Gratitude Monday: purposeful work

Last week was quite the marathon at work. As I mentioned in my post on Friday, I had 25 meetings, 20 of which I scheduled. There’s a lot of stuff we in product management have against our names this year, and I was really hoping that the four two-hour sessions I put into the books would give us a leg up.

We had a kind of a spanner tossed into the works on Tuesday, when a Big Wheel showed up and took over two meetings (nearly three hours), pontificating on How Things Will Be to both engineering and PM. There are reasons why he’s been asked to do this, but the jury’s still out pondering whether he’s a savior or a seagull.

(Seagull managers are ones that swoop in, crap on everything and fly away, leaving everyone else to clean up the mess.)

And by “the jury” I mean “me”.

Even so, we got a metric ton of work done, and made significant progress on the Brioche project, if not so much on PM’s strategy. Turns out that, when you’re working for a cybersecurity company, standing up an application for external testing involves at least two metric tons of boxes to tick, from stakeholders I’d never even heard of before last month.

Just before he got on a flight back to Amsterdam on Friday, the leader of the team building Brioche thanked me for all the hard work I’d put in throughout the week. They really needed me to be on top of all the box-tickings, because if I weren’t, we’d be delayed forever; this is stuff they didn’t know about before last month. I replied that this would be the first time I’ve ever said this about a week of 25 meetings, but it was a pleasure.

And it was—not seven hours of back-to-backs on Tuesday, or Mr. BW, maybe. But pulling together people and plans and feeling like I made valuable contributions was indeed a pleasure. Which extended into the weekend, when I got together with MG to plan the agenda and create a preso for a meeting today at 0930 with Mr. BW, to explain Project Brioche to him and help him decide to keep the project going.

I realized while out on a walk yesterday that I’d have resented the hell out of spending a few hours on my weekend on any project for my last three employers. But I jumped right on it this time because keeping Brioche going is important to the company, and because I do not want to let my team down, even a little bit. They get everything I’ve got.

And that is my gratitude today—to be part of a team that inspires me to be better and work harder. It’s definitely part of #playingtowin.