In this series, I want to give an overview of what I'm doing (sort of) professionally from week to week. What projects have I been working on? What was the progress and what were the struggles? Any thoughts on that? Lessons learned? That kind of thing. The main goal is to document this for myself, but if you're interested you're welcome to read along of course!
Last week, I talked about how dealing with frustrations caused by poor expectation management usually starts with communication. And while that is true, communication is only the start of the solution. With the ChangeGamers, I suggested a couple of options to the team to handle the workload in the run-up to our nearest deadline; most notably postponing a release or cutting some features.
Both the ChangeGamers and Cat Cafe Manager 2 teams ran into the problem of having too many things to do in too little time. As a result, they both opted to delay their project.
I would therefore like to take this opportunity to explain what such a delay means and how I aim to maintain some level of control (along with the team, of course) during the process.
Fortunately, I still have a change of scenery from time to time. Like last weekend, when I stayed at my aunt’s house to kitty-sit (and make some music).
Because unfortunately, postponing a release usually doesn’t buy you more time. If that were the case, everybody would delay everything all the time, and we would all live happily ever after, right? No, delays have consequences, and it can be quite dangerous to delay without considering those consequences first. This is why you have to make sure these situations are tackled appropriately.
For Cat Cafe Manager 2, we have a huge marketing beat coming up that we initially planned to launch at the beginning of July. It was supposed to involve almost everybody on the team preparing different kinds of content, both individually and collaboratively, before assembling everything right on time to hit the deadline for said marketing beat. This meant that every little thing needed to go smoothly for us to make that deadline. Of course, that didn’t happen — a couple of team members fell ill and needed to take a few sick days.
Usually, this wouldn't be a big deal, but since the marketing beat involved many moving parts that had to fit together in a tight schedule, we had to completely re-plan this specific campaign. A few team members — including myself — will be traveling in the upcoming weeks, so it wasn't easy to create a new plan that would allow everything to come together again. However, we managed to do it... albeit with a month's delay.
Fortunately, after revisiting the rest of our plans, we concluded that moving this deadline ahead by one month won’t affect the rest of our planned activities that much. The bigger plan — which this marketing beat is a part of — remains more or less the same in terms of scheduling. This means that every member of the team can still proceed with their work, be it with some small reshuffles:
Irene, our marketing lead, had to shuffle some marketing activities to keep the calendar filled. Rick had to reschedule some writing work he needed to tackle while traveling, making sure he wouldn’t run into trouble later down the line. In the art team, Carmen and Esmée had to revisit some priorities as well. It’s not ideal, but everybody understood why it needed to happen. As a team, we managed to ensure that we’ll all be able to deliver on every goal we set for ourselves — just in a different order. Crisis averted!
Fortunately, I still have a change of scenery from time to time. Like last weekend, when I stayed at my aunt’s house to kitty-sit (and make some music).
With the ChangeGamers on the other hand, we had a lot less time to shuffle around. Within the next two weeks, our beta test has to both run AND wrap up, no matter what. When we realized we weren’t going to make last week’s intended release, we postponed it twice to make sure that all the necessary elements would be included. If we hadn’t done so, the beta test would have been ruined before it even started.
However, with each delay, we also had to cut out valuable time out of the test. Where the initial plan was to have it run for 14 days, we then had to cut it back to 10 and eventually landed on just 7 days of testing.
Somehow, through all this hectic work for Cat Cafe Manager 2 and the ChangeGamers, I reached a state in my professional life that I hadn’t experienced in a long time: I was no longer catching up, I was getting ahead! Whilst working with Mighty Merch, I became so caught up in managing emails with warehouses and suppliers that I almost forgot about my main task of developing the future of the service.
And there I sat for a brief couple of hours; planning out the best way to set up our app structure within Shopify, checking what print suppliers we still need to find, and figuring out how to minimize effort on stock reporting (the answer: throw money at yet another Shopify app). It didn’t take long before the first client requests for information and action started to roll in again, but I thoroughly enjoyed those hours while they lasted!
Fortunately, I still have a change of scenery from time to time. Like last weekend, when I stayed at my aunt’s house to kitty-sit (and make some music).