We’re renting some space in a shared office in SOMA – just for New Zealanders. It’s an initiative funded by the New Zealand government and tech investors to give New Zealand companies who want to launch into the US a base to start from. The Kiwi Landing Pad as it’s called is 2 suites in this building which will eventually house a kind of entrepreneur launch-pad as well, offering space and services for new companies starting out. Xero is the first company in the suite we’re in and over the next few months we’ll be joined by other companies sending 1 or 2 of their staff out here to start their US operations.
It’s fairly rudimentary at the moment but every other day something new for the office arrives whether it be a water cooler, giant poster of some All Blacks, white board markers, cutlery or hooking up the front door intercom. We sit in our corner
with a view over the freeway.
Great to have somewhere so quickly to base ourselves.
I wrote myself a list in 2000 of what I like in a job, most to least. I think it related to the job I had at the time but suspect it was one of those reflective times when I was thinking about what motivated me with a view to finding the perfect job, rather than seeking to fix something in the one I currently had. Wonder how it maps to what I do today?
focussed work on one project
control, central knowledge of project – specialist position
some hands on e.g. enough to know basic workings of a system
technical involvement even if at a high level
writing specs/guidelines
control of work and workload
implementation work – client side i.e. working with clients as they understand and use a new system and feedback/suggest modifications to development company
self-delegation and responsibility
processing feedback and requirements
flexible work hours and telework environment
A process or system gives a sense of expectation.
20 March 2000
At the time I was working at Innovus which had recently bought out Extrados/Spunk Media so having our small web services company swallowed up by a larger corporate probably brought on my evaluation.
Now, as the Community Manager at Xero I’d say this list if applied practically is flipped on its head – I probably still value all these things but in reality:
I don’t have focussed work on one project, in fact my work is not a project
My days are interrupt driven by whatever comes my way from a selection of social media sites so in any day I could do one thing or a hundred things. I have no control over my workload in that sense but I also have a manager in a different location and not much contact so am totally autonomous in that regard
I do work remotely quite a lot but always feel terribly guilty about it
My entire days are filled with processing feedback and requirements with a certain amount of helping our customers understand how to use Xero and interpreting/translating/feeding modifications back to our own product and development teams
I don’t have control at a project level or control over my day but I do feel in control (mostly) of Xero’s social media – I am totally responsible for Twitter and other means of responding to customers using social media sites
I’m getting less and less hands on but I still know the product. I don’t write much any more, let alone specs and guidelines
My work is all public now like it’s never been before, public and attributable, not just content on a website
I’m developing a thicker skin – everyone’s watching, colleagues are questioning, the CEO sees what I do
Interesting. Would be good to see this again in another 10 years.
We’ve all wheeled our Life chairs into the big meeting room at work to be cleaned this weekend. Mine is easy to spot! That’s pretty much how I feel – always a bit different, special, the odd one out! This photo someone took made me smile.
Had a birthday morning tea this morning with the 3 of us that started at Xero together 4 years ago – it was a great idea and great to catch up with people you don’t normally get to see – especially Larissa as she’s in sales and is normally travelling around the South Island. I note I didn’t do a Xero to post year but in the 1st 2 years I wished that the next year we’d be in the New York office – and that happened this year! Well, briefly. I’m hoping that’s what next year has in store for us again 🙂 Happy Xero Birthday Jiff & Larissa!
Simon brought a grow-your-own-Xmas-tree into work today – the first time he had one I was very taken with it! Didn’t realise that was 3 years ago. This year’s was a bit bigger and I set up my camera to take regular photos of it to make a time lapse seeing as we now sit opposite each other.
The photos weren’t taken very regularly and despite the bluetac holding the camera in place I still didn’t get the tree in the same place each time!
However, The Mister managed to make a time lapse video out of it with sound track and it makes me laugh!
Today The Mister received a delivery at work, from He-Man! Our Tweet4yourtee wardrobe increased by 2 more items as a ‘Master of the Twitterverse’ set was delivered to him at his desk – he had no idea and I had to keep the secret that the delivery was coming and that one of the Masters of the Universe characters was doing the delivery! I’d gone around work and got various people organised to video it, including me, and Tweet4yourtee are using it as part of their social marketing … with me giggling in the background and all.
