you’re trying to accomplish. It’s about helping folks understand how you make decisions so they can be able to make similar types of choices in the future.
“When we talk about engineers, too often we hyper-focus only on whether you can ship code quickly or design the most scalable or robust system. But the more important question is whether you can drive actual impact at the company,” says Feng. “As a founder now, I often say that I’m hiring entrepreneurial generalists — people who think deeply about the problem they’re solving, not just from a technical perspective — maybe it’s an organizational problem to solve. They constantly question whether they are even building the right thing.”
So her advice to other engineers who are weighing whether to stay an IC and build or to go the management route is that the paths can overlap. “You can swing back and forth — it’s what I did, and it’s what I’ve seen a lot of amazing engineers do. Listen to that gut feeling. If you’re in a role you think you’re in love with because of the title or how many reports you have, you probably won’t be incredible at it,” says Feng. “That’s not to say that any role will be 100% things you love doing all the time, but it’s important to balance the energy-draining things with the energy-giving things.”
“Ask a peer or a friend to keep you honest. Every week, have them ask you three extremely direct, uncomfortable questions about your project. ‘Why is the project delayed? How do you know whether the team achieved the right outcome? Is a person on your team underperforming?’” says Feng. “In the hectic day-to-day, it’s easy to justify slippery timelines or let these important questions slide to the backburner. You need someone to pull you out and who you trust to keep you accountable.”
We want to be world-class Olympic athletes in what we do — and we need brutally honest feedback to get there.
Operate with scale in mind.
She’s instituted a new ritual to put that philosophy into practice. “My new rule for myself is that when someone asks me a question or asks me to make a judgment call, I try to write out my thought process, rather than just a direct answer. I want my team to understand how I came to that decision so they can make those calls in the future for themselves,” she says.
For folks weighing whether or not they’d like to jump on a founder opportunity, she sketches out a few must-haves:
- Mission. “You have to be incredibly excited about the mission — not just the product you’re building. Are you committed to tackling the problem? In the early days, the product can change so much. You don’t want to get too caught up in excitement about a particular solution or technical challenge.”
- Team. “Find the right co-founders who are complementary to you. My superpower is in execution, whereas I’m weaker in the higher-level future vision setting. I care about being internally facing rather than an external spokesperson. It was important that I found co-founders who balanced these with their own strengths.”
- Forecast. “My co-founders Mahima, Lauren and I went through the Co-Founder Dating Questionnaire, which gives you a preview of what it would actually be like to work together. I highly recommend any potential founding team go through these questions. Some cover how you’d split equity or if you want to IPO versus get acquired. Other questions are more philosophical around values alignment. You don’t have to agree on everything — in fact, it’s probably better that you don’t. You want to see how folks can engage in healthy debates about different perspectives.”
To avoid too many cooks in the kitchen, while maintaining that product ownership culture across the company, Cocoon borrows Apple’s DRI framework. “The notion of the Directly Responsible Individual is that we want everyone to have ownership for the company and the product that we’re building, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is a blocking decision-maker. The DRI is the ultimate person who is accountable for the goal. It’s their responsibility to make sure they’re looping in the right stakeholders, making sure people feel heard, and actually making the call when there are conflicting opinions,” says Feng.
Here’s how it works in practice: “We have four pillars for the year, and we have one person assigned as the DRI for each of those four pillars. They’re responsible for figuring out how we execute and assembling the right team to tackle those problems,” she says.