Part 7: Pipeline

Editor’s note: this is the second-to-last post in an eight-part series.

After months of trying to persuade Microsoft to renew their investment plans with HPE they chose not to, and my contract ended. But it was July in the Pacific Northwest and a good time to be unemployed. I’d been bouncing from contract to contract and wasn’t worried about finding new work. I section-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail through the Cascades and toured Alaska with my family. I decided to take the rest of the summer off and look for work in September.

Finding work was so easy it felt like work found me. Jackie called with another thing she was spinning up but it sounded terrible. When she got done she asked, how does it sound? I said well, I’m available. That irritated her: “you’re available?” Aren’t you excited?” And then I lied and said I could be, but the truth was it sounded like bullshit. Being out in the woods for so long had restored my common sense, it brought new clarity.

But the pay was so good and it would be working with Jackie again, this time for her new boss Max. Max was Jackie’s skip-level, her boss’s boss, an utter creep. Jackie tried to downplay the Max factor but said you need to understand what you’re getting into. We’ll only have to interface with him once a month but you’ll need to write a blog post for him. On the sales pipeline process.

I heard pipeline process and ghost write a blog which sounded fine. I did the math on what I’d make and figured, how bad could it be?

As a would-be journalist Jackie gravitated to stories and gossip. Max had an ugly backstory she was glad to tell. It felt odd to know so much without ever meeting the man. Max was English, stout, and well-coiffed with his sweater and lanyard. He didn’t trust his team to work from home, he expected them in the office. He gave a smarmy vibe and didn’t like contractors. I was often asked to leave the room before he arrived.

Under this new arrangement, we’d create a portal with a bunch of content to reposition Max’s sales force as ultra-elite. And the reason was an executive had been on a tour of Asia, had a bad experience with one of Max’s salespeople, then accused Max’s whole org of being incompetent because “none of his sellers know how to run pipeline.”

That’s why it sounded like bullshit, because it was. But I did it anyway—and waited two months before Max would sign the PO and start paying me. In fact, I had to threaten to leave to get them to commit. So that’s how things started, on a rainy day in November, back at our usual Starbucks, Jackie and me debriefing on the role.

The plan was for me to create a content engine Microsoft could use to seed the new portal. But the thing Max cared about most was this pipeline business, because it threatened his reputation and job. So we started there, though it was more of a project than a mere blog.

Over the next six weeks I interviewed about 20 people from around the world. Max had more than 3,000 people reporting to him. The more I understood the complexities of their business, the more empathy I felt for everyone, Max included.

Going down the rabbit hole of the Microsoft sales pipeline process was like crawling through the company’s plumbing. First, nothing was written down. No process existed. Second, a past reorg had redrawn the lines of responsibility but left key details out (like who’s responsible for pipeline), so interpretations varied from group to group and region to region—as Max’s sales people aligned to different solution areas, industries, partner types and so on. The more you poked around, the more complex it was. If Max had a plumbing problem, he expected me to duct tape it. With a blog.

I picked away for most of November but started to get pressure from Jackie to just produce the damn thing: the blog! But Jackie was MIA for all the interviews and wouldn’t engage. It felt like I was being set up. And I wondered for the first time if I might be thrown under the bus.

So I covered my ass. And I pulled Jackie down with me. I detailed everything I learned from the interviews, looked for patterns, and forced Jackie to weigh in. I made it so we were dependent on her to proceed. And I reminded her I didn’t own Microsoft’s pipeline process, or fixing it. No one did, that was the problem. Their problem, not mine. Corporate politicking can be a form of jiu jitsu this way.

On the day we presented the blog to Max he had just gotten a thrashing from his boss. Jackie said to him, Max you remember meeting Bill?, but he didn’t. Max just looked bewildered, childlike, lost. He zeroed right in on the problem areas with the blog but didn’t hate it. It was the last time I ever saw him and to my knowledge they never published it. I’d burned about $20K in hours with reams of notes that just went back down to the plumbing.

After Christmas break on a group email, perhaps the first of the new year, Jackie took a crappy tone with me in front of her peers. It had that “you’re about to be thrown under the bus” feel again. Maybe it was the clarity the new year brings, or that feeling I’d had when I came back from the woods, but I decided based on that email I’d move on. The contract was up for renewal in a few weeks and I soon gave her the news. She assumed the reason was Max. I never worked for her again.

It was January 2020 and news just hit of a SARS outbreak in an old folks’ home in nearby Kirkland. And though it would soon feel like the world might end, luckily we had technology to save us.

Check back soon for the season finale!

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir