I was in a job for a year and a half that was an emotional rollercoaster. I was there for 8 months and then my horrible boss got let go.
Then I had the opportunity to do what I felt was best for the organization by being more collaborative and moving my team out of it’s silo that it had been working in for the past few years. I started with bringing in the analytics team and stopped trying to do my own analytics. And I also reached out to the promotions team to get clarity on how ecommerce marketing should come alongside the greater sales organization to drive growth and improve retention.
Things were good for a period of time after the old boss was let go. But then, with my new boss, they hired an IT project manager to director over digital experience. So, this project manager with an accounting background was leading the user experience team, software developers, and the ecommerce marketing manager. As nice as she was, she didn’t know anything about digital marketing. She tried to help me but had no frame of reference for what I was trying to do. So, she wasn’t able to help me. She needed me to provide strategic recommendations within the box I had been given by the last boss, who was incompetent. When I gave her solutions, she didn’t understand. She would ask me for more details, I would give it to her. Then she would ask me for it high level. This was on repeat for potentially 3 months.
When it came down to it, they had a large hole. And that hole was their IT department. They spent over half a million dollars on one system upgrade. It was a very basic upgrade, nothing new or fancy added on top of the existing software. And, of course when I was being open-handed and trying to open new channels of communication with other departments, she wasn’t satisfied. She wanted me to move faster. I told her we were making progress. I still didn’t have access to the sales organization. Each group that I talked to had a different opinion and there were no options available to me that didn’t compete with one of their departmental priorities. When my boss wouldn’t or couldn’t help me, I became the scapegoat.
I worked with the analytics team to look at a full view of the organization’s analytics and they found holes just like I did. I showed my boss with data that the promotions that we had previously been running with my old boss were actually creating bad habits.
The only way forward that I saw was to improve the personalization capabilities around ecommerce. At this point, we couldn’t do any promotion on abandon shopping carts and couldn’t customize the experience for dealers based on previous purchases.
It was a miserable work existence. My boss was trying to uncover who was telling the truth. All of the other managers never complained, they just did their work. The reason why was because they worked within existing software tools and mine was trying to drive ecommerce revenue which was a much larger task. I needed cross-departmental support. I could not be successful on my own. Yet no one else cared, at all.
I Was Finally Let Go
I would have liked to quit but I didn’t have clarity about where to go or what to do. This went on for months before, finally, one day I brought the same recommendation I had brought the past weeks and months with a few new ideas in my back pocket. She asked me, yet again, to be strategic and come up with ideas. And then I expressed my extreme frustration with her when I had a ton of ideas and she just needed to pick one. None of them were going to drive growth for the department in the way that the old promotions had. But the old promotions were done in a silo and we had been found out that they were enabling bad habits and continuing to devalue the product by simply offering $ off promotions on a monthly and quarterly cadence. Then, my budget had been slashed.
I tried to make up for it with a robust dealer content strategy. But my boss could not continue to buy me more time. It was time for me to go. And then one day, I walked in after she got back from a trip and it happened. Fortunately, waiting to get let go worked out in my favor with getting paid the rest of that month and an additional full month of severance pay. She felt bad for me. She knew I got the bad end of the stick. But she needed a fresh start. And so did I.
So, I went back to the drawing board and now I had more time to do so with a cushion to pay my bills for the next few months.
I am still not out of the woods but I was able to get a contract role shortly after being let go. Honestly, the time with severance was a nice time of being home and resetting. It wasn’t truly a vacation because there was always that pending doom that I didn’t have a full time job. But it was a sweet time of a break with my kids. And for that, I was grateful.