How This Senior Program Manager Turned Regulatory Chaos into a Leadership Opportunity
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INTERVIEWER
I'm curious, and, and you, you've kind of touched on a lot of these, it seems, but, but let's see if we can get a new, uh, uh, a, a new discussion here where You know, you, you took on a set of responsibilities that was clearly outside of your scope of responsibility, right? You took on a project or something, anything that was clearly outside your scope of responsibilities. Uh, let's start with what was it, and then I have some, uh, some follow-up questions.
CANDIDATE
Yeah, so one thing that that really took me by surprise, um, and this was when I was also managing customer accounts, was in the oil and gas world. Oftentimes
INTERVIEWER
you run into the oil and gas, sorry, yeah,
CANDIDATE
uh, you run into regulatory issues, um, and one regulatory I ran into was we were implementing a project in Colorado. And uh the system that we deployed, um. Came into issue with, with the Colorado regulators saying that, hey, you guys need to meet our uh state electoral and audit requirements um to, to essentially implement this project in our state. And this was something that we had not encountered before. Legal, etc. is, is completely out of my scope and, uh, responsibility, um, and I found myself essentially having to manage two sides of the coin. One was So, one was explaining to our customers uh what was going on and what we were going to do to fix this. Two was I found myself on the call with, and it was the Colorado Housing Authority trying to explain to them, hey, what this issue was, and um. Pushing forward on, on, uh, what we could do to, uh, to resolve this, um. And, and eventually I managed this issue by understanding what my limits were and and what skills I could uh. What, what, what contributions I can make effectively. So, uh, in terms of pushing forward with uh resolving the issue with, with the Colorado regulators, I did bring in our legal team, but another avenue that I pursued was, in order to comply with these regulations, what type of changes do we need to make to our product? And here I found myself taking on a new challenge of, uh, you know, uh, hiring a consulting firm, completing an NDA with them, helping them take a look at. What our product and hardware is right now and what changes do we need to implement it, scoping that out, um. And I really got into almost the engineering and design aspects of this, which is very different from my account management responsibility. Um, we had scoped out the pro we had scoped out the design requirements, we had scoped out the changes that would be needed to implement this, um. Luckily we did not have to go through with it. Our, our legal side and legal team, uh, came through with a win on this one, and they were able to commit, convince the uh housing authority to, uh, to basically back off, um. The new responsibility and challenge I took was kind of scoping out, hey, if we did have to go through with this, how are we gonna do this?
INTERVIEWER
What caused you? To take this on.
CANDIDATE
Uh, frankly. It was the pressure from the customers that I was facing, I mean, they were like, hey, you know, we have a contract in place for you to build other projects and services, and, and while we were able to manage such a situation, it did need to get resolved, um. And, and, and with that pressure, um. I had two options essentially. I could pass the buck on to our um engineering teams to scope out that development. Or you know I uh could. Help take that, some of that burden off, uh, essentially knowing that this is an issue that affects only my customers. I was, uh, the lead account manager for the, the Colorado area at that time, and, uh, help, help, help solve my own issue, uh, so really it was a pressure from the customers, understanding that, you know, this was on me and this affected, um, my, my, my team the most to solve it, that, um. Really pushed me to, to uh put in the extra hours to scope out what what what this new solution would look like. So what data did you
INTERVIEWER
have? Other than, well, that's, that's a terrible question. Normally I ask, what, you know, what day do you have to, to inform the decision this need to be taken on. But when the regulators call, that's kind of all the data you need, uh, so it's not a great question. Um, so when you talked about, uh, the alternatives, right? You kind of worked with your engineering team and you went through legal. I'm curious to understand what, what were some of the changes that were needed. How did, and, and not, don't get into the weeds on the. Kind of what they were. I'm just trying to, you know, high level what they were and kind of time to implement like cost and just to help me scope and understand what, what that would have meant for the product.
CANDIDATE
Yeah, for the product it it essentially meant uh scoping out new materials and builds that were approved by this uh regulatory body that was meant for Colorado itself, and essentially, when we had brought in a third party to take a look at this. The earliest that we found out that we could implement some of this, to implement, you know, one of these would be 3 to 4 months, and uh that's a huge time in terms of project implementation, etc. So, the second, so once we had the, the, this meant this, this would take 3 to 4 months to imple that, the, the main thing was how, how, how do we get that, that, uh, that time down, um, on the engineering specs, you, there's really uh no leeway on um building out a completely new prototype and, and trying to push that process along, um, especially when the, the requirements are, are steadfast, so. Other things that we looked at in, in this case was a, trying to figure out what alternatives do we have in terms of the hardwares that we could provide, um, and, and here we, we really started brainstorming and, and reviewing options uh internally to come up with a a couple of options that would work, um, bringing in the uh Colorado regulatory agency early on to, to help review our, our proposals. Um, having the third party there as a backup. You know, done work in Colorado and Had um a relationship with with this regulatory body and um uh you know, trying to figure out alternatives that would, that we could push out that could be done perhaps in 2 months or less. OK.
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