Gumby Ascendant

After months of reporting to Atlas and basically fending for ourselves, the UX folks at NerdHaven at last have a new boss.

It's Gumby from CorpWorld.

They arrived at a time of chaos. Atlas was overseas while our two development teams - who spent last year merged into a super-team - were reverting into separate teams with separate backlogs of work. The entire organization was coming off the holidays, we were starting 8 new people, and our only slightly less-new scrum master was trying to change our primary work tool. Data is no longer on the UX team and is reporting to Portal. Product was churning up trouble in the priorities list - tackling work that was typically in UX's bailiwick...

-and that was just for starters. I remember being more than a little overwhelmed my first week, but I was dealing with established patterns and procedures. The goalposts weren't moving.

Gumby's got a sh!t ton more stuff to learn than I ever did - and they're doing it when they don't know what is normal and what is a catastrophic departure from the norm.

Welcome to NerdHaven!

But Gumby is their old self, a person I've known for years - and great to talk to. They are in good spirits and I wonder how much of that is the post CorpWorld euphoria that I'm still tapping into. Runner's been keen on getting them here - because they get a finder's fee - but it's also clear to me that Runner has a rapport with the new boss.

And that's a good start. We spend a lot of Gumby's first week forwarding meeting invites and trying to explain away the crazy that is currently gripping NerdHaven.

No, it is not normal for the QA server to bonk and make us cancel the showcase.

Usually, your UX folks realize which team they are on and which one they aren't.

No, it is not normal for us to start a meeting with client with absolutely no data in hand.

That last one was particularly galling. UX is helping Product with the needs of a truly massive client, and we'd asked them in our last meeting to give us some feedback on some possible improvements to our design. At the follow up meeting - which I invited Gumby to - the client was going to give us their feedback.

Right now, any UXer with a brain is saying: that sounds completely wrong. Yes, it was. But we'd come off the holidays having gotten absolutely nothing from the rep working the account. BigRep scheduled the meeting for a Monday (Arrrgh!) and pinged me about a half an hour before the meeting to ask if I was leading the discussion.

I'm like: Sure, I can talk to them - unless Product is driving this bus. BigRep says they'll ping Product - and never gets back to us. Since they've also neglected to reserve a room for the call - Runner and I grab one and invite Gumby, Product and BigRep.

BigRep declines. They want to run the call from their office. Fair enough.

We set up, BigRep does the introductions and we have several people from MassiveClient on the line. Runner sets up the webex on the conference room's machine and shares our screen. I start out by reframing our last discussion and segue into the part where they were going to provide us with feedback. This is going out on a limb a bit, because I'm not entirely certain they've given us anything.

The opposite turns out to be true. They respond with "We've already sent it to you. Weeks ago."

Uh, what the screaming fark?

"Have you seen our spreadsheet? Our team worked diligently on it."

I'm mouthing obscenities while I watch an email appear on my (unshared) laptop. It's from BigRep and it contains two attachments: a PDF and a Word Doc. Both are clearly from the client.

The words 'weeks ago' had blown pretty much every other thought out of my head - so I sit there for a second while I realize the scope of this disaster. We were going to meet to listen to these people, and they are expecting us to have absorbed these documents already. They are going to want to see designs based on them.

F*%k.

What do you do? I'll go by the Ziegler principle: Because it's the easiest thing to remember - tell the truth.

I fess up to not having seen the documents, apologize profusely and start talking about scheduling a follow up meeting where we can have the meeting this feedback deserved. BigRep cuts me off and suggests spending the rest of the meeting going through the feedback documents they've provided and we can ask them questions about them.

Yes. Off the cuff questions are really worth these people's time. They've taken time away from their real jobs and we're going to -

Whatever. We need to proceed. Gumby's first chance to observe UX doing client research is them watching us implode thanks to our being left out of the communication channel.

We finish up as best we can and I go over to BigRep.

What
The
Hell...

BigRep is somewhat aware that something bad has happened, makes it sound like the files never made their way to them until this morning and then starts talking about how it wasn't really that bad.

In other words - this is their fault.

I'm angry and embarrassed. Angry, because this was a total waste of everyone's time - and I'm not convinced that BigRep is tracking that. I guess I'm not really all that embarrassed - UX's screw up was we should have been asking after feedback earlier (and we absolutely will from now on) - but the big ball drop wasn't ours. MassiveClient won't care - they'll be mad at all of us,with good reason.

