How to succeed in a complex, technical project for which you have very little experience in?

As a young leader, one of the biggest challenges is that often you will have to do difficult things for the first time. Sometimes this can make you feel insecure, even like an imposter, since you are working on something you have little or even no experience in. Once you get assigned an important task which is very different from your usual scope of work or area of expertise, at first you might feel like rejecting it. It's too big, too scary, the chance of failing and not meeting the expectations seems too high.

That's what happened to me last year. After overcoming my initial doubts, I gave it a try, and it actually worked out much better than expected. Let me tell you what happened, and what I did to overcome my initial struggles:

The start

For me, the start of last year's new challenge came unexpectedly. After 3.5 years in my role as admin manager, during a meeting to discuss my current work and performance, I unexpectedly was assigned a quite different task to work on. Within the next 6 months, I was asked to analyze a major industry in Taiwan, to understand how our customers are really using our products and what kinds of product developments are needed to better fit the market requirements. At first I felt confused - my role was more related to managing the internal company processes, I have a background in international business - how am I supposed to contribute to such a technical topic to our company? We already have Austrian product specialists who are much more familiar with the technical aspects of our products than me - how could I tell them something new?

I felt pushed outside of my comfort zone, clueless, and delusional about this task at first. I was afraid to fail, and that could negatively affect the opinion of the headquarter towards me. I felt a bit frustrated - why is it not enough to just do my job well, why do I need to do that much more?

After contemplating for a while, I finally started to see the bigger picture - it can also mean that I was seen as ready for the next step. Ready to learn something new, to do more and become more visible in the company, not only as a good admin manager but also as someone who can add more value for the company. I am based in Taiwan after all, why should I limit myself to only my core role? Around 1-2 weeks after having received the instruction, I started to accept this as a good learning opportunity, and a good chance to learn. I was ready to get started.

Source: Media from Wix

The steps

These were my five steps I followed in order to complete the project successfully. They had to be carried out exactly in this way, since they were building on each other. Let's briefly go through them:

Step 0: Making a plan

Having accepted the challenge, it was time to make a rough plan first to set certain milestones I wanted to achieve. I knew I had different parts to work on which would depend on each other, so getting stuck in one phase for too long would mean delaying other, relevant activities - leading to a potential failure of the project goal. Based on what I thought should be the major deliverables from this report, I roughly time-boxed my activities in the following way:

Timeframe	Focus	Action
May- June	Learn	Get familiar with industry, understand its production process and more details about each step relevant for my company
July- August	Build	Create list of sold products into this industry, interview sales about their application, collect needed product improvements and market requirements
September- October	Verify	Meet some customers, discuss gathered requirements with product managers in headquarter to get their comment
November	Present	Arrange data, finalize presentation

Why this structure? For me, first it was important to get myself familiar with the topic. If I didn't do my own homework and get a basic understanding of the industry and processes first, I would waste my colleagues' time and would not be able to ask the right question - and it would be hard to come up with a useful plan overall.

Step 1: Learn

It's time to get started! The learning phase was in hindsight a fun time, but also a dangerous one since it's easy to get stuck here - there was always more information to find, and having a hard stop was needed in order to really complete it and to move on. Looking back, there was a certain structure in which I approached this, which I think makes sense to complete in exactly this order.

1) YouTube

YouTube was by far the most useful resource and helped tremendously to get started. For me, it was important to get the big picture of this industry first, and then to divide it into subtopics. I started with simple videos about "The X industry", "How is product X made?" etc. I found videos about the overall industry trend and its significance, as well as the related production process (which I was especially interested in). Once you know the production process overall, you can then also look for videos about each step again - going from large to small, from high-level to great detail. The more detailed you go, the less material of course is available, so it gets harder the deeper you dive. However, for getting a first overview, it was enough and incredibly useful.

2) Google / ChatGPT

Having watched hours of YouTube first, it helped to get a good overview. However, the more I was diving into it, the more I started having questions, on which I couldn't find the answer directly in the videos. Therefore, it was good to start using Google in parallel to type in open questions coming up, or any terminology which I needed to understand.

ChatGPT didn't exist last year yet, if I were to do a similar project now again I definitely would also use this tool to get answers to these questions, or even for more general research in the beginning. It already works surprisingly well to also answer complex technical questions and AI is only going to get better in the future.

