I'm Back

So it’s been a minute.

I talked in my last post about giving myself some grace to not feel so beholden to writing two times a week, but with that grace came the inevitable complacency and “who even cares” questions that come when you break a routine.

I started writing a few things, and either felt like they were too personal (I wrote one all about our cat that we had to put to sleep earlier this year) or just didn’t feel like they hit what I really cared about (Agentic AI musings)… so I just was like “meh, I guess that I’m going to wait for inspiration to strike”.

But as anyone who writes knows… waiting for inspiration is a death sentence. The inspiration will never come.

I didn’t have inspiration strike. I don’t have a big thing to talk about. I just felt like it was time to start writing again. And I think that Friday releases instead of Tuesday and Thursday feels more right. So I’m going to start a new routine today.

And I guess we can talk about that as a part of the topic today… muscle memory and routines.

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I haven’t been in a real delivery role in a few years. Even when I was in a delivery role, it was all about being a leader and not about actually getting my hands dirty. The last time I was really in a delivery team was at least 7 years ago.

So two weeks ago, when I got thrown back into a delivery role, my first reaction was “pft, I can do this in my sleep” lol because I’m nothing if not an arrogant prick. Then my second thought was “oh god, I’m going to have to do WORK here huh”.

And those two thoughts mirror two experiences that I want to dive into — that 1) muscle memory is a real thing and it allows you to pick something up that you haven’t done in a very long time and be able to get back in the groove quickly… but that doesn’t mean it’s going to work out well and 2) there’s a real difference in roles and responsibilities in companies and we (leaders specifically, not we as in everyone) discount how much more WORK there is to do when you’re actually delivering value instead of being a nice little piece of overhead.

First let’s talk about muscle memory.

I’ve done years and years of product delivery. It started back when I joined mFoundry and was an account manager on the Bank of America account. I got a crash course in “this is what the Software Development Lifecycle looks like” along with “this is how you manage a schedule in that lifecycle”.

Now in addition to those skills, I also learned the main mode of communication that Bank of America understood. In other words, I got really good at yelling at people.

I would be on calls all day every day talking to Bank of America project managers and QA folks telling me that there were issues with our code, then would end up yelling at them to tell me the details we actually needed. This was also at a time that mFoundry was growing rapidly and we opened a second office - and every time I’d visit all the new faces would look at the people around the office and go “who is that guy over in the corner on the phone screaming at people?” lol.

So getting back into a delivery role brings a lot of thoughts and emotions back quickly. In every delivery role I had, the reason they either succeeded or failed was not because of technology. It was always because of process and communication. So you need to have a system for communicating what you are doing, when you are doing it, and when you think you’ll be done, as well as methods of escalation and identification of risks, and all that jazz. That system becomes a part of your larger process which should be built with the goal of delivering value and communicating that value.

The problem is that you don’t just get to make the system and make a communication plan and have that be all that gets hit with your muscle memory. Because you also remember all the times that you’ve failed. And all the times you’ve won. And all the times you needed to keep a tighter grip on the reigns.

And, unfortunately, it’s also a trigger to remember who you were when you were running those roles, and for me that was being a yeller.

I don’t want to be a yeller. I put that time behind me. I’m betting (or maybe hoping lol) a lot of you who are reading this and didn’t work with me back in the day are like “Scott is a yeller? wtf is he talking about” lol.

Just to tell a story to show how bad I was… I was once driving back from our San Francisco office and having a conversation with a team at BofA and my team… and this guy at BofA just wouldn’t stop interrupting me. I told him how frustrating it was and asked him to let me just get my thoughts out then I’d give him time to respond. He didn’t and just kept interrupting me. And so, sitting in traffic heading back home, I went off and screamed something along the lines of “IF YOU WON’T LET ME FUCKING TALK I’M HANGING UP THE FUCKING PHONE AND YOU CAN FIND SOMEONE ELSE TO FIX YOUR FUCKING PROBLEMS”. And then I started talking again (probably not as calmly as I thought I did) and he immediately interrupted me and I hung up.

That’s right. I hung up on a client. Not just any client. Our biggest client.

And did the consequences come for me that day? No. But was I totally wrong in how I handled it. Uh, obviously yes lol. Though did my team love it and think it was hilarious also yes. lol.

But the point being the muscle memory — there’s no ending of what can trigger muscle memory. Anything you have done enough you’ll be able to do easily (not as well as you did in the past but well enough to look competent) if you jump back in. But you shouldn’t let all of the different muscle memories back in because they’re not always good things.

I have a lot of Waterfall process muscle memory, but I can’t use that in our modern agile world, because it’s not relevant and it would actually be a detractor to getting to the outcomes I’d want to achieve.

