During my weekly one-to-one with my manager last week, we were
discussing the user testing I’m meant to be running on a new application that
has been built in paranoid secrecy for the past six months by Engineering.
There’s a long, shaggy story associated with this, but essentially this whole
thing has been run by a guy whose company we acquired last year; he’s been
given carte blanche to develop it, and it turns out he holds no truck with either
product roadmaps or product managers.
I expect he feels both things cramp his legend-in-his-own-mind
style.
We—meaning product management—were first promised that we’d have a
prototype for internal testing sometime in May. Then, faithfully, it was 1
June. Absolutely. On Tuesday, 2 June, at the weekly business unit meeting, our
VP described the application and said internal testing would start “this week”.
On Wednesday, 3 June—in reply to an email requesting some information—the engineering
manager said that they were still cleaning things up and we’d move the internal
testing to today, 15 June.
But on Friday, that date had changed yet again, and now we’re
promised 22 June.
It’s like traveling in the desert and seeing that shimmering mirage,
only to have it disappear as you get close to it.
And this is a product that’s supposed to launch
the first week in August.
Well, from the beginning, Engineering as taken on Mr. Genius’s
attitude that we don’t need no stinkin’ user tests (or product managers). Since
March I’ve been met with deflections and delays as I try to build out a plan, accompanied
by comments like, “we don’t want to put a lot of process around this.” And, as
you might imagine, I find this off-putting, especially since we’ve worked well
with the engineering manager for the nine months I’ve been there.
But the engineering director, whom I’ve given the epithet Foghorn
Leghorn, has been a complete prick, not to put too fine a point upon it. Yes,
he’s getting pressure from MG, but instead of manning up, he’s just been
passing it on and amplifying it.
Okay, well, back to the chat with my manager. I was quasi zoning
out when I caught something I wasn’t quite sure I’d heard correctly, so I asked
him to repeat it. “Your obvious anger is not helping matters.”
“It comes through on the calls?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Is it my tone or my vocabulary?” (When I get pissed off my
language moves into hifalutin sesquipedalian words and long, complex sentence
structure.) Eh, he couldn’t think of an instance, but he said he’d clue me in
the next time it happens.
Well, crap. I did not intend for that to happen. And—as I
specified to my manager—I would not want to do anything to make life difficult
for the engineering manager, who’s been very patient and helpful to me. (I was
notably silent about Foghorn.) Also—though I didn’t say it—I do not want to be
the kind of cowboy who makes the blood drain from my manager’s face every time
I unmute myself on a call as he dreads what I’m going to say next.
Look—we all have a lot of moving parts these days, what with a
global pandemic, lockdown, protests and all outside of the office. And then we’ve
got this incredibly chaotic nonsense at work; launch is stressful when you don’t
have massive dysfunction, and our MG-driven dysfunction is off the charts. But
that’s no excuse for me being a jerk.
But being aware of it is the beginning of remediating it. And I’ve
also started remote yoga lessons with a friend of mine who is an exceptionally
good instructor. I'm noticing greater flexibility, especially in the neck, which I'd started worrying about, and after a session I just feel more relaxed and centered. I swear, the Warrior II pose is my spirit animal, and I’ve
taken to doing some poses on calls where I don’t have to take notes. It’s transformational.
So, today I’m grateful for a candid manager and a friend who can
teach me career-saving coping skills. I’m truly blessed.
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