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Just 5 months into my first job, we were releasing a Global level change in our application on a Saturday, it was a minor change so I was the only one from our team who was monitoring the whole activity. As we were wrapping up after the release was done, we got a mail from branch users who were mentioning some odd application behaviour. After a lot of brainstorming as I was still learning the core technicalities of our system, I realised that it was due to inconsistency in the release, rolling back the change would have required high-level approval from the management. I called and explained the situation to my manager, he insisted on rolling the change back. Before I realised it, I was on a call with so many branch users explaining to them what went wrong and why. I was sweating and tensed as I had no prior experience of handling such a situation. Somebody asked if it can be fixed and released again, all of a sudden, I said Yes. Management agreed for a fresh release, I updated the database with the required changes, and released it again after testing. It worked fine this time. Very few fresh graduates deal with such high-level things in their first year. The kind of visibility and confidence I got from this whole episode was immense. This taught me to be calm minded in every situation, communicate well and start from root cause analysis in any situation without panicking to reach a conclusion.
I am a very emotional person and have not shared this with many people. People often feel that I am a very strong-hearted person but the truth is I am very emotional on the inside. Generally, I will pretend that nothing hurts me but people will be surprised to see how even small things can have such a huge impact on me.
When I cracked the JEE advanced exam, this was an achievement in itself and the entire preparation journey taught me so many lessons, peer learning, being competitive, stress management, time management, multi-tasking to mention a few. It taught me how life throws multiple situations at you and you need to tackle all of them with due diligence in order to succeed. During campus placement at my college, when I got selected in Barclays, it was the turning point of my life. This gave me a chance to live alone on my own for the first time and learn important life lessons such as managing my own finances, dealing with different people, handling work and home parallelly and many others which have made me a mature and grown-up individual who can take rational decisions.
Few years down the line, I picture myself working as a Product Manager in an organization and contributing effectively to the toplines of the business. I would constantly come up with latest and innovative solutions for a better consumer experience. At a later stage, I look forward to being in the top management of an organization where I will be driving major business decisions which will enhance the business proportions of the organization and benefit all its stakeholders.
The most important thing that distinguishes me is "Taking ownership of things." I have always believed in being accountable for what I do and no matter what the result be, I never step back once I commit to a responsibility. As a manager, I believe owning to your decisions and not blaming others when results are not in our favour is the most important aspect. I have always stood up for my mistakes and celebrated my success in whatever I do. A perfect example of this is my 4 years of work tenure at Barclays where I was awarded for multiple achievements but was also called out for failing once when I did a major mistake by pushing our application changes into the live user environment(production environment) without updating the database which was a prerequisite. This called for a meeting from the senior management as it caused a fault in our existing application. When my manager suggested rolling back the changes and take approval for the new release, I refused and convinced him to allow me to handle the situation. After a long discussion, he finally agreed. I spent hours finding out what the issue was and finally fixed what went wrong and got the application up and running the same day after a redeployment. This brought me a lot of appreciation from the stakeholders as well as my manager.
Few skills and qualities that a successful manager needs in my opinion are teamwork as he is the one handling such a huge number of people. Other than that, they need to be empathetic, patient, organised, confident and always open to learning new things.
In my team, we had live releases (where we promote our application changes/ new requirements to the production environment) planned for our application at regular time intervals. In one such release process, I was responsible to execute a set of scripts in the production database. While doing so, I missed some scripts which were to be executed but their absence would not cause the application to break in the production environment. A couple of days after the release was completed, I realised that I had missed those scripts. Now, I faced a dilemma of either telling my mistake to my manager or let it go as the scripts were not critical. It was killing me inside to know that I had done this mistake and nobody is aware of it till now. After giving it a week-long thought, I finally decided to confess this mistake of mine to my manager. I had a discussion with him and explained to him that in between so much work to do for the release to be complete on time, by mistake I missed updating certain scripts in the production database. He understood and after scolding me a little bit, he very calmly explained to me the seriousness of release management and asked me to fix the issue in the upcoming release as early as possible. This incident gave me the learning to be extra careful and attentive while doing any task. Also, I learnt that it is better to build courage and confess your mistake and then rectify it at the earliest, instead of feeling guilty at every moment.