Last week I wrote about the major differences between my experience at Dell and my experience here at Infinio.

One of those was the idea that here, there’s no supposition that at least someone, somewhere knows the answer.

That is really, really hard to digest for someone like me.  I have a predisposition to assume that there is an answer to everything.

I shouldn’t think that, I know.  Even my professional training as a mathematician should teach me that isn’t the case – look at how many unsolved problems still exist in math and may forever.  Look at Godel’s incompleteness Theorem.

Or, last week I was at an engineering meeting and the topic of discussion was a terrible little behavior we were seeing in our product’s interaction with another product.  This behavior came up over and over, and while we fixed each instance of the problem, we had no way of knowing that we had addressed every instance of the problem that could arise.

While extensive testing could minimize that risk, it can’t eliminate it entirely.  As one of the engineers said, “There’s no real way to know when software is ‘done’ or ‘right.’”

This feeling has awed me in the past once before as well.  Before babyDiva, mrDiva and I used to travel a lot, and one of our best vacations was to Belize.  We had planned to hike ATM, a well known cave-system in the Cayo district, but the rains had been so intense that it was un-navigable.

Disappointed, we went to our hosts who said, “Oh, let’s call Ken!  You can go see Ken’s cave.”

mrDiva, our guide Leo, & Ken, with his 1979 Land Rover

Ken’s cave, it turned out, was amazing.  Known more formally as Achtun Chapat, it was only accessible by a bumpy ride in the back of Ken’s 197X Land Rover.  He and his guide led us through a 5-6 hour hike into the cave system, pointing out bats, bones, and pottery shards as we went.  There were cathedral height ceilings and crawl spaces.  Beautiful stalactites and stalagmites.  It was pitch black when we turned off our headlamps.  Like, literally black.  At the end of the cave, we sat under a sinkhole that provided some sunlight from above and enjoyed Ken’s wife’s homemade burritos.

As we were sitting, Ken mentioned casually that this was one path, but they hadn’t mapped the entire cave yet.  There were probably 100’s of additional yards of cave that nobody had yet traversed, because of safety issues – low oxygen rates and unpredictable lakes.

It was inconceivable to me.  This cave was obviously a national treasure for Belize, at least as complex and rich in archeological and natural items many of the well-known sites in Central America.  How could they not have mapped it out?  Aren’t there X-rays or robots or something that could do this?

mrDiva and me, at the entrance to Achtun Chapat

But there aren’t.  Or they’re not economically or practically viable in Belize.  Or Belize chooses not to explore this for fear of losing control of their resources.

Whatever the reason, I am still overwhelmed by the idea that there’s a cave that I have been in that is only sort of understood.

Sometimes, we just don’t know the answer.

After my very early impressions of Infinio, I’ve tried not to overthink the transition.  I’ve had moments of reflection here and there, but being prone to over-analysis I’ve tried to be “in the moment” here.

Recently, however, a handful of themes have continually appeared in my everyday work that I want to share.  My life at Dell was *so* different from my life here.

In my decision to come to Infinio, one of the most important conversations I had was with Matt Brender, who had recently made a similar transition from EMC.  In fact, when I interviewed at Infinio, my now-manager Carrie quoted to me from his blog:

At EMC you first assume there is a process.

At Infinio, you start confident there isn’t one yet.

Here’s his entire post on his transition to Infinio.

Anyway, back to ME.  Here’s what was different when I was at Dell:

1.  I (mostly) stuck to my quarterly plan.

At Dell, I’d propose a 3-month content plan for my team, negotiate with them on it, negotiate with my management on it, and usually by week 2 or 3 of the quarter, we’d have agreement.  I was measured on (and great at) how well I delivered that which I committed to.  Sure, we kept some slack in the plan for unexpected projects, but that was the exception, not the rule.

In fact, if anything major came up, more than a few days of work, we’d go to the work plan and decide what was getting pushed to the next quarter.  We’d let the stakeholders for the different projects fight it out about whose we tackled.

This is not to say that we didn’t work hard and try to overdeliver on our plan. We often would work late to meet a deadline or otherwise do things that otherwise seemed impossible.

But there was a language and a process around how we handled additional workload throughout the quarter, and in fact navigating that is one of the major skills managers at Dell acquire and use.

Is that different at Infinio!!

We did create a quarterly marketing/content plan this quarter, and I’m told it’s the first time we’ve done it at this level of detail.  However, two weeks later, I’m looking at my plan nostalgically as I would a homework assignment list of mine from high school.

It’s not that I don’t need to do those things, but in the span of just a few weeks, so much changes with respect to prioritization and opportunities that it seems outdated very quickly.

And as new things come up, there’s no negotiation on what doesn’t get done.  It’s more like triage – “well, I’ll have to delay creating that training module so I can get us certified before this show we just decided to do,” but that doesn’t mean delaying until I next get to write a quarterly plan, it just means something jumps the queue.  All the work still has to get done.

2. I didn’t do a lot of guessing.  

For example, when we launched a new product, we knew what resources we needed to support it. Sure, we may not always have known exactly what claims would resonate best with customers (or what results we could achieve in the lab) but we knew we needed claims and there was a process to get them.  We often felt understaffed and under-resourced, but the reality was that we had teams of people dedicated to various different aspects of the marketing for a launch, a refresh, and sustaining operations.

There was no concept of someone at Dell not knowing the answer.  That person may not have been in the meeting or in the room, but you could ask and someone would have an opinion which was determined to be “The Answer.”  The job of being a manager at Dell was very much about executing within the system, escalating uncertainty, and decision-making within a pre-defined structure.

At Infinio, I think the phrase I hear most often is, “I’m not sure, let’s try it.”  Everyone from our executive team on down talks about A/B tests, experiments, learning, and mistakes, nearly every day.

This isn’t to minimize the experience of the leadership team here or the employees – it’s an amazing group of people from Endeca, vKernel, EqualLogic, NetApp, and other name brands.  Many of them have built a company before.

But we are in a new market selling something that is very disruptive – and there’s no codified “right way” to do that.  Inbound marketing is still an adolescent.

We just don’t know the answer sometimes.

Back to the discussion on priorities, often during my weekly meeting with Carrie, I’ll bring a list of the new tasks I’ve accrued during the week.  We’ll look at it along with my plan.  “Should I do the content for this project or create the materials for this project,” I’ll ask.  And we’ll consider both, without knowing the “right” answer.

3. At Dell, I was detached from the minutiae

At Dell, I was light years away from lots of daily decisions.  If I staffed a tradeshow, I basically just showed up with the right polo shirt on.  For Dell Storage Forum, I was a little more involved in things like T-shirt slogans and activities, but mostly I just knew about them early, I didn’t create them.

In contrast, the number of details that come across my desk as part of a 5-person marketing team is incredibly high.  What should the booth graphics look like for Citrix Synergy?  What should our giveaway be?  Is this close enough to our “blue”?  Is the text in this ad centered right?  With which vendors should we split our lead gen spend?  With whom do we syndicate which content?

It’s an amazing education.

All of it is an amazing education.

(It’s also exhausting!)