The Value of Now
When I started writing earlier this year, it was supposed to be a kind of therapy. Yes, I had also hoped to raise my profile, help others, and ultimately benefit my businesses (one motion, many actions!), but personally, I had hoped it would help me process what I was experiencing.
I spent the first handful of years at Whiplash re-treading ground I had covered before– getting from Zero to $1M annual revenue. That didn’t make it easy, but it was familiar. Whiplash is somewhere else now– we’re on track for nearly $7M in 2016 and while that’s not huge, it’s new for me. We have different types of problems. Different types of stress. Different requirements placed on us.
As a writer, one thing I’ve learned is that it’s easier to write about the past than the present. Safer. The participants get less squeamish to have the spotlight swing their way, myself included. But by focusing on the past, the value for me personally is lower. Writing has become a chore, something I do for others. So let’s try writing about this week. The intimidating and ever-evasive Now. Or at least now-ish.
Diving Deep
I’ve been consumed for the past several days getting a feature to work. We’ve got a button in Whiplash called, “Publish Inventory”, and it updates the inventory level on a webstore for a group of items to include product that’s on it’s way to the warehouse, but hasn’t arrived yet. It’s critical for allowing pre-orders, which means it’s critical for some of our largest clients. At some point a few months ago, it stopped working for a single store. Some items would be updated, and some wouldn’t. And no matter how many times you hit “Publish Inventory”, the items that originally wouldn’t update, would never update. Support handles emails about it regularly, where they (ok, me) go in and update the items one at a time, which works.
It’s taken months to not-fix because the issue lies somewhere between Whiplash and the store. Whiplash developers are pretty sure it’s a problem with the store. The webstore’s developers are pretty sure it’s a problem with Whiplash. So we grind to a standstill, because actually proving where the problem is takes developer resources, which are in high demand on both sides. And if you’re pretty sure it’s the other guys fault, you’re in no rush to put those hours in.
The user, who has a clearly defined problem, gets stuck in the crossfire of the two teams.
The bug is valid, but here’s a question: why am I letting this consume my days? This has been > 85% of my time for something like 4 business days. Is that a job for the CEO? Once the customer described the problem, why didn’t I hand it over to the dev team? The answer is a blend of my strongest personality traits:
- controlling (micro-managing the fix)
- tenacious (I come back to it hour after hour, day after day)
- empathetic (I relate with the customer to have it “just work”)
- narrowing focus during times of stress (Q4 in eCommerce is nuts; working an elusive bug takes my mind off it)
I make no claim that those traits are positive, although I think some of them probably are. In the last few days, and countless other similar episodes, they’ve combined in a way that’s a hindrence. I can’t really defend spending such a huge amount of time on the problem, and at the expense of other activities. What’s become clear is that we’re at a scale where we need to hire someone to ensure software quality.
But we haven’t hired that person yet, so I’m doing what I’ve always done:
- Fumble through doing a task myself
- Automate as much of it out of existence as I can
- For what’s left, make a process I can hire and train someone to do.
That pattern has defined my career, and I’m outgrowing it. To be honest, the tasks I’m fumbling through are just plain harder than before, and they require specialists. They are nuanced, and they take time.
I don’t write my own legal docs (anymore). I don’t do my own bookkeeping (anymore). I don’t run our sales desk (anymore). I don’t train warehouse staff (anymore). And soon, I won’t be our quality assurance engineer.
But rather than performing those tasks myself and then handing someone a task that I understand better than anyone, in the future, it will be the other way around. I’ll be hiring specialists, and they’ll be teaching me how to evaluate their work.
It scares the hell out of me, and leaves me feeling hollow.
But intellectually, I know that hollow feeling is the vacuum created from a purge. And I know that vacuum will attract a new wave of tasks that are currently going undone. The tasks that are born from the vacuum– or rather hiring the people who will perform them– are what will take us where we want to be.
