Jon Plummer

• I blasted through a workout centered on lunges this weekend. This would have been unthinkable a year ago, or even six months ago.
• In an attempt to be a little more social I had coffee with local friend Joey. It was very nice.
• I’m out of the woods far enough on my coming presentations that my stress level has gone down. Now to practice, polish, and cut.
• My adjustments to “find maintenance” with my food intake have, with the help of nutrition coach Christine Imperato, seemingly been successful: I’m now hovering easily at around 200 pounds and know how to stay there at my current activity level. It’s a good place from which to try a cut later, as an experiment. It’s a good place from which to try lots of things.

• I involved the team in figuring out how we would rearrange ourselves now that we have new product priorities, and they came up with what I expect is a good solution without any teeth-gnashing at all.
• Conference talk #1 is nearly done, #2 is well-in-hand, and the participatory design exercises are coming along nicely.
• I’ve graduated to weighted pushups, “wearing” a 45lb plate.
• While a weights workout still leaves me with a sore knee, these bouts are less painful and last less time than in the past. I’m taking it as a sign that I’m pushing hard at workouts and am happy to give myself a little pat on the back for this.

I don’t find it useful to ask users directly for the answer to a question of detail. For example, I hope I’d never ask a user what they think the order of columns in a table should be, or even if a table was appropriate for the data at hand.

If we ask a user a question of detail such as one of these we will receive an answer, and we would likely be able to fulfill that answer through design, but we would not have learned why; the resulting design would be indefensible, hearsay. It’s akin to asking for and expecting a “sandwich order;” you receive a request you can meet but with no insight by which you could critique or improve upon the request. (This is a problem not just for designers but also for product managers.)

Rather, we should ask questions that help us understand better how the data will be used – where attention needs to be brought, what decisions need to be made, what activities encouraged – so we can come up with and offer a sensible arrangement of data, possibly so we can transform that data into information.

• While the team is sad at the departure of a great employee, they are holding together.
• I made less progress than I had hoped on my conference presentation scripts, but more than I was in danger of making, and I’ll take that as a win.
• I wisely skipped a workout in favor of a friend’s birthday party, and it was good to see here and some old friends from a prior job. We fell right in as if we’d never been out. It was nice. I’ve been “bad at social” for a little while and it is nice to be reminded that I’m not actually bad at social, I’m bad at getting around to asking for and scheduling it.

I skipped a couple of these since I was on vacation. One win of that period, though, is that the vacation was amazing, despite some RV plumbing mishaps (nothing gross). Here are some wins since then:

1. I disappeared for two weeks and my team at work continued to ably make progress without my help. Nothing caught on fire, no one got stuck, no one complained. It was heartening to read the scroll back in the team Slack channel and see them tackling issues, supporting each other, making good decisions. :feelsgoodman:
2. The Huskies look like a much better team than last year, as well they ought. Not a personal win, but this also feels good.
3. I started learning Norwegian via Duolingo. I feel a little like I’m succeeding through deduction rather than actually learning the language, but it’s early yet.
4. I had a great meeting with a new Product Manager, and see real opportunity to help lead her product family into an interesting and more-obvious-for-users future.

Or, a corporation becomes people in six acts:

Fed up with Job A and planning to move away, I looked for work in the new locale. And I found something. Something a little disappointing in terms of scale and compensation, but it was in the right place, nice people, showed some potential, and in a smaller market with much less of a tech scene what could I expect in compensation, really? Okay, let’s do this.

My relationship to Job B: I am a slightly skeptical new employee – hopeful but a bit disappointed, ready to put a brave face on things and help wherever I can.

Job B wasn’t a great business. It was able to pay the bills and pay the people, but incoming employees were typically disappointed by the compensation offered. Longtime employees seemed to stop getting raises at some point. And overall the folks in charge were not much interested, it seemed, in improving the business: making more money, growing, returning more value to the employees. That or they were trying but stuck. Or something; it wasn’t happening and there wasn’t much talk of being interested in major change.

My relationship to Job B: I am a guerrilla improver of the business – looking for ways to push us into making a little more money, or delivering a little higher quality, or do a little better at developing people, hopeful but a bit disappointed, ready to put a brave face on things and help wherever I can.

Our arm of the business was an hourly business – we made money selling our time to others. And this, I thought (and still think) is somewhat backwards; in the short term, when one is engaged with a client, your incentives are to sell them as many hours as you can. Your incentives are misaligned with the client’s incentives. Getting better at your job so that you deliver quality more quickly actually depresses your earnings. And if margins are tight there’s scant room to work ON the business, to make it work better and maybe be able to raise your rates or attract better clients or move into higher-margin work or develop a product or something, as you are too busy working FOR the business. The incentive to improve is out there in the hazy future, requiring a leap of faith while faith is in short supply.

So while I fairly happily worked there for a year and a half or so, it became clear that Job B probably wasn’t going anywhere, and that my ideas about how to maybe make it go somewhere weren’t interesting to the people in charge, and the part of the business I was in (consulting) was going to continually wrestle for oxygen with the other arm of the business (product), which was also not seeming to go anywhere. It was time to look for Job C.

My relationship to Job B: I am steady Eddie but looking for the exit – no longer pressing wherever I could press, much more focused on supporting my people and making things as clean as possible so when the right thing came along nothing was destroyed. Still disappointed, but more philosophical about it.