I really wanted to have a good session so Gumby could have a decent client interview under their belt, but it turns out to be a good experience for them. They get BigRep on the hook for scheduling a follow up with MassiveClient as well as a check in for our team and BigRep beforehand to make sure we won't have a repeat of "oh, I never sent you that?"

This is a good move by Gumby and a sensible practice. Schedule the team meet up when you schedule the client contact. We should be doing this and hadn't been. Point for the Boss.

Gumby also had new eyes when our pre-IPM meeting started to tank because of AV equipment failure. Runner was hanging up the call by accident (their anti-superpower) and I'm misreading the horrid UI on the three remotes that drive this equipment.

We get the call back and Gumby points out two things we were doing wrong and - Presto! - we're back in business. Boss: 2, Subordinates: 0.

Gumby's full of surprises. I remember from their interview that they had a background in the (hideously complicated) subject matter our app is grounded in. But on the job, I can see this becoming a bigger asset as they deal with other in house managers. Gumby's hidden reserve of subject matter expertise will save them from being steamrolled.

Three points for the Boss.

Well, four actually. Gumby has been read into the whole Noddy situation. And so far, the signs are positive. Regular meetings and calling Noddy out on their bullsh!t. The fear is that they are trying to rehabilitate Noddy - which I think would be disastrous. Noddy will do the work if someone is riding them every day. But it would have to be every day. That's a waste of managerial effort, and frankly I think Noddy has passed the point where they could turn things around. They've had at least two years - and this is what we have. It is time to tell them what standards they have to meet and what will happen when they don't meet them. Perhaps Noddy is no longer inspired by their job, and if that's the case - they should search for work that inspires them. UX is a good market these days.

Gumby's just starting out with the Noddy situation, and so far it looks like they are doing the right thing. Gumby and Atlas attended our last IPM and got to see Noddy try to snow everyone. "My work's all ready to go!" It wasn't and it showed - in front of management. It wasn't the full blown implosion the work truly deserved, though.  I think restraint on the part of a lot of our team made things go better than perhaps they should have. But it served to underline the proper way to treat Noddy. Watch this one closely.

Those are the positives to the new era - so far.

There's another aspect to Gumby that has begun showing through that has us more that a bit on edge. I'm not sure I can describe it fairly, but here goes...

Gumby is enthusiastic about creating process and documenting roles. They do so with an energy that seems - to my admittedly cynical mind - to be a little...excessive.  I mean, sometimes - you need to write down a new process so everyone can get on the same path. I get that. But on our project team, the attitude is always that documenting process is a necessary evil.

With Gumby, I get the sense that this is something they genuinely enjoy. Part of this has to do with the way they process information. Their mental workspace appears to be external. Draw things, gesticulate, explain. Communicating what they want may appear excessive because they are doing all of it in front of you. Their enthusiasm for it comes across as cheerleading - and that may be unfair.

Part of my comprehension process has always been explaining things to others - or at least writing them down. Lord knows, I've bored plenty of people with my explanations of things. AmIright?

But there's something else in the wind with Gumby. They are the boss - and we should expect some changes to our wild west existence. Under the former UXDir, we were mostly left to our own devices. After their departure, we've gone positively feral.

The thought that Gumby might start shifting roles within our team - pairing us up on projects differently (e.g. with Noddy) has more than a few of us nervous. Gumby wants to have us do less analyst work and more pure design. I love the analysis part. Doing the investigation means I know what I'm writing up - and writing up the requirements from soup to nuts means I won't lose anything in translation. I want to be open to improvements, but I don't off the cuff change.

Data's abrupt request to report to someone other than the UX director struck me as an indication of their faith in the new boss. I could be wrong.

Gumby came from CorpWorld - and adding meetings & discrete roles may be part of their DNA, or it might be part of their detox process. Part of what's great about NerdHaven is having the freedom to run a problem to ground and kill it. CorpWorld always had a procedural roadblock that stopped you. Or a faction you had to have buy in from.

It's still early days - so I'm not sure where this is going yet. But maybe that is the thing:
Gumby is at the helm of UX: and the crew is nervously looking astern.