Then I heard from my friend about a small company in Concord MA called OneSource. We’d worked together at several jobs and she’d just been hired there. Our contact there was a friend from Inforonics, and I realized another old colleague was working there, and that a current colleague (in sales) used to work there. His recommendation was vital. It took that many contacts to get in the door! They ended up offering me a job, after several interviews. It was great timing because they'd just decided to go ahead and develop a new flagship product and needed some jocks who could define it, spec it, and get it implemented. Even so, it took the recommendation from the sales guy for them to get really enthusiastic about hiring me.
The thing was, OneSource was as sales-centric as Mzinga had been marketer-centric and Prospero was built on engineers. I'll always be grateful to my new boss (Boss7), who was VP of Product at the time, for hiring a 53-year old guy (at $90K) who wasn't exactly this and not exactly that, whose son was just starting college, and who really needed a job. She showed faith in me and picked me off the scrap heap at a time when no one was hiring. There was a little delay while we traveled out to Ithaca College for Dave's orientation, but then I started there on July 14th 2009, after having been mostly out of work for almost 4 months.
I was back working out West again, commuting out route 2 in my Ford mini-van and then in my blue Subaru Forester. OneSource was up on the top (third) floor in a massive building at 300 Baker Ave in West Concord, and I worked in that building for 9 years. It had a volleyball court in back, acres of parking lot (most of which was not used at the time), a cafeteria and a gym, and was on the Assabet River. During my time there they built two more huge buildings in that parking lot, a health clinic and a hotel, re-did the cafeteria and gym, and hosted some big tenants like Dassault Systemes (the huge defense company), KAYAK (the travel company), and Emerson Hospital's PT offices. It later became the HQ for Welch's, the juice/food company. We were always one of the smaller tenants.
It was a weird building, kind of duct-taped together from some other buildings apparently. It had straight halls over a hundred yards long, their attempts to brighten it up for Christmas or Spring each year were sometimes pitiful, and it was a strange mix of medical offices, high-tech companies, and manufacturing headquarters. But I worked there for 9 years and came to feel very comfortable with the building and the location. I started off bringing my lunches but eventually picked up food in the cafeteria all the time, which I ate at my desk. They had great soups and Thursday was quesadilla day, which was a National Holiday in my mind. I loved walking around suburban West Concord on breaks and being so close to places I loved to kayak, which I could do after work. The commute was not bad (I always took local roads rather than highways), and the Fall scenery was beautiful.
But it took a while for them to get adjusted to me and for me to get adjusted to them. I mentioned the libertarian/authoritarian schism before, and this workplace was severely tilted towards a hierarchical, authoritarian approach. Sales was the dog wagging our tail and the reason for everything else was to support it. We aggregated business information and dispensed it through our flagship product, for which we had global customers, and also dispensed it in one-off professional services engagements. As I say, I was hired as a product manager for a new flagship product. But Boss7 soon realized that I was not a traditional product manager. They’d hired me because I had the technical experience that was needed, but I was never quite the whole enchilada my boss wanted because I wasn’t enough of a business person. I could communicate fine with the sales people, and in fact went drinking with them after work many times. But I could not think the way she needed me to about what would sell and what wouldn’t.
But there was plenty to do, and it didn’t take Boss7 long to change expectations and get me on tasks that I could do, very well. In a reprise of the TIAA-CREF experience, they had hired a design group for the new product, and this was a recipe for disaster. I thought at first that they were going to back up their concepts with HTML, but they didn’t and so we had to do it. Sure, if we had unlimited resources we could have done what they thought would be great (for their portfolios that is), but we didn’t and so needed someone to translate their ideas into hard technical specs, and that’s one thing I always did well. And when our programmers started implementing the specs I had to spend lots of time doing user acceptance testing (as opposed to technical QA). So I guess I soon became valuable, as opposed to some other “product managers” who were fired or left pretty quickly.
But (third paragraph in a row starting with “but”), it took me a while to feel comfortable at OneSource. I had several contentious but polite meetings with Boss7, we always got along well but she was always ready to point out that I wasn’t exactly what she needed and I was always ready to point out failures of communication or cooperation within the company. There was a good deal of back-stabbing that went on and people who did not talk to other people. So for a while I felt that I’d either be laid off at any minute or would quit for another job.