3) Friends/Coworkers/Contacts

Having done research on my own, as a next step I started to consult my personal network. I talked to friends and contacts working in this industry to verify some of my assumptions and to discuss open questions I had. I asked some coworkers for specific info and to confirm whether my understanding about a certain topic was correct. This helped me to much better understand the overall process, and to clear up some things I got wrong in the first place.

4) Exhibitions

As a next step, I attended a major industry exhibition in Taiwan, where it was possible for me to talk to potential customers and other vendors in the industry. Having now already a basic understanding of the overall production process and equipment needed in each step, I could understand better what different roles the companies were having in the industry ecosystem. Also, at an exhibition, companies are usually very willing to explain to you what they are doing, so it helped me to verify the knowledge I already had and to finally see some products I previously only saw in videos with my own eyes.

I also realized that I was able to have basic conversations with the vendors about their products and could connect some dots - everything started to make a bit sense at this point.

Step 2: Build

Researching a new, complex industry takes time - especially without an engineering background. As hard as it was to get started with it, it was also hard to decide when to stop the research and when to actually start working on the project. There is always more to learn - luckily I already set myself a deadline in advance, so I knew it was time at some point to start to cluster the information and to move on. There is always more time for additional research in the course of the project as new topics would keep emerging anyways, but at some point you just have to start with the actual work.

After many weeks of learning, now it was important to build an overview of the topic - from big picture to smaller details. I started with illustrating the production process on a very high level, followed by a section explaining every process step in more detail. To highlight the relevance of each step, I planned to add actual company data from already sold products, but then noticed there is a large data gap from what I needed vs what I could extract from the system. There was some manual work to be done: I first set up an Excel spreadsheet, including the data I already had available + the data I still needed for my project. Then, I did individual meetings with all sales responsible for that industry, where I not only completed the missing data in my list together with them, but also asked them about their product feedback as well as any market demands they are seeing,

I put all this information together, and then started analyzing it. Using data to verify my assumptions, I clearly saw which production steps currently have the most connections to my company, and also which products were used for which process step. This data was very interesting, and gave me a great direction about which products / applications are most important.

This also helped to narrow down the focus: At this point, I also had to decide to somehow limit the scope of the project. Some applications coming up were somehow related to the industry but actually to another core process or product than what I was trying to study - even though this would have also been interesting, including all of this side-topics would have increased the scope and complexity of the project even more - at some point I also just had to decide what to cut out.

Step 3: Verify

Having built up my assumptions in the previous step, I now shared my findings first with some experienced colleagues (and made adjustments), to ensure the assumptions I made were correct. We also visited some customers together to better understand their actual requirements.

As a next step, I contacted the related product managers with my findings and asked them for their comment. Some ideas proposed were simply not feasible, some not suitable. However, more often than I expected, I also got the comment "Sounds interesting - tell me more".

Having identified the high-priority topics, I came back to my coworkers. Together we wrote more detailed requirement sheets for the important ideas, in a way the product managers could obtain a more informed opinion about them. In this phase, more topics were kicked out since we considered them as not so feasible/important anymore, to reduce the scope and focus on what really should be done.

I realized something interesting in this phase: Even though I only started working on this topic a few months ago without much prior knowledge about it, I was increasingly able to discuss technical topics with experts in the company - even though they are much more knowledgeable in their domain expertise than me - I realized that probably they didn't have enough time or focus to research every industry in detail. I felt I was able to give them new industry insights and to discuss developments with them almost on eye level, which felt very empowering and gave me a lot of confidence.

Step 4: Present

Having verified and prioritized the information, finally it was time to combine the industry information and to combine all of it into a final presentation. This phase was unexpectedly hard - I was in the flow of working on the topic, but now I had to think about how to ultimately present my findings to the headquarters.

I still remember that time - I had countless pages of content, but only 45 mins to go through everything. Having prepared so much and worked on it for a very long time, I tend to want to show everything (which is often too much). Luckily some coworkers reminded me that I still had to prioritize and focus on the most important findings - instead of showing all findings, I focused on the most important points and put more in the appendix.

I remember proofreading the presentation way too many times. The day before the big presentation I practiced and timed it again and again, just to make sure I could do it well. It didn't go smoothly - I was very nervous. It took a lot of courage to present this topic I was working on for many months to the headquarter. The closer I got to the finish line, the more again I was doubting myself - the imposter syndrome kicked in and was raging in my head. I couldn't wait to finally get it over with.

