Misplaced Priorities

As things really turned around for my team in Item File, my partner in crime was promoted and I took on his team. The temporary assignment ended up being more permanent than expected and the responsibilities began to have an effect on both my personal and professional life. Trying to keep up with 26 associates at the level I wanted to along with 76 contractors across 7 scrum teams was nearly impossible. As 2014 began, my pastor at church started a new sermon series and his first message was on priorities. He challenged us to go home and ask our kids what order they thought the following came in: God, family, work. I took the challenge and asked my girls once we got home and then got a major gut shot when they said it was God, work, family. I was at least glad they didn’t think that work had taken the place of God in my life, but it absolutely killed me to think that they thought my job was more important than they were. In all reality, I should have already realized my life was out of sorts. I was working a full day, coming home exhausted with nothing left for my family, then putting my kids to bed and working another couple hours just to try and keep up with the hundreds of emails I didn’t attend to because I was in meetings all day long. The girls that used to run to the door to greet me every night stopped coming. I should have realized what was happening, but I didn’t. It took a Sunday morning message to knock me upside the head and make me realize change was needed.

Thankfully, when I met with my amazing boss on Monday, he didn’t shame me or make me feel terrible, but instead, he listened to me and then offered to reach out to several people from his time in Sam’s Club. I reached out to each one and met with them to learn about what they were working on and any potential opportunities that might be there. One of them had since moved out of Sam’s Club and had moved over to the Walmart Store Layout team. When I met with her, she immediately connected me to a director in the area that was looking for a new Senior Manager to lead their development team. I got an interview and ended up getting the job.

I was so grateful that God had opened this door for me and brought some much needed changes in my work life. I went from all those associates and contractors to a small, but mighty team of 4 developers. With the move, I had also left ISD for the business and the world of shadow IT. As you can imagine it was quite a shock to my system and I must say that it took me a few weeks to finally get my bearings. One of the other major changes that came with this new role was that our customers sat just a few feet away from our desks.

I learned a lot of great lessons from my three years in Store Layout and I’ll close out this post with a few of them:

1. No matter how small your team may be, if you have a plan and continue to seek improvements to your processes, you can still make an impact. There wasn’t too much tweaking that I had to do with this team as they were already deploying code to production on nearly a daily basis. We just worked on fine-tuning our planning and creating the right stories to ensure we reached out goals. As time passed, I began to notice that my guys were getting pulled away from our main priorities to work on support tickets. I decided that in order for them to be able to make more progress, I needed to get more involved and so I took on all of the support for the team. It helped me to build relationships with our users and to also get more familiar with our product. I even started to make a few code changes to fix some bugs, under the watchful eye of my team of course. I have continued this practice of finding ways to help with every team I’ve managed since then, though the coding ended. I couldn’t get my future teams to allow me to help in that way….not sure why.
2. Proximity to your customer (end user) makes a world of difference. In my previous role, I felt disconnected from our end users as we just worked with a select group of experts, but never really engaged with the people that used our software. At first, it was a bit of a challenge to be so close to our users, but after the relationships became stronger and the collaboration increased, it became a huge plus. I didn’t need to go through multiple layers of management to get the ok to talk to the users, I just had to make the effort to walk over to their desk and ask them how things were going. It is amazing how much you can learn when you just take the time to listen and try to understand the frustrations users are having. I don’t think I have ever had a closer relationship with my users than I did then and I absolutely loved it. Don’t let anyone stop you from building relationships with your end users as they are the ones that can make or break your product.
3. Deploying your code on a regular basis really is the best possible practice. Across the three years that I was managing this team, I believe there were only 2 or 3 times that we actually impacted the business due to our changes. That is unheard of…and no, we didn’t just make really small changes to a simplistic system. Don’t allow others to dictate your release cycle, make sure you plan your work in such a way to be able to deliver value regularly.
4. Give your team the time to innovate. One of the things I loved about Jon, Pete, Steve, Earl and Sam (who took Earl’s spot when he left) was their passion for innovation. They spent so many hours of their own time building incredible tools just because they loved what they did and they wanted to push us beyond our business area and make an impact in Walmart. Any time there were Hack Day events going on in the Tech organization, I tried to make sure they guys got some time to participate. It was such a small sacrifice to fight for them to be able to do this, but the results were amazing and the effects of the event would last for months. Innovation breeds engagement and engagement breeds business success.

I got my first glimpse of our stores and how much our decisions at the home office impact them and it changed my views and passions forever. In all of my development time and my first role as a manager, I was never really working on anything that impacted the stores. The closest I got was when I was in HR, but the applications I built nor the ones I supported really affected the operations or the associates working at the store. The product my team owned made it possible to design the layout of our stores and determined how the space would be allocated to the various departments within the merchandising organization. I learned so much and it actually played a major role in a career decision that I’ll be writing about soon.