When a big company slows you down
By: Tim Meeuwissen
Tags: Technology, Enterprise Technology, Leadership, Life Lessons

When a big company slows you down

Changing your perspective can be the key

Every step in my career was an increase in the size of the company. And whatever they may say… Size does matter.

Big fish, little pond

Just before I came to Jumbo, I came from a company roughly around the size of 175 people. We worked on the latest technologies. I was writing Typescript, Erlang and Python. We successfully did infrastructure as code with terraform and puppet, wrote masses of microservices which we ran on Kubernetes, were early adopters of Google Cloud Platform and used the majority of their services. From Bigquery, looker, and pubsub, to Kubernetes, compute and so much more. No shame in discovering the frontline of technology, learning what you didn’t know and getting it to production.

And we were good at it as well! With a relatively small team we managed to have a really healthy operation balancing backlogs between functionals and non-functionals.

I was part of a group of 3 to 4 hands-on software architects we dove in any issue that needed extra hands, in depth knowledge or restructuring. Whether it was the tech that needed some help, or teams. Either by request, or by discovered necessity.

We got stuff done, we knew what we were doing, and we did it well.

Bigger pond

I was open for internal vacancies, so I decided that I should be open for external vacancies as well. I knew the recruiter that worked at Jumbo at that time and I decided to check in with him to see if there where some roles that might match with my profile.

Now, I swore to myself that I wouldn’t do any E-Commerce anymore

The odds where slim that I would join Jumbo to be honest. I’ve done a lot of e-commerce before and the area didn’t feel challenging anymore. Somehow though, one of my now very valued colleagues managed to reel me in.

Why I joined

This super kindhearted guy was sitting in front of me, looked me dead in the eye and said something along these lines:

Now let me be perfectly honest with you. We have some serious challenges ahead. We desperately need help, there’s so much to improve and it’s hard to say where to start.

Something in the back of my mind, right then, right there, started screaming: “TAKE THE DAMN JOB”. Huh, wait but why? He says they have serious challenges, and it’s e-comm. Computer says no!

But what I felt was:

this is a big company where I can learn

I can really make a difference here

This guy is so honest, there can be no mistake here, I know exactly what I sign up for and I love the challenge

I can be at the spot where I want to be, between structural and technical changes and talking with people

I was sold. This time to a company with 90k employees, of which 400 with a technical job. I knew it would be a different game, but I underestimated just how different.

Honeymoon was over

Three months in and something changed. I was full of ideas, but even more so: real life solutions that solve a lot of the issues that I saw there. I was able to tell people about them, but somehow I didn’t feel the ship steering.

We questioned the mandate of the group. Questioned how decisions came to be. Questioned everything we could question. But one thing was certain. The honeymoon phase was over.

Constantly doubting my own value in this situation took a toll. Ever since I’ve been an entrepreneur, I have a strong bond with money. I’m super aware that there are no trees that grow money, and back in the days of having my own company I’ve struggled more than once to pay rent. When I work, I need to feel comfortable with the hourly price someone pays me versus the value of change that I bring. And at that moment I felt getting nowhere fast.

That tugged me down more than a bit. I’m also one of these guys (like many others), that attributes his personal value to his successes at work. Thus, when I didn’t feel valuable nor valued at work, I felt bad as a person as well.

Talking about it

I’m an open book. I have an extreme sense of justice. When I see something that I think needs change, you’ll hear it. I think negativity is poisonous and needs to be dealt with as soon as possible. You shouldn’t want to infect your peers with it. It’s your leaders that you should talk to. It wouldn’t be fair to do it otherwise.

So I told one of my superiors that I felt so insignificant. That things are moving so slowly, that we could and should do way better and that I had the feeling that I wasn’t making any progress. I knew what to do, and somehow I didn’t feel I was able to make a change. I honestly thought of quitting, but not unless I’ve tried everything I could possibly do to make it work.

She told me the following:

Dear Tim. You are used to steer a speedboat. When you turn the rudder, you find yourself briefly with your face to the wall of the boat and before you know it you are on course again. But take a step back. You are on a transatlantic cargo ship here. Appreciate the size! Change the course of this ship, even if it where for 2%, and you’ve moved millions and millions worth of value into a different direction.

I never looked at it this way. I was looking at it from a technical perspective and I completely underestimated how big organisations have a hard time to get accustomed to new technology or even make decisions. That realisation was one of the things I signed up for. You might even say that 400 technical people isn’t that many people to begin with, but imagine how big the cargo ship would be if it needed 400 employees. It’s not necessarily the amount of employees that resembles the scale, but the amount of water it displaces when it’s moving. I was so happy to gain new insights and learn about how this works.

Later she also added:

You know what the fun thing is with such a cargo-ship. You now know how hard it is to steer such a behemoth. So when you become certain that we are on the correct course, leave your fears behind. Because the odds of us turning back to doing something that doesn’t work are slim to none.

Let that one sink in for a bit.

To frame it in other words: you might not feel that you have the pace you would like to have, but the things you do get done are affecting people far beyond the line of sight and will last for far longer than you can think of.

In it for the long haul

Being in a company for the long haul, enables you to really build relationships and a product.

What I do to stay sane is defining my goals very clearly. There are so many things that happen on a day to day basis, that it’s easy to lose the bigger picture. With every subject or project that I’m working on, I validate against those targets. I assess if it brings me closer to my goals. And I prioritise against the expectations I have of the likelihood of it actually happening. The more projects that I do in this way and order, the closer I get.

I’m so proud on how far we’ve come, and how we are building up steam and picking up momentum.

Nonetheless, I still have that feeling from time to time. But perseverance is rewarded. I’m now standing at the stern of the ship looking at the crest on the path the engines made, and I can super clearly see the path that we’ve made, the cargo we are hauling and the direction we are going.