Starting New Roles: From Anxiety To Action

Starting a new role is stressful. In very important ways, your slate is wiped clean.

When you’ve spent years at a company, you stop noticing your "credibility asset base."

You have the track record. You have the social capital. You understand the unwritten rules, the internal acronyms, and which cages rattle in what winds.

Ovr time, if you've done your job well, you earne the right to be listened to.

Then you move to a new role, and suddenly, you've history is faint, if not erased.

I recently moved from DevRel Engineering Manager at Chainlink Labs to head up DevRel at Cartesia. Before that I've lived and worked in 4 countries, and several careers from law to startup. 

Even with 25 years in the workforce, the "credibility reset" is uncomfortable every damn time. 

If you’re feeling it, you’re not failing; you’re just paying the growth tax.

The Multi-Dimensional Learning Curve

The friction isn’t just about learning a new codebase. It’s a steep climb across several dimensions at once. For example, in my recent role change, the jumps have been:

• Domain Shift: Moving from blockchain to Voice AI means swapping one complex mental model for another (like moving from decentralized consensus algorithms on blockchain virtual machines, to AI State Space Models).

• The Unknown Quantity: To your new colleagues, you have no goals on the scoreboard. They assume the company hires well, but they don’t know how you work or why your specific perspective matters yet.

• Tooling & Culture: Even the difference between Jira and Linear, or how a team handles async communication, adds a layer of cognitive load.

• Who's who in the Zoo: All the names, titles, functions, work scopes have to be internalized.  Who do you go to for X problem? Who is the person who handles Y activities? When do they like being engaged? These are entirely new "cultures" and patterns.
  
  

Action Anxiety vs. Confident Output

 When you’re new, every action—every Slack message, every architectural suggestion—is weighted with uncertainty. You worry about how you’re being perceived, interpreted, and valued.

When you’re established, you act without anxiety. 

That's what confidence is. The absence of anxiety.

The mistake I've made in the past to to try and compensate for the dip in confidence by  trying to "hit the ground running".  This never works as well as it sounds - it often manifests as being very busy.

But action without direction is just noise.

The Strategy: Thoughtful, Directed Momentum

To navigate the first six months (and yes, it usually takes two quarters to truly find your feet), I've evolved a specific framework:

1. Win Trust, Don't Demand It: You can’t port your old authority into a new building. You have to earn the right to be influential all over again. This means listening more than talking and mapping your strengths to what the company actually needs today, not what your old company needed last year.

2. The Reading-Listening-Thinking Loop: Spend more time than you think you should in "learner mode." Use small, low-risk actions to build momentum while you’re still calibrating your mental model of the business.  Others are going to push you (often unwittingly) to do more, produce more "output" etc.  It's hard to resist. And the optics of being slow can be bad. 
   
   But as the old saying goes: "It's better to close your mouth and look like a fool than to open your mouth and prove it."

3. The Torment of the  "Dumb" Question : Every question you ask at the start feels "dumb" because what is incomprehensible to you is obvious to someone who’s been there 12 months.
   
   Ask it anyway. It’s more efficient to feel silly for ten seconds than to stay ignorant for ten weeks. 
   
   Plus, asking questions is the sign of a healthy culture. Play your part in creating culture. And be kind to others that ask questions.

4. Self-Awareness is a Skill: If you aren't aware of the anxiety inside, you won't know when to self-soothe or when to push yourself out of your comfort zone.  If you don't understand yourself, you cannot expect other's to understand - and hence accept - you.
   
   

Start, Stop, Continue

As I navigate these first few months at Cartesia, I’m breaking my behavior down into three buckets:

• Start: What new habits do I need for this specific team? What do I need to start doing to help Cartesia win?

• Stop: What old patterns from my previous role don't belong here? What "right" things are now "wrong"?

• Continue: What should absolutely not change? What principles are meta enought to be valuable and effective here?

Note how these questions are very hard to "know".  Often these are judgement calls.  And note how they also need a lot of self awareness!

Look, starting a new job is objectively hard.

Give yourself the grace to be "out of control" for a while (and when you figure out how to do it smoothly, please let me know!).

Growing pains are painful for a reason. 

Growth isn't the absence of anxiety; it’s the result of taking thoughtful action despite it.