And I was looking hard. The experience with Mzinga had reminded me that I always needed to be looking, and I had momentum in the job-seeking arena from the last few months. There were two really hot opportunities, one was Care.com in Waltham and the other was EBSCO (where I’d applied before) in Ipswich. I interviewed at both places many times over my first year at OneSource, they both really liked me but for various reasons neither place worked out.
This was fortunate too. By that time I realized that I liked the job at OneSource and was feeling comfortable and useful there. One big thing was that they threw a project on UK Postal Codes at me. As I say, there was plenty of back-stabbing at OneSource at the time, and this was clearly given to me as an opportunity for me to fail, as a couple of the departed product managers already had. But I was able to use research skills to find a good source for the needed information, and use programming/spec writing skills to communicate how this information could be incorporated into the product for our UK users (the UK office was a really squeaky wheel, but they were delighted to realize I spoke English). It helped that I was able to get on a LINUX box we had and come up with some proof-of-concept Perl scripts to show our developers how to process the information.
Another opportunity for failure thrown at me in those early days was incorporating Australian company codes into our products, which was harder than it sounds. I had to not only figure out what Australian company codes were, but then come up with how to get an authoritative source for them and how to associate them with companies in our database (automatically that is, there were hundreds of thousands of Australian companies in our database). I also had to work with development on what tasks they needed to do and how to fit them into their release cycles, and work with marketing and sales on how to release this and how to make the biggest bang with it. There was a lot to learn in this job! I looked around and realized that a couple of other “product managers” had been laid off, so realized that I’d gotten to the point where they really valued me.
And then some more good things happened. Our new flagship product had been rolled out, so they had to find a new main gig for me or lay me off, and they wanted to keep me. At that point (Fall 2010), a friend and fellow product manager (and Deadhead) had suddenly given his two-week notice, and this put the company in a difficult spot. He was the only one who understood how to manage a process we’d developed for the new product to create alerts from business news. I was told that for the next two weeks, learning this process was the only thing I should be doing. This may have been another opportunity for me to fail, but both my friend and I are masters of information science (he had gone to URI too, and studied with my favorite professor), and I was able to understand the whys and whats of the stuff he was dumping on me, as well as the whos and hows.
I was left with a bunch of SQL scripts (I’d gotten into our SQL databases a bit before that, but now had to immerse myself in them), an unfinished project in a software tool called Teragram, and a pretty big responsibility. One of the top selling points for our new product was those alerts that I was now the only one who knew how to manage. I was able to see what needed to be done in the Teragram project to complete it and improve performance, was able to cast around like a blind person in the SQL databases until I understood what was going on, was able to write up for programmers what changes I needed to the process, and was able to produce and communicate enough statistics to Bosses7, 7a, 7b, etc. and our marketers to convince them that our “Triggers” were improving, the feature was expanding, and I was doing a great job.
There were many people I worked with at OneSource, et seq. I was there for 12 years! One fun thing we did every year was great, informal Yankee Swaps at Christmas. We would all gather in the cafeteria downstairs (this wasn’t an official company function and we didn’t want it to be) and bring mysterious presents, which we’d draw random lots for … but it was more complicated than that. There are several ways you can do a Yankee Swap and we may have had our own, but it worked and was fun for everyone. I was making beer and I’d usually give beer as a gift, and it was always a popular one. A good friend just missed getting my beer one year and was very upset that he’d missed out, so I left a six-pack on his desk the next morning, from Santa.
We’d also play volleyball on the sand courts out back at lunchtime, and we were not that competent at it. We had a convention called “OneSource Rules,” that we’d invoke whenever we really screwed up and wanted to do it over. Again, the point was to blow off some work anxiety and have a little fun before going back into that strange building at 300 Baker Avenue.
Life started to flow by pretty quickly. Dave graduated from college and ended up getting a job with the Commonwealth and living in Quincy. We converted to a smaller car, which I commuted in, a Subaru Forester. I got some good raises and was suddenly making 6 figures, which I’d never imagined would happen. I was always being put on other projects, but my main responsibility was to keep the Triggers flowing, and to keep directing a rotating cast of programmers in how the process worked and what improvements we needed to make to it, including incorporating feeds from recently contracted news vendors.
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