My friend and colleague had left the company a few months before. I wouldn’t have called it “friend” a few years back, and maybe we were never the closest buddies. He was bizarre, in a way, and maybe that was one of the reasons why he was memorable. Meet him once, and you’d have an opinion of him; meet him twice, and you’d have another.
I was not easy on him, but I’ve seen him suffering before, we had a laugh in a few occasions, and despite all, I think we connected.
But honestly, I never quite understood his way of working. Or, better: I understood it, but I did not agree with it. So, I tended to keep my distance; until the moment all that work landed on my lap, heavy as an elk.
He played a major role selling a project to a very big player in e-commerce. I did not know anything about it, besides the fact that after the deal closed, he left. After that, our developers and product managers found themselves holding the levers of a train that was running a tad too fast down a railway that, apparently, was being laid down at the same time.
Same old story: customer asking more and more, as they think that what they demand was included in their agreement; and the supplier (us) trying to contain the haemorrhage of change requests.
Our CEO would step in now and again to cold off the spirits of the stakeholders, but he needed some power to pull the break: I had to build the case explaining that what we were doing was more than we agreed. We had to slow down the train.
The documentation was just completely scattered. There was a contract. It had a specifications sheet as an attachment. I looked it up, and it was an RFI response that my old friend wrote up more than a year before. To say that both specifications and answers were generic, is a wild understatement.
I planned to match all that with the hundreds and hundreds of Jira tickets opened by the customer. If what they claimed was true, each ticket should have been an expression of the elements in the RFI. There were fare more tickets than RFI points: that alone should have been a good argument. But it had to be stronger than that: each ticket had to be a direct expression or evolution of an RFI point.
If only generative AI had been around back then… no, this was a painstaking manual process, made of searches, thesaurus, comments, categorisations. For every one of those nearly 900 tickets, I had to have an explanation.
The day of the confrontation with the young customer’s VP and his deputy arrives. My boss – our CEO – also left the company in the meantime. We show up in Berlin with our CFO and the account manager, facing an ever angry and off-putting manager, whose technique is to make you uneasy right off the bat.
I dressed all black. I recall how uncool that suit was. Everyone in the room was business casual, but I resolved myself to put up a show, and I had to dress the part.
I started off quoting the contract as a set up: the customer goes: “what, are we talking contracts now? We are not here to talk about it. Are we talking contracts now? I’ll call our legal, right away. What are you anyway, some sort of lawyer?”
Our CFO – may heavens forgive him – utters: “Well, he’s dressed like one!”
As my two colleagues smile, I think I have no longer two, but four people to convince. I try and eye my team, who finally advocates for me as I’m trying to make my point.
As I proceed to show my charts, I’m continuously pinged by the “so what?” of the customer, until the moment that I was building up for.
The final bar, the red bar that shows how many tickets were opened with no reason. No connection with their contract, no hint, no wording, no reference whatsoever.
Seconds of silence. Sweet silence. I look at my team with as much ice my eyes can muster. In my head I’m screaming to them “Do not say a bloody syllable.” Luckily, they’re experienced enough to understand that much.
The VP bursts out with an “OK then, what do we do from now on? And, by the way, I could respond to each of the case you made, but let’s cut it short.”
I was ready for that, but there was no need: the agreement took place that day, the project got back on track, and all extra requests put under an evaluation to be processed and quoted.
Back downstairs, on the sidewalk, I could finally undo that black tie. The play was done.
© 2025 marcocristini. Inspired by real events. All names and characterisations are fictionalised.