Decisive, maybe

The CTO came in this morning having made a decision.

This is unusual. Decisions are more like lunar cycles around here. Presently, decisions are about as frequent as Olympic opening ceremonies — and at least as confusing to follow. Today he walked to the whiteboard, uncapped a marker, and wrote "THE IMAGE THING" in block capitals with a line under it. Then he turned around and said he'd been thinking about leadership.

Apple, he explained, had just replaced Tim Cook with someone called John Ternus. The whole thing was about decisiveness. Cook had apparently run Apple by committee — everyone consulted, everyone aligned, every decision polished until it had no edges. Ternus was going to be different. Jobs-era decisiveness, the articles said. Sharp calls. Fast moves.

Our CTO found this very inspiring.

"We need to be more like that," he said, clicking the marker closed. "We need to stop waiting."

Priya and I made eye contact across the room. The image thing has been in the backlog since week one. It exists as a ticket, a Q2 commitment, and a recurring calendar block that has so far produced no image thing.

"So," the CTO said, "this is yours. Get it done by end of month."

I wrote that down. End of month is nine days away.

After the meeting I asked Priya what she thought the image thing was. She said she'd assumed it was image recognition for the document tool — pull logos, classify document types, that sort of thing. I had assumed it was something to do with the interface. We compared notes. They were not the same notes.

I went back to the original ticket. It says: "Image thing (per CTO) — details TBD."

There is a sub-ticket. It says: "Clarify scope of image thing."

That sub-ticket was created in March. It is unassigned.

I have now assigned it to myself. Progress is the word I'm using.

The irony of the Apple story is that Ternus's decisiveness is being celebrated because everyone knows what he decided and why. The decision came with a direction, a rationale, a sense of what happens next. Our version of this is a man writing three words on a whiteboard and a developer inheriting a ticket with no description on a Tuesday in April.

Jobs-era decisiveness. Sure.

I'll let you know how the scope clarification goes.