Persistent Pursuit of Perfection Part 5: New Beginnings
In my previous blog post, I wrote about finding my first job out of college and the opportunities that I was given and created for myself. My growth and professional development was due to my peers and my leadership continuously providing more interesting and fulfilling work and my persistent pursuit of perfection to be the best employee that I can be. However, there will always come a time that for your own sake, whether personal or professional, that you need to move on to your next challenge. Sometimes your role doesn’t provide the challenge that it once did, sometimes your personal interests lie elsewhere, sometimes you’ll want to learn and explore new things, sometimes you just want a change of scenery, sometimes your opportunity is dried up. You have to be honest and ask yourself, is the work I am doing aligning with my professional and career goals? After just over five years, I decided that it was time for me to move on to the next chapter of my career, keeping that chip on my shoulder and that persistent pursuit of perfection.
As I transitioned to my second company, I went back to an individual contributor role. Everything was new, new company, new teammates, new industry, new technology, new opportunity. Transitioning from internet tech support and people managing to working in a cloud based healthcare software company proved to be challenging but also rewarding. I particularly loved the mission of the company, to enable doctors to focus on being doctors by making the technology side of things easier. Funny enough, my big brother Josh, mentioned in a previous blog, was a doctor at a practice that used the software produced by my new company.
Starting my new role as a NOC (Network Operations Center) Associate, I realized how focused my previous role was, to provide Internet access to a customer. In my new role, my team is responsible for monitoring and responding to hardware, software, network, and database problems, just to name a few. With all the components of cloud based software, there are naturally a ton of teams that develop their portion of the software. My team is responsible for making sure that all of the services offered by the company are humming along with as little interruption as possible. This is even more fun when there are always new services being developed and onboarded for my team to monitor and cyclical code releases that introduce new documentation, troubleshooting and complexity into the services. I was a rookie again and it was really exciting to learn and prove the value I can provide to the team.
My responsibilities came down to four primary workflows, service management or tickets submitted to the team, alert management, incident management, which monitor for and resolve services issues, and project management. My prior experience set me up to be a high performer in service management. Alert and incident management was something that I had to learn on the job. Luckily for me, applications used such as ServiceNow, Jira and Confluence enable easier collaboration and knowledge transfer. Project management is where I would find opportunity to make my mark.
One of the projects that I worked on was to maintain the disaster recovery documentation for my team. This evolved from something that my team managed on our own to an opportunity to work with the Environment team to migrate the entire organization’s disaster recovery plan into a Business Continuity Management system. The project that left the biggest mark on me though was being a primary stakeholder in launching a home grown public facing status page for customers and the world to see. This opportunity lead me to my first product management experience. I was responsible for gathering requirements from customer facing teams, writing the requirements into user stories for the development team, holding weekly stand up meetings with the developers and weekly meetings to provide status update to the other major stakeholders. of the status page product. After months of hard work from all the parties involved, we successfully launched the product. The collaboration, effective communication and technical expertise required for that project was something that I felt perfectly suited my skill set. Even after launching the product, I remained it’s primary stakeholder and expert.
My performance and consistency in going outside of my regular responsibilities led me to being promoted again to people manager. Since then, I’ve managed the NOC but also conduct scrum ceremonies for a sister team of the NOC that develops tools and applications used by the NOC and our customers. Some of the major projects that have been completed are a creation of a new incident management system used by the company and a migration to a new ChatOps tool. I continue to tap into my network and learn from other Product Managers looking for ways to continuously help the team become more efficient.
Shortly after I became a manager, the world was struck by COVID-19. As a historically on site team, I had to lead the charge when the team switched to remote work. There have been many changes to the workflow of the NOC and the sister development team. Everything changed for me when my son was born in July of 2021. My son was born with a heart condition and I was out of work for a long time. This situation has been something difficult for my family but also caused me to reflect on what I want to do with my career moving forward. I remembered the joy that I had launching the status page product and that is something I want to capture again in a full time Product Manager role. I thank my leadership, Chris and Jim, for supporting my career growth and development and encouraging me to pursue my goal to become a Product Manager.
If you made it this far in my Persistent Pursuit of Perfection blog series, thank you for reading the story of my career thus far. I hope highlighting my professional experience in this light gives you a good insight into my approach to my career. I suppose the story is best summarized in a quote by James Clear from his book Atomic Habits, “Your actions reveal how badly you want something. If you keep saying something is a priority but you never act on it, then you don’t really want it. It’s time to have an honest conversation with yourself. Your actions reveal your true motivations.” I hope my blogs and stories can help motivate your persistent pursuit of perfection and to not settle for anything less.
I’d also like to take a moment to thank my professional mentor and friend, Chris Haeni. You’ve inspired me to expand my continuing education. Thank you for motivating me on my journey to be a better person and employee with your book recommendations and sharing your wealth of experience and honest feedback with me. I’d like to thank my wife Ishtar and my son DJ for their daily inspiration, motivation and support for my career and personal aspirations. Self motivation is important, but always remember the ones that helped you get to where you are and those who are always there to support you unconditionally.
This is a painting called “the Doctor” by artist Luke Fildes. This painting was shared during new hire orientation at my second company and has left a lasting impact on how important the mission of the company is, to enable Doctors to be Doctors and focus on the patient.
Also, Happy Star Wars Day to all!
