The reason I do what I do (at work)

At the moment of writing this, I have been working for Boehringer Ingelheim 18 years, 7 months and 22 days…

I started as an Oracle DBA (Database Administrator) at BI (Boehringer Ingelheim) Spain because they were changing its CRM for the sales force, so they needed someone to manage the databases. Since then, BI has given me the opportunity to perform different roles in different countries within the organisation. Four years ago, they offered me to join BI X, BI’s digital lab, in Germany, as a Scrum master. This time to help teams create great digital products and foster the agile transformation in the organisation.

In my last product at BI X (before joining Biostatistics and Data Science) I had an epiphany.

The product was about heart failure and the main hypothesis was that if we could provide a platform that would connect nurses with heart failure patients, those would destabilize less, thus increasing their well being and life expectancy. When you build a digital product, you do a lot of research, starting at the potential users. I was interviewing a heart failure patient. In research interviews, you ask things like “what is your daily routine?”, “What is that you find more challenging?” to better understand what could help them, what could work.

She was younger than me, late thirties or early forties. She looked frail and was a bit shy at first. A cashier at a big supermarket, she started telling me how her life was now: getting tired by just walking to the bus stop, how a flight of stairs became an unsurmountable obstacle, being afraid of getting intimate with her husband… It was a pretty bleak picture. Nevertheless, she was very calm and positive, expressing a lot of gratitude and trust towards her nurses and doctors and the treatments she was talking. Finishing the interview, as a summary, she simply said with a gleam of hope in her eyes:

“In the end, I just want to get my life back.”

It struck me like lightning.

Until that moment, I thought I knew why I did what I did at work. You have to put food on the table, of course. But also you want that project to succeed, you want to introduce that great new technology… But none of that had a connecting thread to make it meaningful, it was just things I did. Now, it all made sense.

We all have goals, objectives, ambitions… We focus our energies in the tasks in front of us, understanding that they belong to a larger task (such as an implementation project, a marketing campaign, a submission document), creating layers and layers of complexity. But all those layers just obfuscate the fact that, in the end, on the other side of all our efforts, there is a human being with a need. Sometimes with a very pressing and important need… Like getting their lives back.

And that is the reason that I do what I do at work, with passion and determination. Because if I can help one person, even only one, have a better life, recover from some serious illness… Then, everything makes sense.

Unfortunately, I don’t remember her name. But I will always remember the hope in her eyes.

What makes you do what you do at work? What drives you? Let’s have a conversation!