Qualities of introverts
When extroverts don't even recognize introverts. And how recognition helps with perception.
Recently, someone approached me with a statement: I've noticed that our best product managers tend to exhibit the traits of extroverts. I don't think that one has to be an extrovert to be successful [...]
Merely reading that, I almost exploded. After a few dasy of thinking, my response was this:
I disagree. This is the same as saying there are no women in tech simply because you are not female or don't have a female in your team.
And I disagree again. There is at least one very extrovert person who championed an introverted person in your team towards well-recognized success (and that's not the only example).
And yes, here's where I agree. It's difficult to recognize introverts. They are there when it's quiet, showing up every day, building teams, and services that succeed. (Stereotypical) extroverts might feel more comfortable to fight fires. I wrote "The showman" about 1.5 years ago, which is slightly related to the reasoning you started.
I don't think our company is doing a bad job compared to other companies, but we could handle "stereotypical introvert" better by setting a higher bar. A lot starts with recognition:
You get recognized by refactoring an API flawlessly, but you don't get recognized to not even need that.
You get recognized to reduce your AWS bill by 10k, but you don't get recognized to have chosen an economic infrastructure from day one.
You get recognized for a heroic effort of huge changes to bring security compliance to your services, but you don't get recognized when it was just a little tweak to make that change.
You get recognized for excellent customer support, but you don't get recognized to write clear UIs that don't even need that type of support.
(The list goes on forever.)
My suggestion is to start changing who and what you recognize. Start today. Do this for a few months. You'll see magic happening, at least within your area of influence.
And no, that doesn't mean we should all be introverts. Same as we don't want necessarily want a female-only organization. It's all about individuals, recognizing their respective strengths, striving for diversity and embracing the resulting benefit, and giving everyone a fair share at the table instead of only to the loudest voice or tallest human.
Please, please do yourself a favor and look around. You'll be amazed by what you find that will invalidate what you said.