When I was a PhD student, my advisor taught me what good management of technical talent looks like.

We used to meet on a weekly basis, and towards the end of that week-long period of banging my head against the wall on an ambiguous problem, my enthusiasm and drive to dig deeper would have dampened quite significantly.

Some weeks I had promising results to show. Some weeks I just had results.

Some weeks, I brought in issues and insights and asked for direction. Some weeks, when my experiments failed to validate a hypothesis or were inconclusive, I went in with nothing but a brainstorming topic.

But every time — every single time — I would go to meet with my advisor, and by the end of that one-hour chat in a small office, where the only tools we used to communicate were a pen and paper and a whiteboard, I would feel a rush of excitement. I would immediately get back to my desk and get started on a brand new set of hypotheses.

Every single time, I had spent a sleepless night trying to prepare for the meeting, and I would go back to the drawing board as soon as the meeting was over. That’s how stimulating the discussions were, and how large the scope of possibilities felt for where we could go next in terms of narrowing down a problem worth solving, and a solution worth building.

My advisor had figured out what motivates me: novel tasks, uncharted territory, and using obscure math to reframe an applied problem statement into something I could produce practical results on.

When I’d get concerned about progress, he would refocus the conversation back on the technical problem. And he knew that it worked to reinvigorate inspiration every single time.

All throughout the years.

I think about this often when I think about management of technical people.

The best technical management I have experienced was never about extracting a status update from me, keeping me accountable to a list of tasks, or making sure I had something polished to show every week. It was about understanding what kind of intellectual environment made me do my best work, and knowing how to recreate it when I got stuck.