Today officially marks one year of my job in ST. Time flies always when in retrospect. I still remember the struggle last year when searching for a job, and I came onboard this team as an eager new kid on the block, trying my best in every task I was assigned in. It has been a journey with ups and downs as always. The first few months in the BE team was a little trying, doing things which I’m not used to, such as account management, business competitive analysis, stakeholder management etc. I still remember sitting into a board meeting with a lot of senior people whom I don’t really know and feeling overwhelmed, and then transiting to representing my team in the meeting myself a few months later. I learnt a couple of useful tools, such as Lean Canvas, User Stories, the two-by-two matrix, and apparently did one of the better opportunity briefs that is still looked upon as a benchmark.
The few months of the p-project was trying, as managing different vendors and contractors was not an easy task, besides it wasn’t exactly my area of speciality. It was a few grumpy months, attending many check-in meetings with not much outcome, and mostly just being an assistant typing meetings of meeting and task lists. Not very productive and those were the few months which I dread coming to work. But when finally the project is over, it was a sigh of relief. And we also moved into a new office, which introduced hot desking, free coffee, me as the facial recognition expert, among other things.
6 months in, I transitioned to another team, this time doing more of the interaction design work. I was tasked on one of the bigger projects to design the forms flow and wireframes for it, as well as structuring the user journey and information architecture of the app. It was a pretty enjoyable time as I probably learnt the most on-the-job during those few weeks from the senior designers. They are brilliant in problem-solving. Although sometimes when there are too many chefs baking a cake, nothing gets decided or takes forever to be baked. Too many decision makers spoil the fun. We completed the project and presented to our clients and it was one of the more successful projects.
4 months later, I moved in to the current innovation team, which is probably the most fun time so far. I got to come up with a new idea, presented it to the “angels” for funding, and it was pretty successful. After that, I got to be involved in F1, building a dashboard and editing a video. Finally I’m really touching my grace zones and it was good to be back in doing front-end coding again. It was also a good chance to do some video editing in collaboration with an external party for a short showcase at F1. And it was an honour and privilege to be on-site at the F1 suite, entertaining guests and enjoying the endless flow of food. I think I really like this team, because it is small and we can execute fast like a lean startup, and we get to see the fruits of our labour faster than designing apps.
It was also an apt timing today to be invited to a nice dinner with my boss’ boss. It’s not too bad, not too bad. Thank you Jesus for your unmerited favour for this new kid on the block. It’s not just a job, it’s a position of influence.
In other news, I think I really need to learn app programming.