Miss you a lot, my dear Andy.
Yesterday was my brother’s birthday. His gf and I prepared a cake for him, they had dinner outside and came back to cut the cake.
His gf seems to be sleeping over at our home every week over the weekend now. I am not sure how I feel about it. I don’t dislike them being together, I guess it’s just that triggers my loneliness.
I shared about how I have been challenging myself to cope with stress from my work lately. But aside from that, I also have some other trouble related to work that I am not sure how to handle.
My current role is being the project manager/consultant of the Disney partnership. Because it is a global contract with Disney, my role is also a global function to work closely with Disney, the Meyer Labs team, and all our 13 markets on launching these Disney products. It’s probably the biggest “truly global” project Meyer has had, and as you can imagine it’s so complex because of how many parties involved.
The person I report to is the product director of Meyer UK, and the reason for that is really just because he was the one whom Disney reached out to sign this global deal. But since then, he’s been very hands off as this is never is focused project as a product director. So I am the only person who is delegated to this Disney project with very little guidance from anyone. The only one who would give me “guidance” would be Vincent, but honestly those’re probably more of orders or directions since he is the COO. That explains why my work arrangement seems to be so “flexible”, because no one really manages me.
I think it is fair to say that over the 1.5 years, while I go through all the internal mental stuff, I still have grown and stretched a lot from being just a PM for a “small” creative team to a PM who independently oversees a global initiative (with many projects within) from products to marketing to commercials (sales) to contractual obligations. That’s also why I seem to fly a lot for work because I do work with a lot of people closely outside of the Meyer Labs origin team.
I share all these to give you some context of my work these days, because recently Vincent started to task me to look at things that are beyond the scope of Disney/PM. He put me in a global product management task force few weeks ago which is one of his “innovative” projects, and in my last meeting with him he said he wants me to generate more commercial numbers (eg sales, inventory turnover) of the Disney products for all the 13 markets.
I actually felt very uncomfortable when he said that in the meeting, my tears were already in my eyes almost falling, luckily it was an online meeting so no one noticed. I was overwhelmed because both of these, product and commercials, are definitely a far stretch for me. I have been working closely with IF team because of the Disney products, but I feel like everyone (and he especially) has forgotten that I came from a brand creative background. And just because I seem to be “capable” of stretching, it doesn’t mean that I feel comfortable with that. I don’t even know if that’s the career path I want to go down to.
Unfortunately my UK boss is a product person and he’s not the kind of manager who is mindful of the career path of his staff, so he doesn’t seem to understand my frustration. I talked with Howe about it and his first reaction was it’s positive that Vincent thinks I can do it. Edison echoed me that Vincent likes to just ask people to do things that are not their jobs and strengths. Jenny said I should voice it out, especially if I am frustrated that I don’t know what his expectations are of me.
I think I need some time to digest and figure out how to approach this. As you know me, I am always scared to speak up for myself, especially it might have to be to Vincent directly this time. I am already tearing up as I share about these frustrations here in writing, I don’t know how I could express myself in a mature and professional way in a discussion with him.
I miss you, Andy. I miss having you by my side when I have to deal with situations like this. I remember the many times that I cried over work on your shoulder. You were always there to give me mental support. And I remember so clearly how you cheered when I told you I got my promotion. You were always my best work buddy and I feel I never thanked you enough for that. Tears all over my face now.
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