
Code Freeze and the Door
In retail e-comm, the seasons operate at least six months in advance, maybe nine. Somewhere around April, the words, “pre-holiday” became routine and the star of most meetings.
Every brand we worked with needed to get something discovered, built, and launched before code freeze at the beginning of November. The amount my UX team and I spent working through the brands’ concerns and ideas was, unsurprisingly, a lot. We met weekly with the brands and worked to identify the requests and business cases for each item. One particular project took months of conversations, approvals, changes and adjustments, and an effort to UX-educate both on-site design and marketing. Two meetings were held to explain and emphasize why wireframes won’t have color, determined icons, or copy, and why wires should take the most time to review and adjust (but rarely do). In the end, that education didn’t really take and I still hash that over in my head, wondering if the problem was my conveyance or their willingness to understand. Probably a bit of both.
When it was time to send the work into a sprint, 20 minutes before end of the day, the last day of the week prior to sprint, I was called into a meeting and told that the scope had crept too far and only 10% of the work was actually going to be completed for pre-holiday. I tried my best to keep my head attached to my body and the flames from shooting out of my mouth. I am told this is standard in retail but somewhere inside, I knew the signs for scope creep had appeared weeks, maybe a month, prior but no one intervened. Not the BA, not the project manager or marketing, certainly not the brand and thus, it was largely shelved. The waste of time felt palpable, particularly because I knew that even if they wanted to implement the new features post-holiday, so much would change in nine months that the work would be mostly irrelevant by then.
Soon our Discovery funnel was cleared and my counterpart and I were out of work. I asked my manager what his plan was for us once we’d reached the end of the queue, as soon as that became an apparent eventuality. He insisted we’d have tons of work to keep us busy and not to worry. In the six weeks I asked that question, I have billed my standard 40 hours per week but spent 38 hours each week not working. Our contracts were extended through the end of February in anticipation of post-holiday work, but we weren’t given any projects to focus on in the meantime. I sought work from my manager and HIS manager, to little avail.
I began to weigh heavily whether or not ’tis better to fulfill the American Dream of being paid to do nothing, vs. finding actual work through a different company and be paid to do what I do. I began to feel indignant about the amount of time I’d spent trying to break into UX, the steps I’d taken to be successful at it, the failed vision of this job, and ultimately what little I’d accomplished since accepting this position. I was able to put one project into my portfolio, showing the wires of the site that would never be, but that wasn’t enough. Sitting around bored, spending most of my workweeks “working from home” so I wouldn’t waste the gas and lunch money, it just isn’t enough.
I enjoy my manager, he’s a nice guy, but he falls into that ever-present trap of, “I’ve been doing ___ long enough, I should probably manage…right?” I’ve watched him wireframe on the fly to brilliant result, he’s an excellent UX thinker, but he is a terrible manager. His communication is sorely lacking and he has to be practically put into a corner for straight answers or replies. I waiver between thinking the higher ups are confused or simply checked out, and the frustration and unhappiness have reached a point where I have to make a decision in spite of this safety net of extended contracts.
So I have. I’ve been interviewing, four in all. Two have happened but I stepped out of consideration for a few reasons and the other two will happen soon*. I’ve said it before, and I keep saying it, “I just want to do the work”. I don’t want to manage. I don’t want to climb a ladder just because I’ve been doing it so long I feel like I should. I just want to be great at my job. I love User Experience Design and all it aims to accomplish, and I need to find a place that will allow me to do it, and help me grow.
*this will likely be an upcoming post. There are serious pros and cons for both, and will require some consideration which may be valuable for anyone who might find him or herself in the same boat.
