My Love Letter to Everyone who “Gets Shit Done” in Tech (and everywhere else).
To all of you who Get Shit Done in tech (and everywhere else), who make it happen: this is my love letter to you. I have been blessed to know many of you throughout my career. You hold a variety of titles and span the full hierarchy of your companies. You are strategists, pontificators, artists, mathematicians, and beyond. But, most importantly, you know how to move Earth, sun, and stars alike to ship your products.
I see you, the people who know how to make it happen; who puppet master like it’s not even a thing. You have the hard conversations that no one else wants to. You confront the challenges head on. You charge through boundaries and blockers with the gusto of a linebacker, but you’re actually more like a superhero. This is far from your only skill; you have many others, but this is your superpower. It is what sets you apart from others. There is a magic you have that cannot be bottled up and sold, though certainly I wish I could.
You’ve missed lunch or forgotten to pee some days, you’ve sacrificed personal time away from your loved ones for an important deadline, and you’ve lost track of time down a QA rabbit hole more than you care to admit. You just laugh when someone asks how your day was because there’s simply no way to describe the absolute chaos you felt across the blur that it was. You are, however, thrilled to share the glee that happens when something comes together the way it needed to.
You take on jobs that aren’t yours. You ship code when you’re not an engineer by trade, you design glorious user flows when you’re not formally a designer, you close deals when sales isn’t even close to what you were hired for. You are the sand that fills the gaps of a team. Sometimes you do this because you’re genuinely interested in the new challenge, but more often than not, you roll up your sleeves and do it because it just needs to get done. It might not always be flawless, but you’ll get it to the finish line.
You are some of the smartest people I’ve ever known, and your emotional intelligence is high. You recognize it instantly in others (your kin), and feel a sense of comfort in letting them take the wheel. You also immediately see the scarlet letter “NUH UH” on those who don’t have it, and you continue driving that car to get you all safely to your destination. You action-oriented people — you are what makes the world go ‘round. Your work is often invisible, as sorcery tends to be. It is a skill set that is under-appreciated, but the absence of it is felt drastically.
Accountability is your middle name. It’s not something you were taught, it comes from your gut. Some of you can describe how you get shit done. You have playbooks and methods and process. Some of you have no idea how it happens, you’re true grassroots. You just know that it DOES happen, and you have faith that you’re the right person to do it. However you do your thing, the end result is always the same: you get it done.
You do it because you care. You care deeply about your users. You care that a student is able to get feedback on their homework through the new feature in your Learning Management System, or that a patient dealing with chronic pain is able to communicate with their doctor through the portal you’re building, or that a company’s digital experience you’re hosting runs smoothly during a critical event. You care about the problems you’re solving, and you know that you cannot solve your users’ problems if you don’t deliver. So you deliver.
To all of you getting shit done: I see you, I celebrate you, and I worship the ground you walk on. There is always room for people like you on my team.
Love, Sarah.
Acquia is the open source digital experience company that empowers the world’s most ambitious brands to embrace innovation and create customer moments that matter. If you’re a talented UX/CX Designer or Researcher, come join us! We’re growing our team. Check out our open positions.
