Prathima's Miles & Milestones

A corporate work set-up

• When I quizzed my close friend regarding his dream work culture, he aptly said ‘I don’t dream of labour. I work today so I’m a free bird from tomorrow’. That’s the penultimate decision of life for all of us, isn’t it?

However, here’s my dream work culture of loving to do what I do for a living.

• Everyone is involved in major decision-making such that everyone feels heard. In case of rejections — “now” or “later” can be politely specified.
• A healthy banter with constructive criticism. Disagreeing is fine, but not disrespect.
• Everyone is treated with respect irrespective of their designation.
• Trusting an employee in deliverables during standups rather than multiple follow-ups all throughout the day.

• Freedom to shadow people/role to jump up the ladder with initial hand-holding.
• An easy day after a big release, while we gaze at Amplitude & Support tickets, helps us de-stress & give the satisfaction of adding value to the users’ EOD.
• Odd & even sprints [bug sprints & feature sprints] help the team balance the work pressure in a better way.
• No blame game when something breaks in production — rather than “Who did it”, or “How’d each one of us volunteer in resolution” discussing the approaches, helps. Builds a fearful environment and one can confess their mistake so that the rest can fix it on behalf of the other rather than RCA (Root cause analysis) in critical moments. To err is human.
• I love switching products when it’s too monotonous of working on the same product/domain leads to lesser innovative ideas after a while. Switching gears has always brought in value — be it away from work wrt product reviews, etc.
• A paid leave for attending tech conferences (with proof of course) helps in networking, promoting the org, meeting new customers for our products & many more collaborations.
• Celebrations for both personal & professional accomplishments.
• Appreciate the efforts invested, and lessons learnt as a Product team when one of the PMs — A/B testing fails, campaigns don’t meet the expectations, but learnings are noted so that the org doesn’t invest in a similar attempt due to the previous results. Every day we learn from the users & nobody predicts that all experiments work successfully for a product with the domain expertise. Hence we see the pain in killing features which do not add value to the product over time.
• I enjoy switching roles occasionally — Support, QA, customer interviews, and wireframing at times as it has helped me tremendously helped in building features/tweaking the current ones for the users. (Balsamiq is my fave tool)
• Supporting the learnings via online courses, fitness activities, art classes, etc.
• “No calls Fridays” where one is engaged in the work rather than attending calls.
• Quarterly feedback results in increments rather than annually as nobody humanly recalls nor can go back to the past & correct it. Also, Q1 feedback helps us do better in the following quarters to balance it out both individually & for the organisation as well.
• Frequent 1-on-1s help if the process, culture or anything bothering the team & needs to be heard (also via anonymous forms)
• Retrospecting on both individual learnings & organisational growth makes a good mutual fit.

P.S. Some are literally “dreamy” (-_-*)(-_-)