In light of social distancing, we've all been forced to get a lot more family time than we may be used to (or necessarily want). As a result, I've spent a lot of time learning about exactly what it is my mother does for a living, as we're now both working from home. So it's my distinct privilege to listen as I work to the sound of my mom venting her frustrations at Carla and her inability to follow the simplest instructions, Jim and his unhelpful comments, and wave after wave of pointless calls with clueless customers.
That's not to say I didn't know about her job before. I knew the company, the department, her boss, her title. Hell, I even worked there for a while, but I wasn't quite so intimately familiar with the details of her day. Namely, I wasn't so intimately familiar with her process.
My mother is in middle management at a medium-sized company in a not particularly interesting sector. About as vanilla as you can get. But she's complaining to me about an issue with her latest project. It's not the first time I've heard about it, but I'm listening more closely than usual, and a few details start to stick out to me. I express to her that this project seems to have some serious internal scaling issues, and possibly some even more serious issues beyond that. We get to talking about them, and she shares my frustrations. Quietly to myself, I wonder, "why hasn't she done anything about it if she owns the project?".
The next day we're talking again and mom says that she had been up late last thinking about what we had talked about, and some of the problems I had brought up. "It literally kept me up at night", she says. She had messaged her boss earlier that day about her concerns and what she thought they needed to do about it.
"Although scaling is a concern, the thing I'm most worried about is the impact to customer experience" and with that and a few supporting details, my mother had successfully pivoted an entire project away from a larger disaster.
This was the moment I realized the chasm of difference between myself and my mom, and where we were in our careers, and in our experience in working with management. I'd had a lot of thoughts going through my head "well if it were me, I would have already brought it up".
The key difference between us is the approach, and my own failure was my assessment of the situation. Although we were both able to identify the problem with the system, we saw that it didn't scale and that it would overwhelm the internal systems. What I failed to see, was where the company's priorities where at that moment, and as with many companies, it was with shipping to the customer, or the client, and not necessarily on refining the process.
The lesson to be learned here is that there is a time and a place. It's easy to identify faults in a system, in fact you probably aren't the first person to identify those faults. What makes the difference is the person who finds the justification to fix those faults within the context of a larger priority.
Thanks
Thanks for reading, this was originally posted to my blog. Follow me on Twitter for primarily nonsense, or check out some of my other hits like Idempotency in API Design or Working From Home: The Wonderful World of Social Distancing.
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