The first month of 2020 has just passed. How’s the year been going for you so far?
I missed a couple of weeks of writing here on TechManagement.Life, but it’s with very good reason. In spite of all the terrible news from around the world that came in this January (which I really hope take a turn for the better in the coming months), a lot of positive things have been happening for me lately and it’s been keeping me a little bit busier than usual. I feel like I might miss on a post this week as well so I figured I’d just write an update on what’s been going on in my life the last few weeks.
Harper’s first birthday
The best and brightest thing to happen was my daughter Harper turning one on February 1st. Yes, she’s officially made a full revolution around the sun. My wife, Gen, did an amazing job putting together a space-themed party for the occasion.
I still remember when I had just started writing out my thoughts (this article, particularly), Harper was just going on five months. Then I wrote this one when she turned 6 months. Since then, the milestones have just kept rolling in. She started pulling herself up to stand, learned a lot of new syllables, learned to let go and stand on her own feet, and started taking her first steps (a scarier moment for a parent than it’s often made out to be).
It’s incredible to see how far she’s come. It’s also interesting how the months just seem to start feeling shorter. The first six months felt like a pretty long time, but the span from that to a whole year felt like no time at all. Fascinating how time can be so relative. I’m super excited to see how year two goes for us and I can only hope I don’t miss any special moments with Harper.
Expanding responsibilities
The start of the year also meant expanding my responsibilities a bit with my work at Synacy. I’m just about to mark my first year with this company in April, and my boss Mark and I felt it’s just about time for me to try and grow out a little into other roles.
I spent most of last year working on people matters. That meant establishing a performance management system, putting policies in place to optimize work conditions, and generally just getting to know people in my team. I felt I made pretty good progress on these last year, though as with anything people-related, it’s going to be a perpetual work in progress.
For this year, I’ve set a path to become more involved in process aspects of the job. I’m looking forward to this as, for one, the feedback loop on process improvement is relatively shorter and clearer than with people, and I do need that kind of validation once in a while.
I’ve since spent some time getting to know the teams’ roadmaps better and understanding how the new processes introduced last year affect their work. While it’s definitely a challenge to find my place in this new scope and identify how I can make an impact, I’m really looking forward to what’s ahead in this area of my work.
New business opportunities
Some positive news on the side of my software development startup, ATeam Business Software Solutions – we’ve just recently signed a partnership with ProximaX, a leading blockchain provider, to be trained and licensed to integrate their technology into our solutions. While I won’t be involved as much on the technical end, I’m excited to learn more about the technology in general and how we might leverage it into real business impact.
Likewise, we wanted to do a closed Beta on our beauty & wellness app called “RUB” in January though a few roadblocks have budged us slightly off schedule. We did manage to onboard a couple of service providers to the platform and signed up about 50 friends and family members to participate in the Beta test. Overall, some pretty good progress was made and we should be going live in no time.
It’s been exciting for me to get to dive deeper into learning business concepts through these two projects. Building partnerships, acquiring customers, and digital marketing – in small, controlled doses at this point – has been fun to be involved in and I’m looking forward to growing these particular skill sets moving forward.
Anyway, that’s about how my 2020 has gone so far. I’d say it’s been pretty good for the first month. Now, if I could only find a little more time to write.
Dexter is an engineering manager at Synacy, a co-founder of ATeam Business Software Solutions, and founder of TechManagement.Life. He loves to share his experiences and thoughts on managing software teams and running businesses.