The Mister was very surprised and was a great sport! I giggle every time I watch it!
The room my team and I are in at work is often referred to as the Orange Room … for obvious reasons … my desk for starters. Other than my team of 2-3 as it has grown to in the last year, an extra can fit – and we’ve had a stream of them in that time. I’ve collected up a few Room Rules as we’ve cycled through people and got a reputation for being quite upfront about communicating them on someone’s first day sitting in the room! One poor guy ended up changing his eating habits to salad for fear of breaking the ‘smelly lunch’ rule … much to his partner’s delight.
So another new person arrived in the room this week – a Xero old-timer but has never shared a workspace with me. By now there were rumours of the rules being documented and the person vacating the desk next to me said he couldn’t get away fast enough. So I welcomed our new room buddy with an emailed copy of the rules, which I circulated around the whole office to show just how real they were, and so far so good. He’s been a very quiet and well-behaved neighbour and he’s had rather a lot of visitors and sympathy – people coming to see him to make sure he’s OK!
This morning I got to work and after him telling me yesterday that he could only abide by 2 of the 11 rules, I found that he’d printed them and stuck them up on the wall. Good man!
This week, our international product team launched Xero Answers – a site for questions & answers for our new product Xero Personal. Rather than have a massive customer base flood our email support queue, we’re going to try this largely user-based approach to helping our customers, the aim being that people can see questions previously asked & answered, saving them having to do it, & also to give an opportunity for people to help each other out as they build up their own product knowledge & learn their own ways of using the product that they want to share.
It’s still orange & it’s had a few questions posted to it already; I’m nervously keeping watch over it trying to answer the questions as best I can but I am further removed from this product than Xero Business that I wrote most of the Help Centre for. I really hope it grows into a big community site like some others I’ve seen where eventually we can hook up a blog, the @XeroPersonal Twitter feed & stuff like that. And maybe even extend it to our business product. Early days!
Planes make me think. I guess you’re always going some place new or some place old that can make you look forward to new things or think about old things you want to leave behind, in either case, you’re going somewhere.
I’ve been thinking a lot about working remotely, in a different geographical location and timezone from the main office, and after weeks of this filling space in my head I’m going to attempt to get some of it out – after all that’s what I started my blog for even though since we’ve been away it’s become a glorified travel diary. Time for it to return to its routes as an outlet and store of my random thoughts! However I have to be careful this doesn’t cross a line – in this age of social media and people being fired for airing their grievances online and acting in a way out of line in the eyes of the company I will likely have to watch what I say, which kind of defeats the point of a personal blog! I don’t hate my job and this isn’t a precursor to any major decisions, just supposed to be random stuff about working remotely!
So why is this topic filling my head? I don’t think it’s one thing, I think it’s a collection of little things. I think if I was to pick one thing, or have one thing to sum it all up, it’s that change thing. I thought that being out of the office would open up a new way of working for me, give me some new and different things to do, stimulate new thoughts or ideas and above all, give me some freedom to change bad work habits for ones I actually want. However, due to my own need for routine, the office not really being set up for remote workers and the new way of communication that’s required for remote working, I’ve been unable to bring about new work habits.
Another big milestone at work, launched the personal version of Xero on Monday (NZ time) – it’s been coming a while and with great anticipation by our customers and commentators. It was the first release with us out of the country and it was rather pleasant to just wake up at the normal time, have breakfast then sit down for our respective roles in the release.
It was the start of a very busy few days – that Sunday (for us) morning, about 5 minutes after the release went live, the news started spreading on Twitter – and didn’t stop for 3 days! I almost went cross-eyed and started seeing and worrying about tweets in my sleep – all that Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. I thought tweeting for Xero might be a full-time job some day but not that quickly! However, all has returned to relative normal now and I have welcomed lots more Xero fans and got hundreds more followers in those 3 days. Yaaaay, the community is growing.
