Return from Austin

This past week I've been in Austin on a business trip and now I'm back. Let's chat about it!

6 min read

First off, it’s great to be back home in a familiar setting with my desk to work at and my bed to sleep in! I’m definitely happy that I was able to go and meet my coworkers in person as well as other people at the company.

The trip was an on-site to discuss the upcoming year from a strategic perspective. Our portion of the company is very small and more or less in a startup phase. We’re quickly reaching the point of growth where we need to scale differently than we have been as we are nearly getting more projects than we can comfortably handle. It’s an extremely exciting time to be here because I feel like I have an impact on the direction that the practice is going. Overall, the meetings and dinner were comprised of people from operations, business development, sales, PMO, and delivery (me). No, I don’t mean delivery like a pizza guy: as a tech consultant and developer we deliver our service and see the project through to completion.

The Business Side of Things

Everyone I met there seemed to be really invested in the growth of our smaller team as we carve our a larger and larger piece of the revenue pie for the company. One of the biggest struggles we’ve had as a team is communicating the vast differences between our tech stack and platform from the rest of the company. Our projects just don’t fit into tidy little boxes because of how open and flexible the platform is: essentially there is a big difference in functionality between a CRM and an ERP. Those differences in functionality lead to even bigger difference in requirements, what kind of project we are doing: new implementation, handle mergers and acquisitions, migrations, and so on. Being able to demonstrate the differences and pain points has given the rest of the company the ability to support us the way we need it most.

That support is required from all sides: especially from the sales perspective where selling our services to implement, modify, and maintain a CRM requires a different set of tools. By arming our sales reps with the knowledge and tools to be better sellers, we can work with operations and the PMO folks to learn how to manage and deliver our projects smoother with fewer escalations. The more we help others learn from us, we will be able to learn from them. After all, the ERP side has volumes and volumes of lessons learned captured that we can use and modify for our own needs.

We had a few very key takeaways that I think will make our requirements gathering process smoother and enable us to really lock in and define both functional and technical design. Having these better defined gives the client a more transparent view into our process and leads to better communication. Better communication means, hopefully, fewer surprises and escalations and overall happier clients.

And What About Me?

As the senior developer on the team, there was a lot of focus on what I can bring to the table and how to better utilize my skills to generate more revenue. Part of the plan is for me to go to Dreamforce to figure out what gaps there still are in the market so that we can work on intellectual property for me and a future development TEAM to work on. Intellectual property in our world means one of two things from a revenue standpoint: the first is reducing time to delivery through automated and semi-automated tools; the second is recurring revenue from software subscriptions we sell to clients to use. There is so much that the platform lacks out of the box and those weaknesses of the platform (start filling your SWOT table if your playing along at home) are opportunities for us.

I love making cool shit and clients love using cool shit to make their days easier. It’s a match made in heaven that allow us to deliver continuous improvements quarter over quarter or gives us a foot in the door to offer customizations to their specific business processes at a lower cost than they would have doing it themselves. At the end of the day, this extra revenue will eventually turn into a small development team to continue building and improving packages for sales to sell.

I’m so incredibly excited to see the various business units see the value I can deliver, and already have delivered with IP I’ve created over the past 18 months of working here. Now I just need to get my contract updated to take a cut of the monthly subscription.

The Social Side of Things

I’m very much an introvert, even with my ADHD medicine working at its best; I’m just an introvert that can focus on the multiple tasks at hand. I wanted to take full advantage of this amazing social and networking opportunity, so with some encouragement and support from my amazing coworkers, I did just that! It also really helped to have my partner with me on this trip: something she enjoyed far more than she was expecting to.

I’ll keep this relatively short since I’m finished on the treadmill for the day. There were some really great breakfasts, dinners, and evenings full of discussion that made the trip enjoyable from a social perspective. It was nice to get to know my coworkers more and be able to see them in person. I never felt pressured by any of them to do activities: I felt encouragement, instead. And when I declined to drink or partake in other things, I never felt any negativity toward me. It was surprisingly not at all toxic or bad and instead supportive. At the big dinner with everyone, one of the operations guys asked the server for water shots for me. I know it was a small gesture to him, but it resonated with me and made me feel really included.

I feel good about the people I work with: they’re all a bit weird and they all have empathy. I’ve felt supported by all of them, especially my manager, through the good and the bad. We celebrate together and we bitch about clients together.

It was sweet how they all were really interested in how my partner was doing every day. There’s just something so genuine about how they always asked and it translated over to my partner feeling so many warm and fuzzies.