I got frustrated beyond tolerable at my job, and that is why I stayed
This is a story that unrolled in the summer of 2015, pretty much exactly three years ago. Why am I writing it only today? Well, life was in the way™. But I think it still deserves its attention, and I think it’s an example that can come useful for many in a similar situation.
This photo above depicts quite accurately my work situation at the time. Except I wasn’t laughing. I was just being thrown oranges at while already striving to stay afloat. Two years earlier we had launched what would then become the most successful digital campaign in Italian history. This campaign was meant to push the parliament into passing more stringent rules to fight corruption. It collected well over 1 million signatures and it mostly succeeded. But I digress.
I had my life sucked out of me every day
My role at the time was what back in the 90’s would have been known as The Webmaster. Except back then the complexity a webmaster had to deal with was 1000 times smaller. You know what I’m talking about.
I had built the back and front-end of our website a year earlier, and I was working daily on improvements, bug fixing, supporters’ support (sorry for the pun), new features and about a thousand other things. Yes, I was a team of four, responding and giving assistance to inside and outside stakeholders, rolling out new features most of the time as a result of last-minute ideas, and keeping the complex architecture that ran the website and the campaign from falling apart like a castle built on sand (it had originally been designed according to extremely simpler requirements).
The amount of work was ginormous for a single person, I had to constantly cut features and convince the stakeholders that they weren’t all that necessary, when the reason was that to do it all a whole team would have been needed. When after a year of praising I got one junior developer, it took him months only to get on board (and I can’t blame him, the thing had grown to a complexity giant and I didn’t have a minute to explain it).
Yes, this is a simple case of intense and stressful work. Not the ideal, surely, but it’s still a less demanding job than many others. Maybe. What actually brought me over the edge was one other factor though: improv.
Yeah, no. I’m obviously not talking about theatrical improv. I’m talking about how the campaign was run. Six-to-eight people on the creative and policy team were constantly coming up with new ways to push our fight forward and to respond to current events with real-time marketing inventions. Inventions, yes. Stakeholders had, rightfully, their say as well. And all of the above fell on my shoulders, and I had to manage it, and deliver it, alone.
Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a case of bad management. It was a case of extreme creativity on top of a rapidly developing political scene. And under, under, extreme understaffing as far as the web platform was concerned.
To top it all I wasn’t even satisfied with where my career was going. I was always introduced as “our developer”. I found it almost humiliating. That “our” there took away my dignity as a stand-alone creative problem-solving person. I was an task executioner, to the eye of people.
And then a startup offered me double the salary
I was on the verge of desperation when I was contacted by a recruiter and I started interviewing for a startup in London. The company was still small but growing, which meant I could actually start, build and lead my own department. They were very explicit about that: ultimately my role was to start and grow the front-end development team. The people were incredibily nice, easygoing and determined. And it was London, have I mentioned that? It was a complete match. And I would have doubled my salary, just like that.
They wanted me.
I was depleted by my current job.
So I turned their offer down
Wait, what?
Yes.
Let me set this clear right now: still today I’m not completely convinced it was the best decision. But it was the right one, and not for some cheesy loyalty issue, but for my own personal and professional growth. Especially personal.
But first I need to take a (brief, I promise) step back because where I come from is essential to understand why I decided to stay.
I graduated in Architecture, one of the few disciplines that bring art, design and technology together. I then started designing and building websites with a similar attitude. The truth is that back then my personal experience on the web was horrible. Frustrating. Dysfunctional. Forms told you something went wrong but not what, registration procedures were long and slow, images were all over the place, interactivity features were crap, forums were a mess. I knew things could be built in a better way, smoother, faster, more intuitive, more useful. And I couldn’t help but learn how to implement the needed work myself.
I started designing and building websites, as I was saying. But the thing is, all my friends were architects and designers, and I was the only one with some coding skills. So over (a short period of) time I ended up building, but not designing. That felt ok for some time until years later I realized I wasn’t doing what I really wanted, but only what other people needed me to do (for “ok” money, but still…).