I have a lot of yelling experience, but that’s not what actually gets people motivated or gets them on your side, so using that skill isn’t something I should be doing, even if it’s very fun in the moment to be the gigantic asshole in the room.

Similarly I have a lot of muscle memory here writing articles, but I still don’t know if that muscle memory is good or not. I have to actually be a little more critical before I can make that determination.

Now the second line item :) doing the work is way more work than leaders tend to think it is.

As leaders, our jobs feel SUPER hard. Some of it is that you end up feeling responsible for the people you’re leading (which we’ve talked about quite a bit). Some of it is that we’re just sitting here thinking all day long and trying to come up with ideas or constantly fighting fires. To be sure there’s a lot of intellectual “work” going on but it’s not the same as being under the gun of delivery.

And I feel like as a manager/leader sometimes we think that our work is so hard and difficult because it’s emotionally draining, but don’t think about the flip side of how that affects our individual contributors.

For instance, as a leader, you might be looking at a process and think “it’d really be better if we restructured this and made it more efficient and all that jazz” — but as a person delivering against that process, you’re just trying to figure out how to manage the responsibilities you have while also not getting yelled at for not following all the right processes.

There’s also all the politics of delivery that people who are just trying to do their jobs have to reckon with in order to just… do the right thing? For example, I had a whole “here’s how we reframe this engagement to get the most value for everyone” pitch, and the immediate response was “well, Scott, you’re not the sales person, we need them to be the one delivering news about how we change the engagement”. And that’s totally the right thing to do, but it’s also one of those things being in a delivery role, where you just want to get the right result.

But instead of being able to do it strategically and quickly you need to navigate the politics.

And then you aren’t always responsible for the deliverables in the way you’d want to be. A sales person might sell something you can’t deliver. A product person might make assumptions that you can’t deliver on. Designers may design something that isn’t technically feasible. You might run into technology limitations that aren’t resolvable within your budget. All of those things are the problems of the delivery team, and it’s really hard.

But as leaders… we end up typically just swooping in when shit hits the fan. And then look at things and say “why didn’t the team do xyz” and that’s really just not a fair assessment. The team likely didn’t do it because they weren’t empowered.. and who weren’t they empowered by? It’s probably you!

So why am I talking about this topic, honestly. (full disclosure, I stopped above for the day and came back to this Friday, so I’m not just asking this for you I’m also asking for me lol)

The reason is, it’s easy to fall into routines and to see things without looking beyond your own perspective. And some of the times you are able to fall into that routine and feel like you’re absolutely killing it. But even in those moments, it’s important to look beyond your individual perspective and see what’s going on for the people around you.

Even the best people at their jobs fall into ruts and end up doing things that aren’t the right thing because they “know what’s best”. It’s a huge thing in tech especially the idea of “I know what we’re doing” or “I know what the clients want” or “I know what will bring people to this platform/app”.

I spend most of my work day thinking about what OTHER people are thinking and then whether my reaction helped or hurt. Often times, my first instinct is that it helped, while reflection reveals it either didn’t help as much as I thought, or was actually hurting.

And the important part honestly isn’t “did this help or hurt” but the important part is the reflection. Being reflective about your own impact and not being overly ignorant of everyone else’s reactions is the key element in getting better. It’s why we know we should all do retro’s after every project and proposal… and it’s also why we often don’t do it. Because while it’s incredibly helpful and insightful, it’s also painful to reflect on where you dropped the ball.

It’s exhausting. It’s mentally draining. Sometimes it’s depressing. Sometimes it’s debilitating (I literally had a moment a couple weeks ago where I realized that even though my point was right the way I went about making it wasn’t and it literally ate me up for a week. I’m still not even over the “you fucked up and have to do better” internal monologue which is why I’m still writing about it long after I’m sure everyone else involved has forgotten it even happened).

But that’s why it’s worth doing. Life isn’t supposed to be easy. And I don’t mean that in a “stop complaining about your circumstances” way. Because those of us who have the time and energy to think about these things are already in a place of privilege where our problems are more existential and less survival. If you want to be a good person and you’re in a place of privilege like most of us in the tech industry are, you are responsible for your impact on other people and it SHOULD be hard to ensure that you’re being a good person. If it was easy, everyone would do it.

But you should also hear from other people in the same position that it being hard isn’t you. It’s hard for all of us. But that doesn’t make it less necessary or meaningful. And when you are looking at a situation thinking “I really don’t want to look into why this didn’t work” that’s the exact moment you should take a beat and say “I need to be brave here”.

I’ll make a deal with you — if you give it a try I will too.