The Liftoff Moment

I wasn’t one of those kids who grew up sailing. My experience navigating the high seas was limited to a rowboat on my aunt’s quiet lake and a whale watching ship on a trip to Cape Cod in the 5th grade. Truth be told, I’m not much for getting flipped around by waves and churned-up sand. I’d rather not wage pointless war against the ocean in my spare time.

That said, I saw a documentary late last year about sailing and I could appreciate the effort. I watched as a group of men and women learned the ins and outs of a sailboat. They fumbled around with the mast, learned a bit of sailing vocabulary, and found that the hardest struggle of all was in balancing and timing the sail. Sailboats are tragic objects: so glorious with a bit of wind, so skeletal in its absence. I think that software can be tragic too: so glorious when it’s done right, so skeletal when it’s not.

I get to do a lot of forward thinking at Arc90, which is fortunate for me because that’s my favorite kind. From time to time, we discover a need to step back from the immediate projects we’re working on and ask larger questions about where a client is headed. Often this requires us to touch base with our client to gather more information about the needs and wants of the companies we work with. And once the information is gathered, we set a meeting.

My most favorite meetings at Arc90 are these, the ones that result in raising a sail.

We sit around a table and draw on a whiteboard. Sometimes this takes hours. Ok, often this takes hours. Everyone in the room has a different expertise, a specific constituency to lobby for, and there is always a fair amount of balancing. Once in a while we get to a point in the process when we don’t know where else to go. Everyone’s eyes glaze over and we get punchy. It seems that we’re too tangled up to see the solution.

But then there comes a moment when we begin making ground. You can almost sense it coming, as if a slight breeze has started in the room. Though they’re tired, people’s voices get faster and a little louder and all of a sudden the sail catches wind and we’re coasting. The feeling is the same whether we’ve successfully found a name for an effort or solved a tricky issue about integration- our collective thinking has seen liftoff.

The ironic thing is that the liftoff moment doesn’t signal an ending, but rather a beginning. Much of the hard work is still ahead. We must organize new meetings to decide resources, define requirements of this new effort, and get sign-off from the clients themselves. But in its most basic sense, we have found a graceful moment of agreement and we are ready to move forward.

There are both storms and beautiful blue days of clear software building ahead, but in that moment – at the end of that meeting- we’ve managed liftoff. And damn, it always feels good.