I talked to my dad today.  He died the day after Christmas 2014, but he’s still a daily part of my life.  I think of him most often when I’m on my way, or on my way home from work.  That’s when we used to talk, because I’ve had long commutes.  He would listen to my complaints gently, and guide me off in a wise direction.  I’ve always thought of my laptop as my violin, and he always reminded me it belonged to my employer.  He was an attorney, so I believed him.  I still think of my laptop as my violin though.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been unusually busy.  Email has been like space invaders; the more I reply and delete, the faster they seem to arrive.  Still, I was encouraged when I heard our CEO, in a town hall meeting this week, say that he didn’t care how hard people worked.  He cared about results.  He must also be a John Wooden fan: “never confuse activity with achievement”.

I managed to get into some trouble when I declared one of my projects was behind.  I don’t own this project, I co-own it.  My co-owner says the project is on track.  Sure, it’s embarrassing to hear that things are behind, but I figure he’ll look better if I’m wrong, and be happy that I was managing expectations down if I’m right.  Based on past experience, it doesn’t make sense to tell people that everything is on track when you have doubts that’s the case.  The complexity of shared ownership must be the distinguishing aspect of all this. Nobody expects a single product to be owned by two different parties.  It must be confusing when mommy says one thing and daddy says another (though my children seem perfectly happy to blame daddy whenever necessary).

When I talked to dad, I talked about these things.  I also talked about the places I felt I was failing.  I told him that, if he knew now what I had been through in my life, then maybe he would understand why I am operating the way that I am.  I like to think that this gentle, careful man would see how I have no qualms about throwing myself under the bus.  He was fastidious and anxious, risk-averse.  I am swift and brash, gut-driven.  We couldn’t be more different in our professional styles.  I’ve never been fired, and neither was he.  Is getting fired a failure?  I suppose it would depend on why.

One thing I’ve been taught as a product owner is that I shouldn’t try to protect my engineers.  I’m starting to think that this is going to be one of my continual failures.  I have to protect my engineers!  They do the work I ask them to do.  If any other party can come in and usurp my backlog and interrupt sprints in progress, then are we Agile?  The scrum master is there to make sure the team is efficient, and not to run interference.  They live in the same hierarchy as the engineers. Nobody else can help them keep their focus better than me.  Every business has distractions.  Who will block new distractions from them as they perform their work in progress?  I owe it to the people that work for me to block as much of the “noise” as I can block.  Where am I going wrong?

Dad had nothing to say tonight.  Then, I didn’t think he would.  I don’t much believe in God anymore, which must torture my dad, but I still think Jesus was amazing.  I’ll never forget many of the lessons I learned reading about Jesus.  Whatever else he did, he taught the world that being a leader is being a servant.  Lao Tzu and others had the same idea.  I’d rather give up working than give up on the conviction that I serve the people that work for me.

That makes me think my dad would be proud.