On a demanding terrain, I bike with excitement. Adventures await. I look forward to pushing my limits and testing my skills in mastering the fluctuating velocity and momentum.
I have never felt more alive.
This is how I live my life, peeking at every corner of a twisty path to discover the surprise at the next turn.
Imagine waking up every morning excited and invigorated by the surprises that await at work. My job isn’t going to be mundane, because I cannot anticipate what challenges are coming my way like a plethora of surprises waiting around every corner along my bike’s path! Sometimes they could be roots and ruts on a single track, or a giant tree trunk that forces me to take a different route. And occasionally, a cliff overlooking a breathtaking view stops me in my tracks.
I am an Account Manager at Jivox. As with my teammates, each of us awaits the challenges that come our way. Here, I am talking about Class A collaborators who run marketing and advertising campaign assignments like riding in a group along a narrow and sometimes treacherous path. We have customers on the team. At Jivox, we have advertising operations, campaign developers, and engineers. Every person is highly skilled to negotiate the difficult terrain, and this is how we as a group succeed in getting to the destination–together.
One such Class A collaboration I could think of is with a leading financial company where our project was to launch a campaign leveraging Jivox’s newly introduced Google Campaign Manager (GCM) feature. As we were running this new capability with the customer, we were all energized by what we saw: the tracker generation was automated and the process simplified. This reminded me specifically of the time when I biked in groups on a demanding long terrain. We staggered our riding formation where one would lead and each biker had the responsibility to point out obstacles or debris on the path to avoid crashing. Everyone did his/her part, synchronizing as a team to be efficient, streamlined and safe.
As with the bike group, at work every team member has the responsibility to flag issues and point them out to avoid errors during the flight of the campaign.
Back to the bike adventure. Each of us bikers had a “strategy” while riding on steep or turning roads. We took the smaller dirt roads and had our fill of adventure: rugged mountain faces, canyons, and sheer drops abound there, revealing jaw-dropping views around every corner. The tracks were mostly packed dirt with some muddier pockets here and there–all the while, our focus was the changes in the landscape ahead.
Similarly, for this challenging new project our focus was the process and the end goal. This time, the new, automated process was different than usual. Earlier we would receive the trackers from the customers. However, with our new feature, we could integrate with the customer’s platform where they could push the trackers, hassle-free, right into our system. This made the process efficient.
But, there was a surprise element, and it did add an extra step to the process for our team– we had to construct the CTURLs. (Typically, the customer would provide us with the CTURLs.) This did not stop us. It was time to put on our gear and get ready to roar together!
There were numerous back and forths between the customer and our team. It was a huge responsibility for me as the bridge between the customer and the team of passing on the technicalities accurately so as to avoid any errors. There and then, I had an epiphany. I related this challenge to my biking experience, where I had to leverage my team coordination and communication skills in case one of us was lost and needed to find the way back.
Needless to say, getting the project delivered on time was the biggest challenge. Our unstoppable team made it happen.
The bottom line: This experience takes me back to the time when I was on a long terrain group ride. There were times when we lost our way. It took a team effort to find the correct path, and — the gravel, mud or the rocks could not stop us.