What i have just realized about my self

Ian Nugroho
3 min readDec 2, 2021

At my former company, we used 6-month-based project method. So everyone in a project plan their goal, compile it together into a sheet of team goal, get approval, then work for it for the next 6 months, and review/score it on the last month.

Person that responsible for review is the PM. And that’s it. Leader will present the result, PM will compare to the goal sheet that team and PM have committed before, if the result meet the expectation of the goal, then it’s fine and you get the bonus.

This review is presented by leader, so the lower level individual contributor doesn’t need to give a fuck about it, it’s presented as team results either. So when something goes wrong, all the team will get the burden.

My current company does it in very different way. So we are adopting agile and scrum, so our work cycle will take 2 or 3 weeks long only. So the work will be splitted to make it more granular and easy to review.

Once every 2 or 3 weeks every one have to present their results. It isn’t team goal anymore. Because it’s granular, or small enough to be delegated to each individual contributor. So every work item is a responsibility for a single person only.

On the agile environment, you will have stakeholders like PO, PM, designer, and bunch of non technical role. Even if your company isn’t big yet, department manager and C level (at least CTO) will jump into your review session. And in so called startup culture nowadays, they bring transparancy to your table, that means, your work and result are freely opened to all of people in company, every one can see, critics, even judge.

Had the first story for 3 years, and now i have to experience the second story for 3 months really makes me realize a lot of things.

6 months is a quite long run, plus with the team goal, makes you feel safer and you know, you dont really have to completely responsible for anything. Your PM will blame your leader and that’s it. I had experienced when one of my colleagues screwed up, even me either, but the blame always goes to all the team member. So life goes much easier that time
Meanwhile right now, with everything that i mentioned above, it give me mixed feeling

On the one side, it really push me to deliver good quality on the shorter run. So it makes me to be more creative and working effective by default. But on the other hand, i makes me discover something that actually exist deep inside my soul.

This review needs everyone to present their results isn’t? When one of my colleagues get a compliment, meanwhile i dont get it. I will feel so stressed out. And when the sprint goes on 2 weeks mode, while my workload cost more than 2 weeks, and make me can’t deliver the results on time, it really drop me down because i really feel iam an unreliable person.

So i discover that:

  1. I’m an affirmations junky
  2. I really have inferiority complex
  3. In every reviews, it will give uncomfortable feeling on my heart that makes me overthinking

So, what should i do then ?

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