That couldn’t have gone better
I turned 40 this week. That’s not really about the number. It’s what the number does to you: it doesn’t just make you look back at the year; it makes you look at all of them. Sixteen years since I started JH , and what running it has actually produced.
Some of that is easy to see, because it works out the door and keeps going somewhere you can watch. A designer who worked with us and is now at Facebook. A developer who’s at Etsy. Another at DuckDuckGo. The junior developer who left to join a company 5-10 times our size and became Head of Development overnight. None of that happened because of a training scheme or a career plan we wrote down somewhere. It happened because the work they did here mattered enough to build a career on top of.
That version of impact comes with a company name you recognise, so it’s the one that’s easy to point to. The other version doesn’t announce itself, and I think about that just as much. I have an endless need to make things more and more perfect, and more often than not that means I don’t celebrate what’s already right in front of us.
Somewhere out there, a family of vie who saved all year for one holiday are trying to tick off their favourite landmarks. Somewhere else, someone who’s spent the week looking forward to a board game release just wants it in stock, correctly priced, and not hidden behind a filter that shows them the wrong edition. Somewhere else again, a family is three months into a home project that will outlast the mortgage, choosing the thing that’s going to be what their kids remember about the house.
None of them knows we exist. You could argue (incorrectly) that none of them cares whether a checkout got faster or a search result finally returned the right product first, or a stock feed stopped lying about what’s on the shelf. They just experience the moments we made slightly less frustrating, on a day that mattered more to them than it did to us. Data will always be king, and insights always vital, but not everything that matters shows up as a KPI. Some of it is only ever felt, never measured.
I’ve left this way for as long as I’ve been doing this, and it’s why I’ve always tried to hire people who feel the same pull: people who obsess over that connection between what they do and who it’s actually for. It’s one of the things I’m proudest of about this team, watching someone properly clock the effect their work had on a client’s team, or on the customers behind them, and seeing what that does to them.
That’s the actual choice sitting inside the work, and it is a choice, not a given. You can treat a ticket as a ticket: close it, log the points, move to the next one. Or you can notice that behind the ticket is a person trying to do something that matters to them, on a timescale that matters to them, and decide the work is going to be good enough to deserve that. Most days, those two versions produce the same output. Only one of them produces anything worth looking back on sixteen years later.
Nobody on a typical delivery team sees that connection by default. It takes something special. A developer fixing a filter bug doesn’t automatically picture the board game order behind it, and there’s no dashboard that draws the line from a checkout fix to a family catching their bus on time. Someone has to draw it. That’s most of what leading a team like this actually is: not writing the code yourself, but making sure the people who do know what it’s for.
I have always chosen that second version. Not because every day of it has been extraordinary, but because plenty of ordinary days are in there too. Because, project after project, person after person, that’s the version of “why we’re doing this” that I’ve kept picking.
You don’t need ot turn 40 to run the same check. Pull up your own history, not the revenue or the deal sizes, but the people. Who’s come through your team, and where did they end up? Which customer, if you actually pictured them rather than the segment they sit in, would make this sprint’s tickets feel different? What’s the version of “just delivering” that you’ve let set in for something that could have mattered more?
Write it down if that’s what makes it land, even if nobody else ever reads it.
I didn’t need to write mine down. Sixteen years of it came back to me at once, and none of it was about the numbers. That was my purpose. It always has been.