The Campsite Rule (at work)
One of my favorite concepts about relationships is the #campsiteRule.
“Leave everyone in the same or better condition than how you found it.”
I learned it in my work on personal relationships and in therapy in my twenties. It’s also a concept Dan Savage, one of my favorite relationship advice podcasters, echoes regularly about break-ups.
I’ve held it as a mantra over the last 14 days since finding out my team was affected by #layoffs. Since then, I’ve done my best to wrap up all my projects, make sure they’re all accounted for by the folks remaining in the org, and as much #knowledgeTransfer as possible in only two weeks.
I think Gap is in a much better place now than how I found it.
When I arrived, we had a fragmented site across several brands and apps. Now we have a fully #responsive and #accessible site that allows customers to shop all our brands and use one checkout for the entire order, and lower costs after migrating off the third party vendors we once needed to retain to build and maintain all those disparate platforms.
When I arrived, our revenue was coming in primarily from brick-and-mortar stores and our work on the responsive platform prepared us to take full advantage of #eCommerce and #mobile to be the majority of our revenue years before the pandemic made that absolutely essential.
When I arrived, we had an ancient and barebones proprietary system, no version control, little agility for content creators to affect live site within 24 hours, and no #CMS. Now we’re well on our way toward a fully modern approach to #contentManagement that allows us to react to business in a controlled and streamlined way within 15 minutes.
When I arrived, we had no processes for #codeReview or opportunities to share knowledge across siloed #engineering teams until my colleagues and I started our monthly Code Forums and #documentation initiatives. Now, the few engineers left behind can confidently work on anything they need to because of their breadth and depth of knowledge gathered from those sessions over the years.
And some new things have been built from scratch too! We now have an awesome cross-brand #loyaltyProgram, a stronger #diversityAndInclusion org, a robust brand-enabling #designSystem, a lightning-fast #react platform beneath our CMS, and so many other great things I was able to lead or contribute to.
I’m really proud of the campsite I’m leaving behind here, and I know my beloved colleagues remaining will take that progress and continue building upon it for years to come. 💜
Tomorrow is our last day, so we’re wrapping up projects, merging PRs, and hugging our friends goodbye today. Tomorrow we’ll be turning in badges and hardware and having one last happy hour. Tears will be shed for sure.