Chapter Seven
LACEY
When they all get back from lunch, Kate’s at my desk showing me something she thinks is a bug that is absolutely not one.
The board members head back into the conference room to collect their things, and there’s much hand-shaking in the hallway as they say their farewells.
Kate and I continue our disagreement quietly, while I’m half-eavesdropping for signals about our plan for Lettercat.
Mostly they’re talking about golf, and what the name of that steakhouse they all went to last year was.
“Quite the sausage party,” Kate remarks as the last ones depart.
“And Amber,” I add.
“Poor Amber,” Kate says. I agree. It’s not fun being the only woman in the room, but being the only woman in that particular room sounds like nightmare fodder. Maybe someday I’ll be in there, but I have no regrets about skipping it today.
Jude comes jogging down the hall and stops at the half-wall outside my cube and points at me, bright-eyed. “Gutenberg in, say, ten?”
“Sure,” I tell him.
He dashes away, then turns and comes back. “Can we make that five?”
“No problem,” I say, but he’s gone before I get the words out.
Kate, seated on my desk, has her arms folded and she’s looking at me funny.
“What?” I ask.
“You told me you had a boring weekend trapped in the office.”
“Which it was.”
She shakes her head. “No, something’s different. I sense… camaraderie.”
I shrug. “I don’t know that I’d go that far. Maybe mutual respect is what you’re picking up.”
Her eyes narrow. “The man is glowing. Did you not see him there, glowing?”
I stand up. “He probably got some hot new KPIs in. You know how he is.”
“Fine. Walk away! I’m filing that issue as a bug,” she calls after me as I head to the bathroom to check my lipstick before hitting the conference room.
“It means an immediate pause on everything we’re working on,” Glenn says. “Bugs, features, internal requests, all of it.”
I nod along with Trevor, who showed up a few minutes into this meeting, straight from the airport, and claimed to be fully up to speed after reviewing the board deck on his flight.
It’s him, me, Glenn, Jude, and Keith, the CTO, in the conference room.
Jude is sharing our plan for the upcoming quarter from the deck we made, the three-month plan he’s just committed us all to delivering in four weeks.
“I know it’s aggressive,” Jude says. “Which is why we’re going to need everyone pitching in however they can.”
“Agreed,” Keith says.
“Happy to hear you say that,” Jude tells him. “Can you spend this afternoon with me? I just want to walk through the process you’re using now and make sure my commits won’t be causing problems?”
Keith, who Dave and Ingrid tell me hasn’t done a single pull request in his six months here, makes a little choking sound but is saved from admitting anything by Trevor.
“Dude, you’re going to be coding?”
Jude nods, a smile on his face. Despite the huge amount of work we’re facing, he looks happier than I’ve seen him in my two years here. Escaping from spreadsheet prison will do that to a person.
Glenn cuts in to explain how this is going to work: the three major initiatives will be split three ways, with Trevor and me each embedding with a team of engineers to define and deliver a minimum viable product as quickly as possible.
“And the third team?” Keith asks, looking worried that someone might make him work.
“A tiger team,” Jude says. “Steve from the data team, that AI consultant, Irina, and my sister Ella’s going to come back to do UI/UX. Yeah, and me.”
I feel a pang. I want to be on the tiger team, not only because it has a cool name.
“With Glenn on the product side?” Trevor asks the question in my head..
“We debated it,” Glenn tells us. “But Jen’s due any day. A handoff will only make it more complicated.”
“Bro,” Trevor says, raising his fist to Jude. “We’re getting the band back together.”
I look to the head of the table, where Jude is sitting. His eyes find mine, but I just sit here, stunned. What am I supposed to do, jump in and shout “no—pick me”? Trevor might be the worst, but he’s senior to me, he’s been here forever, and he’s friends with Jude.
Ideas belong to everyone, is what Glenn always says about taking credit.
I know I should be proud that we’re all here to take Lettercat in the direction I wanted, but that somehow doesn’t feel like enough.
Jude should tell his bro to put his stupid fist away because I am the one who was here when it counted.
The tiger team should be mine to turn down. But of course I wouldn’t.
“But you’ll have an entire other team,” Jude reminds Trevor.
“I haven’t had a carb in two years; I can take two teams for thirty days. Don’t leave me hanging,” Trevor says, and I watch Jude bump his fist to seal the deal.
I close my laptop and stand up. “I know my team and my mission. I’ll go get to it.”
“Kate,” Glenn says, because he always knows when and why I’m mad. I’m out of the room before I hear him say anything further. I don’t want him to fix it anyway.
It occurs to me that maybe it’s unhealthy how much time I spend angry about work. I used to think it was a sign that I cared, but maybe it means this place sucks. And now I can look forward to four weeks of busting my ass for a guy who can’t stop showing how little my efforts mean to him.
I set up camp in a small conference room and Slack my team to join me when they can.
While I wait for them, I log into LinkedIn and click the setting to show recruiters I’m Open To Work. Screw you, Jude Mulholland. I can be taken advantage of at companies far more successful than this one.
