There is an old story about the Carpenter’s House – the last project before he moves on. At the end, he finds out he’s been building his own house the whole time, and cut corners all along the way. So now he’s stuck with a “meh” house with lots of fixes needed for it. I don’t think you’re going to get your own cloud tenant on the last one you built for a client, but…
Competing with the louder voice is a race to the bottom (top?) to see who is the loudest. You can’t win. To compete with the loudest voice is to provide the opposite that they can’t do: remain silent, don’t say a word, and wait. A conversation and meeting cannot happen with one person, and eventually, they will realize to move forward, they will need to listen.
This is one of the hardest questions to ask at the end of a meeting: “Did we accomplish our goal?” This is why it is so rarely asked: no one wants to hear the answer. If, meeting after meeting, you were to hear the answer to this question being “No”, how demoralizing would that be? Massively. But the hard questions don’t come with easy answers, because the answers that come require work, hard work, tough…
Right now we are boiling everything down to fast something can get down and how little effort we need to put in to get it done. We have reached the future that Wall-E predicted. When I used to hire Junior Developers, we knew what we were getting – blank slates with some level of computer knowledge – so how were they evaluated? Their effort. How much time did they put in, how much were they…
You might be working in a dumpster fire, but this doesn’t mean you have to leave it that way. You can make things better starting on Day 1, incremental change can push the ball forward and then have someone else pushing for what’s next. If you can improve someone’s experience by 5% with each action, it’s worth it. Just ask them.