When The Fire Stops Being Yours

I used to be the person who got the call on Friday afternoons.

The thing was broken, the customer was upset, the team was stuck, and I had a track record of walking in, asking the right two questions, and putting it back together by Monday. It was satisfying work. It also paid in adrenaline, which is the worst currency a career can run on. Best I save that for my motorcycle track days.

There was a stretch where I started noticing the same shapes inside different fires. Not the exact same fire. The exact same wiring underneath. Same misalignment between what marketing thought sales needed and what sales actually used. Same gap between what customers were saying on calls and what product was hearing two layers later. Same five percent of the work carrying ninety percent of the weight.

That is when you stop being a firefighter and start being an electrician who fixes the wiring.

This is the move most career writing skips over. The shift from solving problems to designing problems out of existence. Heroes solve. Systems builders quietly remove the conditions that made the hero necessary. Both are real work. They actually need another. Just the other night I was telling my Garth’s Brew Bar team how appreciative I was for them doing so much around the bar so I can focus my attention on systems work.

Here’s the thing that hurts me every time I talk to my team…

The system, once it is running, makes your contribution almost invisible. Nobody throws a parade for the customer escalation that did not happen. Nobody writes a thank-you note for the rep who did not get the question because the answer was already in the deck. Reorgs come and erase your fingerprints. New hires inherit the system and assume it grew there like a tree. You watch your best work disappear into the air, which is exactly what good systems are supposed to do.

That is the bargain. The bow goes to someone else. Sometimes nobody. Often the company itself. You get the quiet pride of knowing the gears are still turning.

A real one for me. The clearest piece of system work I have ever done was building a closed loop across the company with AI in the middle of it. The SRDC document feeds the collateral. The collateral arms the reps. The conversations the reps are having flow back as signal. That signal becomes the next product enhancement, the next page of the deck, the next sentence on the website. Information stops dying in one team’s inbox and starts irrigating the whole organization. No single piece of it would have been impressive on its own. The point was that none of it had to be impressive, because it kept working when nobody was watching. And it worked without me touching it.

That is what scaled product marketing actually is, when it is good. Not better launches. A better nervous system.

A caveat the loud people skip. Not everybody needs to be a systems builder. A team without people who can work inside the system is a team with a beautiful useless machine and no operators. You do not earn the right to redesign the system until you have spent enough time inside one to know exactly where it pinches the hands of the people using it. The leaders I trust the most have done the small work for long enough that their proposed systems carry the shape of real hands. Shit, I’d argue that in the current state of the tech industry, especially, a leader has to do a bit of the work. (Ask to see Todd Olson’s GitHub pull requests calendar from 2014 to today. His present engagement is symbolic of the industry at large. Hands must be on and in. At least in enough to make better systems decisions.)

If you are early in a career, work inside the systems. Notice where they pinch you. Make a list. That list is the seed of the work that will eventually carry your name without carrying your name. And, come on, you certainly remember a teacher or boss you couldn’t stand and you vow’d to “never be like them.” Do that with the work systems, not just the people. It’s a win-win because your work gets better, and you do, too.

If you are further along, the test is simpler. The next time you feel the urge to grab the fire extinguisher, sit on your hands for two breaths and ask whether you would rather be the person who put out this fire or the person who built the floor that did not catch.

Systems work is mostly an act of respect. Respect for the people inside the system, who deserve a workday that does not require heroics. Respect for the customer, who deserves consistency more than they deserve charm. Respect for the team you will leave behind, who should not have to rebuild the gears from memory.

That is the reward. You become part of something that is bigger than you and quieter than you and slightly more patient than you. The fire stops being yours. The floor underneath everybody is yours.

Stay Positive & Build For The Ones Who’ll Inherit It