Follow-Up

First published on

Years ago I was a Product Manager of a product with lots of teething troubles. The Director of Support and I sat down from time to time to discuss the most urgent customer issues. One day he suddenly said, visibly annoyed, "I see that you're agreeing with me and writing down things in your notebook, but are you actually going to do something with it this time?" .

Needless to say, that hit home.

I've seen many LinkedIn posts that go like "here are ten things that take 0 talent: following up on commitments, being on time, ... " etc. . But I think that's wrong. Making sure you "follow up" is hard work. I'm a total pleaser by nature, I want to be agreeable and I dread confrontation. Telling someone "I'm not going to do anything with this" is very difficult. So my natural tendency is to say "Hm yes that's a good point, it would be great if we did something with it, perhaps we can do ..." and then go off and brainstorm something nice in a fantasy world. People go along with this most of the time, because it is very nice to go off into fantasy mode. It's just that at some point they have to admit reality. In this instance it took a couple of meetings to see that nothing was happening.

In the years afterwards, running a regulated quality management system and managing a team, I've had to unlearn my pleasing nature and get down to earth. I never want anyone to tell me again that I'm not keeping my commitments. I've noticed that I'm promising less, I say "no" more, and I have a simple checklist system to track all the things that I actually committed to. I smile a bit when I see other people go into fantasy mode and typically steer the conversation back to reality.

So thanks for the feedback Nilco, I'm definitely not perfect at following up, but a lot better than before.

(this is a cross-post from LinkedIn)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

AI programming tools should be added to the Joel Test

First published on
Here's a wake-up call to all CTOs: AI programming tools are getting freaking amazing and if you don't allow your teams to use them somehow, it will bite you in the ass in a couple of years. You will be slower and you will lose your best people. The infamous Joel Test is a list from the year 2000 of 12 things all great software companies do. Since then most companies have implemented Git and CI/CD, checking of three items, so we have some space left in the 2024 update ;) I believe "Do you allow your developers to use AI assisted development environments?" is a necessary addition. I get that you don't want your source code to end up on some OpenAI / Microsoft / Github server somewhere, sure, but find a way to use your own models or learn to live with it. Note that this is often not the same as "#9 - Do you use the best tools money can buy?" as blocking AI tools is about data security, not money. So why do I think developers need AI programming tools? I&#
Read more

The unreasonable effectiveness of i3, or: ten years of a boring desktop environment

First published on
Image
My wife uses Windows and over the years I've helped her move things to new systems. Win8, 10 and now 11. With every change the UI changes. Now I can't right click the bottom right corner anymore to open Task Manager. The UI feels "fresh" and up-to-date I guess, but does it really matter? My desktop has looked like this since 2008. I love the picture of the gearbox, it's a testament to the hidden precision engineering that goes on inside the built world all the time. I don't see much of the gearbox though, because most of the time my screens look like this: The environment around my background picture has changed a little more, but has been stable for the last 10 years. My experience is very different to my wife's constantly changing system. In 2009 I moved from Windows to Ubuntu, then to Debian using Gnome. Then finally to i3 in 2013 after a brief affair with XMonad in 2012. So by now in early 2024, I've had the same minimal UI for more than 10 years,
Read more

Idea time: RFID+E-Ink, electronic price tags without batteries

First published on
I got this idea years ago, somewhere in 2004 after I had heard both of RFID and E-Ink. The order is irrelevant ;) The idea is simple, we take: 1) RFID readers, which send radio waves to tags, which pick up some of the energy in the wave, do some computations and send a reply. The tags are brilliant: no batteries, no connected power source of any kind except for the antenna. 2) E-Ink displays, which need power only to change pixels. After the power is cut off, the pixels remain in their current state. The result: a small tag with a display. The display gets initialised and updated by an RFID-reader and after that retains its state indefinitely. Perfect for price tags on shelves in supermarkets, which need to be updated every now and then but are hellish to replace. I soon found out in 2004 that Epson had already done this:  http://gizmodo.com/026090/epsons-electronic-ink-%252B-rfid--21st-century-price-tags
Read more