#21 Cap Watkins (Primary, Buzzfeed) on helping new managers and the problem with taking other people's career ladders

Cap Watkins is CXO at Primary, where he's responsible for Design, Product, People and engineering (oh my!).

In the recent past, he was a professional leadership coach and organizational consultant at Practical Works, helping senior contributors, first-time managers and managers-of-managers grow and evolve in their roles. Previously, he was VP of Design at BuzzFeed, where he managed Product Design. 

While at Buzzfeed Cap also created one of the most popular design frameworks on progression.fyi – https://www.progression.fyi/f/buzzfeed, which he then blogged about warning people not to use it directly. We talked about that along with several of his blog posts, including:

https://capwatkins.com/blog/skip-the-shortcuts

https://capwatkins.com/blog/two-questions

I'd been following and nagging Cap for an interview for months, so it's funny that it then took me six months to get the resulting interview out. It's a great and very much evergreen interview though, so lots to dig into.

Find cap on:

https://capwatkins.com/

https://twitter.com/cap

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