And then Job C comes along. Not without its challenges, but exciting in the way a new job can be even when the challenges are apparent. Maybe I can make a dent in these! Job B folks are sad to see me go, but I’m mentally done with Job B, so, bye.

My relationship to Job B: I am a distant well-wisher, but without much faith that anything will change. I’m much more concerned about the welfare of individuals I respect and keep in some touch with, and not at all concerned about the fate of the business as a whole, the leadership, folks in the other division, or anyone I found annoying while I was there. I have my own troubles to chew on in Job C.

As I integrated into Job C I started to notice things I had learned at Job B that were useful: more about design systems, more about scrum-like alternatives to project management, much more about accessibility and about bending typical design processes to meet the needs of the moment. Much more tolerance for misguided people, odd opinions, difficulties with priorities and resources, and the strange sort of decisions that leadership sometimes backs into that don’t seem sensible lower down on the org chart. So amend the above:

My relationship to Job B: I am a distant well-wisher, but without much faith that anything will change. I’m much more concerned about the welfare of individuals I respect and keep in some touch with, and not at all concerned about the fate of the business as a whole, the leadership, folks in the other division, or anyone I found annoying while I was there. I have my own troubles to chew on in Job C. But I’m grateful to Job B for many of the things I got to experience while I was there, and draw useful lessons from these. I recognize that Job B made me better at Job C that I would have been.

Then comes the news, a surprise to the majority of employees, that Job B is being acquired. This means upheaval and uncertainty, and many of the folks taken by surprise are angry. Angry about disruption, the impeding scattering of Job B social groups, of promises broken, of the small lies that are necessary when an acquisition is in the works, of having to find a new path forward when some can little afford it. This leads me to post here empathy for the leader whose company is being acquired, though since that probably wouldn’t play well with most soon-to-be-former Job B folks they see (via LinkedIn) the more-pleasant-and-relevant-to-them empathy for the employee that arrives via acquisition. (I don’t chase LinkedIn engagement and rarely post there.)

An alumni Job B Slack team pops up. Lots of Job B folks are active. They are angry at Job B leadership, angry at the acquirer, angry at fate. And it becomes apparent that the acquirer doesn’t really know what to do with most of them, or how to treat them well as disrupted potentially-incoming employees. Suddenly Job B is no longer a company for me to be disappointed in but a cadre of wronged, searching, frightened people who are banding together to support each other. And support each other they do, admirably, referring each other to new positions and organizing social events and commiserating and cheering each other’s successes. And(!) graciously congratulating those who manage to land positions at the acquiring company, even as others are driven away from it by lowball offers, poor managerial behavior, or other problems.

My relationship to Job B: I am part of the Job B mutual aid society, a helper, a friendly ear, and, now that the company behind Job B is no more, a potential employer to a few Job B folks (since we are no longer bound by an employee contract that prevents hiring folks away from Job B). I can help! I do help. I’m a bit of a lurker on Slack but I chip in with information and good wishes where I can, and job referrals to a few people. One interviews, gets an offer, and chooses a job elsewhere. One is on my team now and I’ve overjoyed by that. And now that Job B is not a business its leadership and their choices are moot, so my feelings about my time there are unexpectedly much warmer than before. Job B is now just the people, nothing more. And I love many of those people.

Long live Job B and the kind, smart, and gracious people I met while there. It served me well, in hindsight.

Three wins:

• While a respected and very productive design contractor gave notice, she had a lot of nice things to say about the team, company, and my management of the team. I’m sorry to see her go, but I feel pretty good about what I’ve been doing.
• I had a great workout on Tuesday, but that night thought maybe I had injured myself. I had pushed hard, and while I felt good right after the workout about ninety minutes later I had knee pain, enough to have difficulty sleeping. But whatever it was dissipated very quickly, and by Thursday I was ready and able to have another great workout. I’m cautious, but expecting that this weekend things will be even better. A happy side effect is that I regained a little bit more knee flexion range than I expected.
• I managed to work some bonus content into my presentation about NPS results, relating complaints in NPS comments to a similar signal in support tickets. I also completed that presentation a little sooner than I had planned. I haven’t presented yet, but I’m optimistic. I feel good about what I’m about to do.

Five(!) wins for this week. It pays to think about what good is happening:

1. After buying some cheap running shoes ($70, about as cheap as they had that felt good) I went for a run again. I hated it, but only a little bit, mainly at first, and much less that I would have had I not been wearing proper shoes. I’m four runs in and can see this as a possible “thing I do.” Between lifting three times a week, walking sevenish times a week, and running threeish times a week I’m getting a fair amount of exercise now.
2. My knee flexion has improved to the point that I can do a Turkish get-up on either side without cheating. That’s a nice improvement.
3. One of my mentees has progressed from “how do I convince my boss to let me do what I want” to “how do I communicate about this issue so we can have a productive discussion,” which is a critical change. I’m proud of them!
4. Upheaval in a product has given that product manager and one of the designers I support to do some real live user research, and they are so excited by what they are learning that it seems like to significantly help the product and strengthen informed collaboration on the team. I’m proud of them!
5. There was disconcert in a different product team, and I’ve helped address it mostly by pushing the designer and product owner together, and encouraging the two of them to pull the tech lead in to their discussions. I’m not sure how that team became so disconnected, but it hurt, and we’re meeting with some success undoing that. Everyone involved has so far been able to set aside whatever ill will had emerged. I’m proud of them!

Never mind the distractions, these are nice results.