2/19/2023 0 Comments Frozen scratchpadYour incentives are misaligned with the client’s incentives. 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. Our arm of the business was an hourly business – we made money selling our time to others. 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. Or something it wasn’t happening and there wasn’t much talk of being interested in major change. 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. Longtime employees seemed to stop getting raises at some point. It was able to pay the bills and pay the people, but incoming employees were typically disappointed by the compensation offered. 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. 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. Or, a corporation becomes people in six acts:įed up with Job A and planning to move away, I looked for work in the new locale. My changing relationship to a former employer 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.I feel a little like I’m succeeding through deduction rather than actually learning the language, but it’s early yet. I started learning Norwegian via Duolingo.Not a personal win, but this also feels good. The Huskies look like a much better team than last year, as well they ought.It was heartening to read the scroll back in the team Slack channel and see them tackling issues, supporting each other, making good decisions. Nothing caught on fire, no one got stuck, no one complained. I disappeared for two weeks and my team at work continued to ably make progress without my help.One win of that period, though, is that the vacation was amazing, despite some RV plumbing mishaps (nothing gross). I skipped a couple of these since I was on vacation. 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. (This is a problem not just for designers but also for product managers.) 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. 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. 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. I don’t find it useful to ask users directly for the answer to a question of detail.
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