One of the amazing perks of a startup is the small office and teams, allowing you to spend plenty of time with colleagues from other fields. I’ll write a post with all the amazing things I’ve learnt working with product managers, designer, developers and customer support; but today it’s about something different. I want to talk about how changing who are you sitting with will drastically change your experience in the organisation, and even your career.
Keeping your team in sight-distance is easy with our size, and it gives us freedom to move around without compromising the Agile manifesto. We’ve also moved three times offices since I joined, and completely changed the org and teams a couple of times; so I’ve changed my desk on several occasions. I’ve been sitting close to the development team to convince them about the testing importance, with my manager to better define the roadmap and priorities, with the designer just because we’re close and I’m so funny she wanted me there (OK, no), with our customer support guy… and every single of those experiences gave me a better understanding about our product and mission, and taught me something. Both personally and professionally.
Some experiences were more enlightening than others. For example, working close an introvert colleague might produce less conversation about life, the universe and everything else; but you might be able to ask more details about his daily work, and how you can assist him. Other times is your colleague who directly asks you for help. And bonding just talking about the weekend is always a huge morale boost in the office, and you never know when you’ll need it!
For example, sitting with our Customer support guy has completely changed how I approach testing and building the product. It gave me a lot of insight about what the users are complaining about, he engaged me with the community (it’s really useful the I think I found a bug forum!), helped me understanding how to test something, and taught me some legacy parts of the platform. I also helped him understanding how we’re building the new one, reminding him when a change was going to be released, teaching how to find technical details of the cases, and giving faster answers to the user.
With this, I just want to point out that you should care about where you’re sitting, especially if they let you chose! This is going to be part of your onboarding, and it’ll shape your career and experience in the company. If possible, I encourage you to change your place from time to time and visit some of your colleagues pairing with them some days (more about it in future posts!). Less process and organisation empower us, and this is one of the main reasons why!
So look around your desk and think Who should be sitting with to better learn how things work? Who is going to teach me more about X? Where I can be more useful?. No good manager will block you to change providing a valid reason, and testing your manager with the question is valuable on its own. And then… share your experiences with us, please!
May the force be with you,
Gino
Just call me Gino, please 