Gratitude Monday: Namaste

At work, we’re in the final run-up to launching a new product, a truly new approach to our core value by this business unit (and, tbh, the company). Target date: first week in August.

You naturally expect things to be a little chaotic when you’re blazing new paths, but this effort rates about a 9.7 on my weird shitometer, primarily because a Great Man (former CEO of a company we acquired a year ago) has been given carte blanche to run engineering and to define the product all on his own. Since January, ENG have been working full bore on something whose mockups Product Management didn’t even see until about April. (For those unfamiliar with software development, it’s PM’s job to build out product requirements—based on customer, user, competitor and market understanding—and ENG’s job to build the product based on those requirements. What we’re doing now is totally bonkers.)

This has been at the Great Man’s behest—don’t want anyone seeing it until it’s done. Well, dude, we’re not “anyone”, we’re bloody PM. (Actually, he told us, “I don’t need product managers right now; I need project managers.” I think he doesn’t like anyone suggesting features or functionality but himself.) This also applies to letting any users on it. When I started carefully approaching ENG in March about setting up a plan for internal and external user testing around May, I was rebuffed. “We don’t want to put a lot of process around this.” “[Bas Bleu], Great Man will let us know when we’ll allow users to see it.” Evidently Great Man knows what the users want more than they do.

But leaving that aside, we were promised six different dates when ENG would grudgingly let a small number of internal users on, until eventually we got that round going 15 June. (Remember, launch is first week in August.) And immediately we got more than 300 feedback line items (meaning distinct issues; I was collecting it all and I merged duplicate reports), and discovered (unsurprisingly) that a lot of features weren’t working properly (bugs), the user experience was not helpful to actual users (enhancements), it was missing functionalities that users would need critically (features) and (actually surprisingly) the data was completely screwed up (catastrophic failure, since this application is all about putting our data into customers’ daily lives).

As you might imagine, this has put a crimp in ENG’s grand plans to add the features we were promised at internal alpha. Meanwhile, customer-facing staff don’t even know what that final feature set is going to be (because Great Man), marketing is circling trying to build content without having access and my hopes of getting actual customers on this thing before launch are rapidly fading.

Trying to get a committed date from the ENG director, Foghorn Leghorn, is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. He is blusteringly defensive, like any member of the current presidential administration: he’s so afraid of Great Man that all he can think to do is pass on the whippings he gets and try to not piss the guy off. He couldn’t even commit to priority 1 and 2 bugs (blockers and criticals); he had to go ask Daddy if they were okay to work. But after that chat a while ago with my manager about my anger coming through, I’ve made a concerted effort to not rise to every ludicrous evasion or passive aggressive deflection.

Anyhow, on one of the 12 or so project calls last week, Foghorn took a gratuitous pop at me by way of distracting attention from some ENG failing. (There was a legitimate issue, but it had been addressed and discussed on a chat thread that he was on.) I did not address him, just said that the technical issue around images in Confluence is beyond my ability to solve but that every JIRA ticket I created had the correct image. (Which he would know if he’d looked at any of them; which clearly he had not.) And we moved on to other things.

Well, that afternoon I had my weekly chat with my manager. I started by listing out all the unpalatable options we now have for external testing—there is not one of them that will serve the multiple purposes external pre-launch access is supposed to provide. As I was talking, I could feel my jaw stiffening and my throat constricting. It’s my job to run this test to get user feedback that will inform the product development, and every day it becomes more impossible because of Great Man and his minion Foghorn. My manager listened and agreed that it’s not looking good. I would have asked to escalate to the SVP, only the main issue is that there aren’t enough engineers to do the amount of work necessary to build out the promised functionality, deal with the data issue and fix bugs, and I don’t know that you can escalate more engineers. We can’t release to customers, even as a beta, until we’ve got the data in and tested; best case scenario now is week commencing 27 July. And Great Man has dug in on the first of August launch date.

See my problem?

I moved on to other issues and then asked, “Okay, reality check: did I tell [Foghorn] out loud that he could fuck all the way off, or was that just in my head?” Indeed, I had not said it audibly.

So I said, “Y’all should be extremely grateful that I’m taking yoga.” And told him about my lessons. When we start, and my instructors says, “Give yourself permission to be only here for the next period of time,” I’m still fulminating about this or that. But by the time you’re trying to do Warrior III [which is one foot on the floor and everything else in the air], you are not thinking about anything except not toppling over and cracking your head open. This is the most liberating feeling imaginable—letting go and being focused fully on what’s going on inside.

Then I noticed that while I was telling him about it, all the tension and constriction had left my head and neck. Just recalling the poses chilled me out. And believe me, Imma need a lot of chilling out in the next four weeks.

My yoga instructor is terrific. We do our sessions via Zoom, but even so she’s excellent at explaining and demonstrating the movements. Last Friday I did two Sun Salutations, which are a whole thing. She promises me that over the next months this movement will become “smother; not easier, but smoother.” Warrior II is still my centering pose, but I also love Forward Fold and Happy Baby. I feel stretched out and calmed down after a lesson, and this is a very good thing.

And that’s my gratitude today: a great yoga instructor who’s helping me not tell my colleagues to fuck all the way off.

Even if they really should.