When it was then finally time to present, luckily everything went unexpectedly well. I was able to present everything very clearly, and I got very positive feedback. Not only that, only a few weeks later I was invited to present the same topic again at a regional company meeting, later even at a global company meeting. I remember that with more experience and knowing the company was satisfied with the content, I was feeling increasingly comfortable to talk about it also in front of bigger audiences, and I got much joy out of it. I could see how much I grew through this project.

The takeaways and learnings

Looking back, this experience was a great confidence boost for me, and helped me to reduce my fear of stepping out of my comfort zone and trying something completely new at the workplace. Before working on the project, I increasingly felt limited with my business degree in a technical environment - this assignment showed me that this limiting belief only existed in my head.

Looking back, this is what I learned from this experience:

• Don't get paralyzed - just get somehow started If you think a task is too hard, it is common to feel paralyzed and unable to start, to procrastinate and to focus on other things first. However, this is dangerous: While this strategy might have worked relatively well for some school assignments, for such a large project which involves several phases and other colleagues, it's hard to catch up with time lost early on - it's crucial to get out of this initial phase quickly and just to get started.

• Having a rough plan first is key - define overall project schedule and milestones early What helped me first was to discuss the overall project goal with some other colleagues in the company, and to make a structure in my head first - breaking down the big, daunting goal into smaller, easier manageable sequences. These parts can then be easier time-boxed, and I can better plan in which order to tackle them.

• From large picture to small details If the overall topic is very complex, it can be hard to really understand it, and it's dangerous to get stuck in details. For me, I realized it is very helpful to start big: Get an overview of the industry and the whole process first, then use this to go into detail for the individual steps. This will not only increase your understanding, but will make presenting it to others later much easier.

• With today's freely available resources, you can learn almost anything Youtube, Google, ChatGPT - the internet is full of useful, free content for almost any subject. Using these resources early on will already give you a basic understanding of a topic you are unfamiliar with - even if the topics are very complex.

• Don't assume others always know more than you - nobody can be an expert in every topic At first, I was very worried that with my limited technical background, I won't be able to discuss complex topics with engineers or even our global product managers. I underestimated that I have just picked up one niche industry (out of many more we are dealing with globally). Even though they are undoubtedly technically highly skilled and experienced, they probably didn’t spend that much time dedicated to this specific topic.

• You can become knowledgeable in almost any topic, according to the 100 hour rule In the book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell claims that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of correct practice to become a master in a certain field. This seems very intimidating - who has that much time available these days? Luckily, a variant of this rule has been introduced by Leo Polovets in 2015: "For most disciplines, it only takes one hundred hours of active learning to become much more competent than an absolute beginner." This is much more suitable for what we are trying to achieve in this context: The goal is not to master the industry, but to reach an adequate basic understanding - this can be done much faster than I originally thought. Looking back, 100 hours seems about right.

• Be ready to leave the comfort zone and to dive into the unknown In our careers, we regularly will be presented with the chance to learn something new. However, our mind likes telling us to not take too big risks - since it also could go wrong. From my coach, I learned that when presented with two choices - one direction with a certain outcome, one with an uncertain one - we subconsciously prefer doing something for which we already know the certain outcome (even if option is not good) over something unknown with an unclear outcome (even if the potential rewards might be greater). It takes courage to convince yourself to take the risk - outside of the comfort zone is where actually the learning is.

• Public speaking is fun and a very useful skill A very personal insight - towards the end of the project I realized it's quite fun to present something to a larger audience, being seen as the expert in the room about a certain subject, and being able to bring new ideas to a group of people. Presenting arguments in a convincing manner is an important skill in leadership positions - especially if you want to convince top management to get a certain decision approved.
  

Overall, this project was a great learning for me - it gave me confidence that taking a professional risk and embracing uncertainty can pay off. Trusting in the process, two months ago I again took a leap of faith and changed my already well-established job. I transferred from manufacturing into software industry, into a position with a quite different scope of responsibility. I am certain that I can again apply what I learned from this project - now with the focus on agile project management and the scrum framework. I am looking forward to all the new experiences ahead, I am sure many new learnings are waiting for me here.