The roles and real work




In order to make it more clear and organized about what the true work that I should do, I would like make an statement by using the clause”if I’m in the role of… then I do…”, just like what Mintzberg discovered in his famous Manager’s Role Theory. (Mintzberg is one of my favorite management scholars, here is his other insightful theories).

When in work, I have mainly three roles. What I’m supposed to do with each role are:

**Role #1: Entrepreneur

  • Idea: Search for and test new ideas and opportunities
  • Design: Design products and business logic
  • Communicate: Talk/connect with people to learn, hire, sustain customer relationship and make network
  • Execute: Execute the project quickly by pushing others and by myself
  • Channel: Build the channel that matches products to achieve selling at scale

Role #2: Indie hacker

It’s a sub-role of #1 Entrepreneur as being a solo developer. So it covers all the above work, and also includes the specific:

  • Writing code
  • Connecting to audiences

**Role #3: Writer

  • Large amount of input of content
  • Write dFown at a regular productive pace
  • Edit and publish

Role #4: Researcher

  • Reading papers
  • Construction of theory
  • Writing papers

**Some basic work

  • Learn to know more about what you do(industry, product, benchmark, customer, yourself) by investigating, reading, talking, experiencing and retrospecting.
  • Healthy lifestyle and habits to maintain peaceful mind and energetic status.