Looking back at work through week notes

Let me come out clean, I have never watched Ground Hog day. The popular framing of repetitive, monotonous and unpleasant days stemmed from the movie. Many have used Groundhog day to describe their state at work and variation involved with meaning making.

It definitely doesn’t paint the exact picture of my every day working experience. The situation of my work is represented more accurately by the movie Edge of Tomorrow.

Our lead, Tom Cruise is a Military public relations officer who gets thrown into the battlefield against aliens. He attains the capability of reseting the day when he dies in the battlefield, thus falling into a time loop. The goal is to defeat the enemy within a single day or die trying only to go again the next time.

In movies unlike work life the protagonists overcome the time loop(obstacle) and achieve their goal. This doesn’t translate perfectly to a work life metaphor but stick with me for a minute.

Last year this time, I wrote about progress.

This year there has been a feeling of tremendous progress. I believe it is hypocritical of me that I have been pushing for a tracking system for progress status at work and have no such mechanism for self.

And I also mentioned that I will focus better on doing the small things right.

Next year, I will focus on the small things and try to do them better. Publish more coherent posts and newsletter to keep the focus on the message instead of the messenger(unlike this post).

This brings me to the topic of today’s post, meaning making through week notes. I wrote about this in one of my previous issue.

Basing on Doing Week notes I incorporated them at my work. Being an IC, my work ends up across different streams among different teams. There was no single source of truth either for me or the team to track progress. I have now written more than 25 of these at work and will continue as they provide a coherent narrative on progress made and broadcast updates to the team.

I have now written for 48 of the 50 weeks passed so far this year. They have varying lengths of notes and quality. The act of not doing it makes me feel like Tom Crusie’s character in the movie I mentioned earlier. Failing to complete the mission and resetting to go again in the next week.

These notes provide me an avenue to check the progress without any hindsight bias and progress further.

Reading through the notes and the emotion associated to them revealed that I never felt at ease doing my work. I was either overwhelmed and buried in work or wandered for far too long in deliberations. It was only during writing these notes did I feel cathartic and it all made sense. While I felt both extremes, overall significant work was accomplished. I was not at peace while carrying it out.

The discovery work has been continuous and I have learnt to appreciate the art of sizing the demand. I also dabbled into doing Jobs to be done interviews with few of the customers and it was revealing what actually matters at the end for a customer.

The tracking system of North Star framework helped me gain knowledge on the inner workings of the product.

Overall a year where I introduced no new framework but continued to do reps with the existing ones. In the process, understanding art of product building.

Frames for context setting, progress for making changes, framework for tools to track status First tweeted

Round up

A month ago I wrote an update on Sales process I dabbled into starting this year. I will be publishing my book notes from Sales Pitch by April sooner than later .

Update on Sales Process

Kick-off with an insight about spot freight. Then identify the challenges they are facing with status quo. The final part of the setup is tease the end state they could attain with our spot freight product.

I will write more about each of the components from a broader research point of view to frame the spot market.

Links that resonated

While trying to reference the Ground Hog day , I remembered an old post from Venkat of Ribbonfarm.

On the Unraveling of Scripts

I’ll define scripts as collections of learned patterns of behavior that reliably supply both psychological and material resources for survival.  These lend meaning and sustenance to power the script, respectively_._ Both are necessary, and any loss on one front, if not quickly reversed, usually leads to loss on the other, triggering a vicious cycle of increasingly severe script breakdown

Who turns software into money?

As a developer, I like to think that engineering teams create the value that the GTM side sells to customers.

Engineering, Product, and Design make the software product and keep it running.

But really, the software has no value until people are using it. GTM draws that connection.

Sign off

As the year comes to close, I have two more week-notes. One thing I realised as I re-read those notes was lack of connectedness across the notes on few main initiatives. Its one of the areas I need to improve.

I have also felt like I am talking way more than required. My default has shifted to talking or getting on a call rather than writing it out. I need to reset here and get back to my writing first practice.

Signing off till next time,

Vivek, writing this through this year’s first snowfall.