A plea for success based on teamwork

4.5 years ago, I started as a marketing and sales manager in a development department that was set up as an internal startup - alone and without a team. I didn't know where to start - the product was still prototypical, the startup was still in the middle of its founding phase. I had no idea where to start, so I started with simple name tags, eventually 29 people started within a very short time. Was that the most important task? I doubt it, but no matter what I started with, I felt like I wasn't getting anywhere in the department. I was fresh from my delegation from Mexico. The shift from Mexican to German culture was hard, the change from Sales to R&D more extreme than I would have thought. My first mediation followed in the first month, after which my acceptance by individuals improved, though still under critical eye. Soon we got support from the region - I saw hope, as there were finally two of us now wearing the customer glasses. Things got even better when I attended the internal "Lean for Leaders" seminar the next year and, as a homework assignment, had to implement a discussed measure in my daily doing.

We founded an agile team for MarCom and business development topics with my boss, a Scrum Master, the newly hired working student, a front-end developer and the other two of us and called ourselves AXit - the door to the customer ?? Within this time we mastered the first demo presentations, created the first marketing materials, optimized the website and tried our hand at customer acquisition.

7 months later, my boss went on maternity leave and I was asked if I would supervise AXit as well as our application engineer in the future as Product Owner / Team Lead. I agreed, but also knew it would be challenging, both because it would lead to a double load (marketing was still my main job) and because it added a whole new area thematically. I'm sure many thought, oh wow - two teams right away after such a short time, but it wasn't easy. I thought we could introduce agile ways of working to the application engineers, it worked in the other team after all - but the advantage of Daily, Refinement, Review & Retro had not come so easily. It took time - time to grasp the added value of the formats.

I am all the more proud that the daily is now common practice at TeamOfAxion, that we have started the weekly discussion of topics, which is also used for refinements, and that the call for a retro came up again in the last few weeks. Even though the team has cost me a lot of nerves in the meantime, I have probably not learned as much in any other team as I have in this one, especially from a human perspective.

The next challenge came in April 2021. The developers were looking for a product owner for some components. The existing ones were already working to capacity, which is why I was approached. What was special about this was that I was not approached by executives, but by developers. I felt honored, even though it was clear to me that they were looking for someone who offered them many degrees of freedom and that this was probably the driving factor for my choice. We went about team formation - deciding on an E2E team along with AXit's existing team. This way we had almost the entire chain covered in one team, from development to MarCom to business development. To this day, I haven't come across any department where a similar approach has been tried!

Again, you might think - wow - but how much energy we had to put in as a team to find acceptance within the department in this constellation - that took time and patience. At the end, no one would have thought that developers would also deal with marketing content on the website or with icons. That people from MarCom would deal with GitHub, probably just as little.

The double burden was high - but could be organized well in Corona times. But with the New Normal and the presence in the office, the routine I had gained was thrown into a tailspin. I reached my personal limits and could no longer do justice to the application engineers, the devs and the MarCom colleagues. I simply had too many tasks for my limited working hours. My personal life was suffering. I communicated that something had to change - but the change took time, first someone had to be found who could and wanted to take over some of the tasks. Last year's limited sales release was a huge success - and I was devastated. Although I was so incredibly proud of the end2end team, I was also happy when the development part was taken over by a colleague.

And when we got personnel support in the remaining MarCom team, AXcelerate, a stone fell from my heart. I had probably learned the most important lesson of my life during that time:

You are responsible for yourself and no one will take care of you as much as you take care of yourself.

I could now devote more time to business development for the product - or so I thought. But with the limited sales release, the marketing and sales manager role also became increasingly present and thus more time-consuming. Documentation, one of my favorite topics, was also suddenly on the agenda. The variance in topics and how they were handled, regardless of title, was always something I had appreciated in the department. And despite the versatility of future tasks, I knew I had reached a point where topics were also somewhat repetitive, where things had to be approached differently, and where perhaps I was no longer the right person for the job.

As you can see, my journey so far has been accompanied by many ups and downs. Often it seems as if success is based on personal effort, but if you look closely, it's mostly the team behind it that makes the success.

"Teamwork makes the dream work"

is the best saying I can think of in this context. Even though working together in a team is much more challenging than working on one topic alone, we all reach our limits from time to time and are glad to have someone or even several people by our side who catches you, gives you a hand or just gives you a good talking to in order to stay on the ball and finish topics. And let's be honest - those who coordinate and prioritize teams don't have the time to acquire in-depth expert knowledge, which is why close collaboration with team colleagues is the most important.

Thank you for 4.5 years of trust, reliability and understanding - without you, I wouldn't be where I am today ??