The other night, as I was tweaking the final draft of the 30-second commercial for Blendz “kick-starting the week” campaign, I found myself looking over it for six times in a row; I wasn’t completely happy about it, but I couldn’t tell exactly why. | |
And then, Sunday came, and that feeling of rush struck again with the whole IA team as we prepared for the second pilot of BlendZ. With 16 of us in school the day before, we were definitely getting enough preparation—weren’t we? We weren’t. People were taking forever to cut the fruit, others were giggling around, the room was a mess, fruit was not refrigerated correctly—you get the picture. At the last minute we were finding out glitches that we didn’t expect. It was hectic. Were we panicking? Yes. Was this chaos normal, being the second prototype ever? We still couldn’t tell. Did we need more time than we originally thought?... |
And that’s where I understood one thing about real-world work: although we should shoot for flexibility in the work place, there’s always deadlines we CAN’T change, and in order for your product to provide a service, it MUST be released to the public.
In the IA we work as a company, and part of adapting to it, is knowing how to manage people around you, not just if your role is being the mentor, the project manager or the CEO. What we sometimes fail to recognize as a team, and I’m guilty for it as well, is that—very differently from what traditional schooling exercises—we should always try to give each other a hand. The issue was that, although we had a checklist of tasks for the day, no one was taking initiative to do MORE than what was asked from them. More so, we were waiting for others to delegate roles, whereas we had to be looking for the work ourselves. Most of us were not thinking long term: What would we need the next day? Where could I help next? These are all questions we needed to start asking. Additionally, I got a sense of vanity metrics, from the lean Startup, in the sense that the overall feeling of the stand gave me more insight than the lists we were checking off. |
So, my main take away from this week, is that for BlendZ to work smoothly we need—I need--to start taking initiative past what’s expected. To stop thinking about deadlines as a threat or an excuse to mediocre results but instead start helping each other to meet the vision in the time we have. Because, collaboration can be frowned upon if it leads to procrastination as a group, but when done right, it allows you to get things done quickly but beautifully. |