Monday, June 15, 2020

Gratitude Monday: candor and yoga


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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