One Year in at Coursera

Screenshot of coursera.org homepage

365 Days.

On this day, in 2020, I had on my Coursera blue swag t-shirt, a hair cut, a new pair of kicks, and a birghtly lit office room (with my now "infamous" sneaker wall as the backdrop), ready to meet my new colleagues and onboard.

In the year since, I've led, been a part of, and participated in a lot as I took on the management of our Core Learner Experience engineering team.

By the numbers, my year has consisted of:

  • 60+ 1:1s with my manager
  • 25 sprint plannings & retrospectives, 5 quarterly plannings
  • 1 Employee Resource Group cofounded (Mental Health Allies @ Coursera, currently co-chair)
  • 1 team split into its own charter
  • 4 interns (Thanks Karen, Guy-Jacques, Steven and Amanuel)
  • 2 Direct Hires, 2 Contractor Hires
  • 2 direct reports promoted
  • 1 p0 outage
  • 1 engineering-org wide initiative & OKR owned (hiring! more on that later)
  • 1 engineering vision pre-mortem facilitation
  • 4+ weeks of PTO taken, 7 sick days too
  • 1 bootcamp cohort graduated (my 6th cohort taught)
  • 2 courses completed on Coursera (Inclusive Leadership & Leadership Through Social Influence)
  • 12K+ emails received
  • 21 lbs gained
  • 30+ wrong item deliveries on doordash
  • 5 failed instacart deliveries
  • 20+ successful Amazon/Whole Foods deliveries
  • 100+ disposable masks... disposed of
  • 587 "Let me share my screen" announcements
  • 1236 awkward "okay. byeeeeeeee" Zoom meeting endings.

    ...and lots more.

It's been a wild journey. Fun, many times. Stressful, quite a few times. Difficult, many times. Worth it - still every time I login.

A lot has happened in the world since the first day at the new job. A lot of work. A lot of life. A lot of streaming. A lot of wins and losses.

And after a 2 week break, and some reflection, we'll get back into many, many more.