In my time here at Lettercat, I’ve nurtured and grown our Customer Advisory Council, a group affectionately named The Colony.
They’re the ones I listen to when deciding what to build next, the ones I run ideas past, the ones who get early access in exchange for honest feedback.
I turn to them again now, to do a sanity check on the reduced scope I’m proposing for my chunk of Project Roar, the codename for the larger piece of lunacy we’re working on.
Engineers love a codename—it makes everything seem covert and interesting.
I’m responsible for the website/paid live and asynchronous video portion of the project.
Translated to real life, if you’re a cartoonist like my client George and you want to record a series of classes and charge for access to them, or if you’re a guitar teacher like my client Claire and you want to hold private or group lessons online, we’ll help you do that.
There are thousands of small things we could include that would be nice to have, but it’s my job to whittle it down to the essentials: the minimum viable product, it’s called.
Though I prefer to find the minimum delightful product, because who buys something because they think, oh wow, that’s really viable?
Dave, Ingrid, and the rest of the team are muscling through the things that aren’t debatable—we will need to host video, livestream it, and collect payment for access—while I go back and forth with The Colony to find the shortest path to a thing they’d be willing to pay for.
In a normal world, I’d do three or more rounds with a designer, but in the interest of speed we keep it simple and promise to come back and refine it once we see how people are using it.
Two days in, at our first scheduled Roar Report, I kick things off by presenting the wireframes and the project plan before turning the floor over to Dave to run through the proof of concept he’s built.
Glenn has a few questions about the vendor we’re leaning toward using and their pricing model, which I’ll need to schedule a call on later.
I’ve successfully refused to look at Jude since Monday, kept my head down, stayed in the company of others, and taken the stairs whenever possible to avoid running into him on my own. It’s harder to do this when he’s in the same meeting as me.
“This is really impressive,” he says. “Great work, team.”
And then it’s Trevor’s turn to underwhelm us with his mediocrity. His team seems to be doing okay with the basic concept of a podcast platform, but there’s no evidence he’s building a thing that anybody wants. It’s a jumble of features with no through line. Jude notices this too.
“Lacey, can you hook Trevor up with some of your user group?” he asks.
I answer without looking at him.
“They’re not mine. They’re everyone’s, and they’re all tagged in the admin system.” It’s hard to make this sound kind and collaborative when it’s shit I really shouldn’t have to explain. Especially to members of the tiger team.
“Sweet,” Trevor tells me. “I’ll hit you up later to show me.”
Jude gives us an overview of the ad network he’s building to integrate with our users’ content, giving them (and us) another revenue boost. He asks for some of Dave’s time, maybe over dinner or something, to go over architecture and API stuff.
Dave agrees a little more enthusiastically than I wish he would; he’s aware of my recent situation with Jude.
In fact, he was just telling me this morning how fucked it was that Trevor’s on the tiger team and I’m not, but now dinner with the CEO sounds terrific to him.
When the meeting breaks up, I don’t escape quickly enough. I leave the smallest opening, and it happens.
“Hey, Lacey. Can you hang for a minute?”
He’s trying to sound casual, but he’s not very good at it. I get a lot of raised eyebrows from my team; I’m in detention. I stay in my chair until everyone leaves. I won’t look at him, but I brace myself for a bullshit apology.
“What did I do?” he asks. His tone is more impatient than contrite.
“Are you kidding?” I say, incredulous.
“I’m not. I’m confused,” he says. “Monday morning everything was great, and now you won’t even look at me.”
I look over and see his pained expression, and I tilt my head to the side. “Well, maybe you and Trevor can scale up a tiger team to investigate.”
“Are you serious?” he asks. “Is that what this is about?”
I’m sad when I see he’s not pretending. He really is this oblivious. What’s more aggravating than having to explain to someone how inconsiderate they were?
“I spent seventy-two hours practically chained to a whiteboard with you, and the second you have an opportunity to choose your fratty himbo over me, you do it.”
He gets up from his chair and comes closer. He leans on the edge of the table and gives me a forlorn look that I bet he practices in the mirror. I notice he’s still gelling his hair the way I taught him to.
“Of course I wanted you on the team. But, Lacey, you’re building the bulk of the platform. You have a lot on your plate, so I thought you didn’t want to do it. You didn’t say anything.”
“Maybe I thought my work would speak for itself. For once.”
When I look at him, there’s hurt on his face. I’m surprised to see it there.
“I don’t know what more I can do to make you feel valued here,” he tells me. “I listen to you. I love your ideas. We’re all working on your plan. So what more, then? Do you want me to fire Trevor? Fine. I’ll fire him, if that’s what you need.”
He gets up and walks to the door. I’m pretty sure he’s just being dramatic, but I very much don’t want to build the podcasting bit.
“Jude?” I say, and he pauses without looking back. “Don’t fire Trevor.”
He shakes his head. And he leaves.