Meaningful Work

The Search for Meaning(ful work)

Disclaimer

This document is written from the perspective of Rob Murdock’s career and values. While this may be useful to others, I make no claim that my personal definition of meaningful work is universal in any sense. It, however, may be useful to use this template for exploration of your own career or work-values, and it is likely if you are framing similar concepts differently, that alternative framing is useful to your own journey. That said, read on!

Thesis

There are three dimensions that a job must fulfill in order to further my career growth. Furthermore, these dimensions are only viable when sufficiently free of the poison - a poison being any fixture that makes succeeding in that dimension sisyphean. The following will express these dimensions, and the associated common poisons, to clarify my professional needs. Additionally, there are documents containing my goals for each of these dimensions. The goals are a series of intentions that I hope to fold into work that I take on.

Dimensions

These are the primary dimensions in which I find my work meaningful:

  • Building valuable products
  • Building resilient teams and team-spaces
  • Building next-generation teamwork processes

Let’s unpack these more.

Building valuable products

The “valuable product” dimension illustrates that the work is clearly focused on finding or focusing a product, and that product solves a real observed problem.

Components of this include:

  • Keeping the product concept user focused
  • Ensuring Users are built into the development process
  • Improving underlying technology
  • Tools for building the project are chosen and discarded based on utility, by the team using them
  • Clear, short-term roll-out strategies for new products or new features.

Known poisons:

  • Technology decisions being made independent of the team
  • Product sponsors are disengaged or disinterested (deferring responsibility)
  • Users are distant from the process, or the resources needed to properly engage the users are not available
  • Poor strategy for, or poor communication regarding, product release
  • Team identifies critical usability or utility concerns, but the product plan does not adjust to compensate.

Goals for developing this dimension are here.

Building Resilient Teams and Team-Spaces

The “resilient team” dimension illustrates team and organizational development. This is similar to the “valuable product” dimension, except the product being developed is the organization.

Components of this include:

  • Nurturing a culture of teaching
  • Helping the team practice self-management
  • Normalizing the practice of improving or replacing systems over time
  • Setting up processes that make the team comfortable and enfranchised regarding staffing change
  • Establishing processes for clear communication of the team’s needs and successes
  • Testing that the team can survive and thrive for multiple generations

Known poisons:

  • Team has no persistent center of gravity (viable centers include: owning a product, a team mission, a clear physical home)
  • The team does not have control over team composition (who should join, who should leave)
  • The team is not allowed to set clear boundaries on how stakeholders interact with it.
  • The team’s existence is not part of a larger organizational vision, leaving its future in question.
  • The team’s senior members are not invested in the existence of the team (the team wants to disband)
  • Team patrons or stakeholders are not responsive to the team’s needs or successes

Goals for developing this dimension are here.

Building Next-Gen Teamwork Processes

The “Next-Gen Teamwork Processes” dimension illustrates the development of development processes. This means working with a team to build a development process that is pushing the boundaries of excellence.

Components of this include:

  • A more Continuous Integration (CI++, improving speed of integrating tech)
  • Continuous Design Integration aka, building processes for faster and safer design integration
  • Better, easier, testing - making the process easy to understand and maintain
  • Processes that take advantage of large scale or cloud functionality.
  • A team that is sufficiently briefed on advantages, disadvantages, and challenges associated with well known development processes.

Known poisons:

  • Team has no control over integration processes
  • Over 25% of the team is not committed, or adverse to improving processes
  • Existing product or work-artifact is too change-intolerant to make process improvement a near-term goal (always on fire)
  • The team doesn’t share a conceptual model of how they do work, and therefore cannot collaborate on how to improve it, or refuse to compromise on personal styles
  • Resource or permission constraints, that make change high-cost (which includes cost of willpower)

Goals for developing this dimension are here.

Mission

In order for work to be meaningful, I need at least one of these major categories to be fulfilled with minimal (essentially zero) poison, as an assurance that the work will stick. Work that fits all these dimensions, but is poisoned in all of them is not meaningful.