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.