Week 9

Go back to index

This past month has been a real roller coaster ride. It’s the end of the phase Build Something From Scratch. And as the name says, I had a chance to work with a team to build a system from the ground. This is something that I’ve done before but only as a school project, but this felt way more real and serious. I learned quite a lot of things from this past week, so let’s begin.

Overview

Communication is key. Own your sh!t. - Optimism Bias.

This week we made a huge mistake. We didn’t finish the work that we were supposed to deliver. But that wasn’t the real problem, the real issue was that we didn’t communicate it to the client with enough time. After the presentation demo I felt awful because I had worked so hard and still the results that I wanted weren’t there. From that point I tried to understood what happened to correct my mistakes. And the answer was sitting as a link in my email. There is a video that we had to watch from this month homework that talked about this particular topic. Basically we tend to overstimate the positive things, and in this case we overestimated what we could deliver. And while doing so we waited until the last possible minute to realize that it wasn’t possible anymore.

Keeping the right attitude is everything

There was a moment during the week when I think that every member of my team, inculding me, felt awful. It was a feeling of frustration and tiredness. But despite all those negative feelings we joked our way trough it, we didn’t started with the blame game and because of that I’m proud of us as a team. We made a horrible situation into a not so bad one, this gave me a real sense of camaraderie. I really value that this happened with my team, but I’m aware that this will not always be the case because I can’t control how other people think. But it was really nice to discover what a group of people can achieve when everyone is on the same page.

Meetings are fundamental for remote work, but…

I can’t concieve remote work without meetings. They are just way too helpful to communicate and set the direction of the project. I just think that there were some times where I thought that we were spending too much time analyzing over and over one detail that would be best to wait to discuss. Or maybe we stayed as a whole team to do one task that could be done by one or two people. I think mostly this was a rookie mistake from us and maybe I realized too late that I could have communicated this to my team. But I will have it in mind for my next team project.

Antifragile

Fragile is something that breaks or gets damaged when bad things happen to it. Antifragile is something that gets better with the difficulties that it faces. This past month I felt like I had the whole world on my shoulders. It was just too much to handle, too many deliveries, too many bugs, too many features and not so much time. Now it’s almost over and there is no more stress I realize how much I have grown personally and profesionally. You can’t get more antifragile than that. I still have a lot to learn. But I think that I’m in the right path.