Finish As You Mean To Go On
Today was my last day at Infogrid. There are many things I could look back on over the last two and a half years. Some good things and, let’s be honest, more than a few not-so-good things. Instead I want to focus on something that happened today.
Today was a perfect demonstration of one of Infogrid’s biggest strengths: a healthy relationship between Engineering and Customer Success. So often the relationship between “devs” and “support” leans towards the resentful and transactional. Not so at Infogrid. I will miss working with the CSMs - they are lovely human beings and I wish them well.
This morning a message went around that one of our Customer Success team needed help preparing a report. This is not a particularly unusual situation. As flexible as the product can be, each customer has a very particular set of needs. Often the data they want to see is hard to pull out of the app.
Since it was my last day and I didn’t really have much else to do, I answered the call and decided to see what could be done. I spent an hour or two pulling together the bulk of the report before chatting to Suhail, the CSM dealing with this customer. It soon became apparent that for a variety of reasons Suhail was not having the best of days, and he also had a deal with an unhappy customer.
I should call out here that I was not working alone here. One of Infogrid’s other redeeming qualities is that, in a pinch, devs will gladly band together and chip in to see a fix across the line. It can be both a blessing and a curse having so many people get sucked into unplanned work, but today I was grateful for the company.
I jumped on a call with Suhail just before he was due to chat to the customer, to run through what we’d managed to cobble together. I could hear in his voice a mix of gratitude and relief. This absolutely made my day.
My main reason for leaving Infogrid was that none of the work felt meaningful. There were so many barriers between me and any of our external users. It was hard to get feedback of whether anything I’d built over the last 2 and 1/2 years was actually valuable. Today, on my last day, I know that at least I made one person’s day a little more tolerable. That’s not nothing.