Member-only story
Don’t Talk About Your Labor Pains
Just Show Me The Baby
Once upon a time I worked as an engineer. At one point, I was the engineering manager at a small company. I was responsible for delivering finished products to customers.
There were often tight deadlines.
Unfortunately, the general manager I worked for came from an accounting background and did not understand anything about engineering. It didn’t help that he was the owner’s son-in-law.
He would assume that everything would go perfectly when it came to design and manufacturing. I guess because when it comes to numbers, it really is cut-and-dried. There are no delays caused by a part not being delivered or a technician accidentally missing a detail on a specification.
In the real world these things happen, however.
I started heavily padding my timeframes in order to make sure we could always deliver products in a timely fashion to customers.
Because customers are not interested in why there was a delay. They just want the finished product to be delivered when you said it would be.
In other words, they don’t want to hear about the labor pains — they just want to see the baby.