“Years later” is the summer of 2015.
I had a realization
“Designing and building” websites had a name, and the name was Product Management. I had never heard of it before as a codified position, but the more I read about that role the more it checked every single box. I was so excited! I wasn’t some weird mixture of 2 parts designer, 1 part frustration and 3 parts coder. I was a PM. I was something!
But this wasn’t the realization.
The realization I had was that the fact that my current position was awful wasn’t a bad thing from which to escape. On the contrary, it meant I was in the extremely privileged position of acting as a change maker.
I want to say it one more time: things weren’t working, hence I was in a privileged position.
What I see in most people is a tendency to passively complain. If they are under a boss, this boss should provide for them exactly to their expectations. If things don’t work, it’s their boss’s fault. Or their boss’s boss’s. Or the company. Or society. You get the point, the fault sits always somewhere else, and if something doesn’t work the best thing to do is to change hoping to find a place where things work, to go work under some other boss that is still feeding you with lists of tasks, but at least the kind of tasks you are willing to tackle. And maybe a 5-to-10% pay increase.
Try to look at this from another way for a moment. What happens when everything just works, and you surf on top of a wave whose energy comes from some external force? That you float. And maybe you are on the ocean, and it’s a beautiful sunset this afternoon, and the temperature is just perfect and the wind in your hair oh it feels so good and… And you are sill just floating. You may be succeeding, but mostly because you showed up at the right place, at the right moment, by chance.
And there is nothing wrong with that! Everybody chooses their own path in life, and everybody surfs through it their own way, and that’s how it should be. But as for myself, on the verge of breaking up in pieces in that cold northern European summer of 2015, as for myself I was saying, I decided on taking a different path.
“When you can, choose the harder path”
…they say.
I had one last call with the London startup to communicate my decision to ultimately keep my current position.
I then spent weeks reading and studying everything I could get my hands on about the role of Product Manager. I didn’t have any mentor. I didn’t personally know anybody with a similar role. It’s not really a thing in Europe you see, so I had to figure things out myself.
When I felt ready I reached out to my boss, and I suggested one small change in the way information flowed in our organisation and in the way decisions were made and affected the web development. My one goal at that moment was to make everybody in the organization aware of the cost of new features and the state of development, in order to ease the pressure on myself. I ended up designing a system based on task lists that a few days later I found out having a name as well: kanban.
It took only a couple of weeks for the whole team to buy in. In fact, web development had always been opaque to them and they were mostly just happy about actually knowing what was happening at that level. As simple as that.
(By the way, the fact that the development was opaque was 100% my fault/responsibility).
Once everybody was onboard and things started flowing I took the second step: I asked that my title (and role) be changed from “web developer” to “product manager”. Or maybe I simply communicated that I would change it in the About us page and got a nod and went home happy! Whatever. Some say that titles are vain, and that is simply not true. A title is a symbol, and symbols are one of the most powerful means of communication we use.
Obviously, the day after was spent writing code and fixing bugs and answering to support requests. But the seed was planted and with a little patience and a lot of persistance over the next months and years, I managed to turn a messy one-man shop into a proper, modern web development endeavour.
In the winter of 2018, we launched a fully functional sub-website in only about 6 weeks, including discovery and design. All around Christmas and New Year’s. I worked with the stakeholders, 1.5 designers and 3 developers (plus myself, I was still writing code) and even though things were still far from perfect, we delivered. And I had learnt.
So let that sink in
Yes, every and each one of us is different, has a different story, comes from a different place and is heading somewhere different. But maybe this is your moment, maybe things aren’t working, and maybe the best thing you can do right now is to stay and change them from the inside. Or maybe not 🤷♂️
Ps: I’d love to hear if you had similar experiences and if you took similar or different decisions and why!
