I picked blueberries

I went out for the 2nd weekend in a row. :)

Last week was jamming my left hand into the zip lines at Tree to Tree Adventure.

Note: I didn't make it up this wall...this year.

This week was picking blueberries at Bonny Slope Blueberries.

The blueberry farm is basically a house with extra land where the owners planted blueberry bushes. The payment uses a complete honor system where customers weigh and pay on their own, and put the money in a drawer. Might be one of those developed, rich country or even "American" ideals as I think this would be much abused in China or Taiwan. The owner told me "Look in. Look up." which I learned is pretty good advice as every berry at the top has been picked clean. But if you crouch down and look up, you see all the berries hidden from view by the leaves.

This past work week was pretty bad as I caused a problem in OM by using every available inventory for 1 Softitel order, and now there's no product to fulfill another order we got on the same day. People are pissed. But, I'll take a deep breath, eat some blueberries, learn my lesson, "look in, look up", and move on.

Note to self: don't talk to Sales about order fulfillment anymore.

Is it too late to go back to school and study engineering?

Every product I've worked on has had the product quality called into question by the customer. It's the worst question to get asked as the product manager. And sitting on the other side of the world from R&D, without know every quirk and twist of touching and using the product, all I can go on is the knowledge and history of the process (which has holes that I have to ignore), aided by the encouragement/hypnosis/打氣 from the boss which can sometimes veer into BS territory. He takes the time to get to know more of the details than most bosses, but still he sees things easier as they are because he is a boss.

The customer interaction is the most challenging part of the job because I have to talk about things I don't know for sure, but pretend I do know. And when I read customer reports issues with seemingly basic functions, I really struggle. I really do. The boss has set things up so that I should not have to answer technical queries, but sometimes like today, I have to respond to the customer directly because it affects sales or business, and I don't want to take the easy way out and let it go till night time for my HK colleagues to respond.

Every time this issue comes up, I wish I had the technical expertise to say, this product is wrong. Actually, I can probably figure out how to set up the product, if I decide it is priority enough. When would that be?

Trying to be under the radar

For the most part, I think I am getting along with the bosses. One way I know is I keep getting more work, which I believe for at least one of them is an acknowledgment that I'm not screwing up what I've been doing. The other way I know is one boss crashed a weekly conference call I have with my coworkers and told them I'm doing a good job. Which - thanks and all, but dude, now I might have to deal with the "teacher's pet" syndrome. And I'm just fumbling through everything like my coworkers are, I'm just the one making the requests so it's easier to measure when my coworkers fail vs. when I fail. And I'm the loser with no family or social life to speak of, so I can spend every waking moment working or thinking of work. Don't keep enabling my bad behavior, boss!

I was also a loser when I was a kid, reading books when my siblings were watching TV or having fun, and I also got pointed out and praised which made me 莫名其妙. I'm just reading cause I don't have enough dexterity to play whatever games the older kids were playing! or cause they didn't invite me! Then the praise made them doubly sure to never invite me. So there's some personal overreaction here but I'm really wishing I could ditch the spotlight part of the job cause everything else is pretty fun. I am getting that sinking feeling again of not getting enough done, and the boss told me "don't send me any more emails complaining about job priorities" as he fixed things last time and I think I only get to play that card once a fiscal quarter... or fiscal year... T_T

Source: Discover Education 

PM reporting to Sales

I found out this week that my company posted a job for director of product marketing for another business unit. The thing is, it reports to Sales, not product management! This company direction worries me. I (mostly) like the sales team and they're critical to success. But Sales and PM often have a conflict of interest, and that check and balance is really needed to keep ourselves honest that we're building a product to address a market problem, instead of always chasing that elusive "killer product" that Sales is always pushing for.

I guess I have a slight case of fear of abandonment from some personal and previous work experience, and as I am just getting to enjoy my job, I hope this is not a sign that my boss is going to throw me over the fence to Sales boss!

From the 2010 Annual Product Management and Marketing Survey:
Reporting to Department

• 29% directly to CEO or COO
• 31% in Product Management
• 20% in Marketing
• 14% in Development or Engineering
• 7% in Sales

And here's why PM should not report to Sales:
"Very few product managers find themselves in a Sales (or Sales & Marketing) department. It seems clear product managers in Sales will spend all of their time supporting sales people with demos and presentations. The product managers become the sales engineers. In effect, subordinating product management relegates it to a support role for the primary goal of the department." (Source: Where does PM belong?)

And I think actually I wouldn't mind trying that, it's just I like to continue in my current role a bit longer as there is still a lot to learn here.

Working for a boss that challenges you and trying to live up to it

My last meeting with the Boss at HITEC (big Hospitality tradeshow), he asked me what I learned. I couldn't give him a succinct answer and blurted out something like "it's all about relationships and it's stupid." OMG...can I use the excuse that english is not my first language? He does this frequently and I'm always unprepared and need to come back to him later with my answer. Work faster, brain!

Coming up with snappy, high level observations and insights is definitely something I need to work on. I need to process information faster and I'm better at writing than talking. In a group environment, I like listening much more than talking because most people have good stories and I don't have or don't want to share them. The only thing I like to talk about is work. I worry that makes me a boring person but work means interesting and SOLVABLE problems. It makes me happy to think about instead of how much I miss my grandma and whether I should try to pursue a romantic relationship again.

I like that the Boss gives me an seemingly endless variety of things to do. Things that I never thought about doing or thought I'm not qualified to do... he just tells me to do it. Now I see myself as a leader of the project team and whatever I feel is beneficial and necessary for the project, from social marketing to educating how this market works, I am not going to beat myself up about "should or should not", I'm just going to do it and do it well so people believe in what I say.

The answer to another direct question from the Boss is: I am happy at my job.

Source: Mad Men S4E8 - The Suitcase

Don Draper, another challenging boss. 

My boss isn't as scary as Don in this scene, thankfully.

Diving back into Order Managment (OM)

I've been thinking a lot about how to approach the problem of the different in service level expectation from East Sales and West Sales director. I'm pretty confident that this is part of the reason OM rep left.

First, they are the ones that are actually bringing in PO's. So the Ops team recognize that their importance. However, it's also natural to compare their style.

East - has nothing but complaints of the Ops SLA. Announces sales with a tagline "may need Jun onsite". This means it's a rush. This means Ops need more info from you to process this request.
West - Says that it's always been good service. When she submits rush orders, she practically has the config form filled out already. And she actually checks with Ops to get a good confidence level and sets expectations with the customer.

Note that the same team is servicing both directors.

I think I'll email East and explicitly outline the differences in her interaction with Ops vs West, and tell her that it's not helping the team.

Order Management lady left

I've invested a lot of time trying to help the unsustainable situation but in the end, I'm not the one that has to do the dull data entry and check part numbers, meaning I can't actually help. Maybe I even hurt things, enabled some of the emotions to go from bad to worse. 

I'm really re-evaluating what I'm trying to do in OM and what my improvements should be. Maybe I should take a step back and ask myself, what value have I added?

I'm gonna miss her. T_T