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Quiet Moves
May 5, 2008
Welcome to TNL.net. If you like this content, you may consider subscribing to the RSS feed.It’s been very quiet here on TNL.net but the same has not been true of my life. As a matter of fact, it’s been extremely busy.
The Job Search
The job search has ended and thanks to the many people who have helped. It’s been an interesting excercise in learning how to use social tools to achieve a specific goal. Here’s how I did it:
As longtime readers of this site may know, I am a tad obssessive about keeping my address book up to date. Over the year, it’s grown and now has about 1600 people in it. When I started this search, there were over 1700 people in my address book but, after doing an email blast, I had to prune it as I could not find information about the missing folks.
With over 1600 emails out, I also combined a blog entry, used twitter, facebook, linkedin, and friendfeed to alert people to my job availability. Those efforts paid off as I ended up getting over 600 emails relating to my job search, talked to 82 prospective employers, followed up through second and third rounds of interviews with about a dozen companies and ended up with four serious offers. This all happened over the course of less than 60 days and I am now happily employed again.
So I’m sure you’re now wondering who and what.
To answer that question, I must first go back to a previous entry and revise some of my earlier thoughts. When I first left HSBC, it was over the belief that all banks were equally impacted by the mortgage crisis. It was also based on the belief that regulatory controls had left all banks in a state of near paralysis. However, I must now say that judging a whole industry based on a single example, no matter how powerful a player that example is in a particular market, can lead to a number of flawed assumptions.
At the same time, one of the thing I’ve been thinking about a fair amount since I left HSBC is the nature of transactional data and how the type of experience one acquires in the finance world easily translates to other online effort. As a result, it’s given me a deeper appreciation for the fun that finance provides, as far as building complex technical solution.
Yet, building purely based on specifications other people have put together is something that I’ve always found limiting. I wanted to be more involved in the discussions around strategic positioning and product development and these discussions seem to have moved largely outside of the control of IT departments. Increasingly, the information technology department is concerned with building based on a set of specification in which they have had little strategic input. It explains some of the disconnect I felt in my last year at HSBC and also explained where I wanted to take my career. It wasn’t a fully conscious decision until I put it under the microscope and figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up.
As I stated time and time again when talking to people over the last few months, I bring three types of capabilities to the table: I’m a strong internet strategist, a strong technologist, and a decent international IT project manager. Those are the three skills I bring to any organization, listed in order of preference.
When researching the market, I figured that this meant I ought to find a job where I could help shape the internet strategy of a company and/or of internet-based products for that company.
As a result of many discussions, and based on my background in both Internet and exposure to the financial sector, one job became more attractive than the others in front of me so I took it.
I am now Vice-President, Product Management for the Global Transaction Group at Deutsche Bank. The news started filtering out over facebook and linkedin when I updated my profiles there but I had not come out and stated on TNL.net so here we are. As always, activities on TNL.net continue to reflect my own opinion and are not related in any way shape or form with my employer. They don’t tell me what to say here and I do not speak on their behalf on this site.
But wait there’s more!
Of course, one of the downside (or maybe upside) of being between jobs is that one finds ways to start getting involved in new projects. And for me, that new project is Extra 15. It’s very stealth right now and I’m working on the coding at night but I can tell you that it’s very fun to get my hands on code again. Beyond the regular job and the demands of regular life, that project is where I’ll be concentrating some of my energy for the next few months so updates on TNL.net may continue to be light.
So there you have it. Another update on what I’m up to. I’ll have more soon….
