Good bye, code editor.

I’ve been in web development for a long time now. I am a programmer. The type that likes to know how things work, and how they could work better – I would like to be able to hack everything. But I’m also the kind that likes to give input and to participate on higher level discussions and design decisions, research techniques and plan for new solutions. And that side of me is talking way too louder these days, so I’m grabbing the opportunity by the root and diving into this new role.
It’s been about 3 months now since I was invited to take position on the “sort of Product Owner” role for my team. This is not the standard Product Owner role nor it is the standard Product Manager role. It’s something slightly different. From a daily commitment standpoint – the activities that I develop on top of this role – it’s quite similar though: I’m primarily in charge of gathering requirements and prioritizing work – maintaining the backlog, if you will. But I’m also in point to bring new solutions and innovations to the output of my team to our Business partners, and deal with the higher management to get them accepted and prioritized at their level.
It’s an interesting position to be in.
The work is basically deal with communication. I have to communicate the team what we need to get done and what can wait till next sprint without harming the company business plans. And I have to communicate back to the stakeholders how we are going to meet their necessities and when the solution is in place for them to keep rolling with their strategies.
That’s where it gets tricky, because the way I think to work with communication, participate in meetings and write e-mails, is totally different than the way I think to write code, so switching from one to another during the whole day is heavily unproductive, and made me perform poorly in both till now. That’s why I’m quitting development.
I’ve been gradually reducing my allocated hours to work with development during the last few sprints, and once we get Project Success out of the door I’m going down to 0% time allocated for coding. I’m jumping full-time in this gig, and I’m really excited about it.
I wish I knew more of the entire role to talk about it here, but the fact that I don’t is also super cool: I’ll be taking showers of new knowledge everyday, and that’s what I like the most. I’ve met a lot of awesome programmers throughout the last year at Dell, and I’ll keep taking sides with them and working with them – I’ll be in the same team. But I’ll also have the chance to meet another handful of brilliant business people from whom I have a lot to learn, and hopefully a lot to share and help.
This is not only a great new time for me at work, I will also make it a great new time for me on my personal projects – after all, I don’t want to kill hacking like this. I’ll start pulling technical knowledge, like new languages and systems, at home, as I used to be reluctant and only focus on things that would give me direct benefit to the tools I use at work. Fun times, as always.
Tagged: career, life, Programming, team, work