A Day in My Life as a Red Bean! 😆

Hello! I’m Angel and welcome to my life as a Red Bean (RB) in the Mission Control Team (MCT)! Being a RB means that I’ve levelled up from my time as a Green and Yellow Bean. I’ve developed strong foundations and habits to contribute independently to non-routine projects, the MCT and Mavericks. 

Now, my days are filled with guiding and mentoring others to solidify their foundations and become high-performing and self-managing! On top of this, I manage and monitor complex programs to help Mavericks grow and thrive 😎.

Every day comes with its own thrills and challenges, so here’s a glimpse into what a day looks like for me!

9:00 AM: Rock up, Plan and Prioritise for the day 📩

Before I work on ANY task, I always dedicate time to sort through all the new tasks / information / requirements that’s come in. This helps me have good visibility and awareness of what I need to do, so I can allocate time and resources most effectively (especially since I only have 8 hours in a day to deliver as much value as possible!). 

After sorting through my inbox, slack channels, ‘To-Do’ post-its and calendar, I start time-boxing my day, i.e. assigning time slots to the day’s top priorities. This is kind of like creating a timetable for myself! The key benefit here is that not only do I have planned slots to focus and work on my tasks, I can also prioritise the most important tasks and de-prioritise others to another day.

A key consideration I have when time-boxing is to ensure as little context switching as possible. (After being proven many times that multi-tasking is a myth 😅) I found that in order to be more focused and productive overall, one should spend as little time as possible re-orientating themselves to a new environment/context. Find out more about context switching and how to subtly improve your productivity here!

10:00 AM: Stand up with the MCT 🧍🏻‍♀️

As an Agile team, we have short daily sync ups to keep everyone updated on our progress. Most importantly, it gives the team time and space to take a step back from just doing the work. 

We take time to evaluate how the team is progressing towards our week’s goals as well as review and re-prioritise our tasks depending on what has just come in. This ensures that while we aim to do our work most efficiently and effectively (i.e. doing things right), the team is also spending our time and resources doing the most important and valuable work first (i.e. doing the right things).

10:30AM: Interview Scheduling for the MCT 🗓️

The first task on today’s agenda: Scheduling! 

This is a weekly task to manage our team’s call and interview roster. It sounds pretty simple at first but there’s actually a lot of hidden complexity and considerations to take note of. It’s more than just taking X number of calls to meet our company’s hiring priorities. 

All of our interviews are paired (a.k.a. 2 interviewers) to ensure fair candidate evaluations and opportunities for interviewer feedback. We also push ourselves to grow and improve as interviewers. 

I check in with the team and their calendars to understand their learning goals - Is there a certain role they are working on? What kind of calls are they trying to tackle? 

Once I know this, I start to create the overall roster for that week. It includes opportunities for:

• Meaningful call debriefs where interviewers get feedback on their approach and have time to review and improve before the next call. 

• Individuals to sit in on each others’ calls. While observing, they can get exposed to different candidates, roles or interview approaches. 

• Some continuity between interview pairings for dedicated feedback and some variation so individuals get feedback from different perspectives and interviewers. 

Not so straightforward anymore huh? 😼

While there’s a lot to consider, it’s also meaningful! This plan helps us to ensure that our interviewers are encouraged to improve with direct and constructive feedback on how to do so. 

12:00PM: Lunch + Catch up! 🍽️

(Arguably my favourite time of the day!) Some time to take a breather and catch up with the team about their lives makes a day at work seem more like a hang out with friends! Gotta make the most of this time before getting back to the grind.

1:30PM: Designing interviews for BA candidates 💻

Following our hiring statistics discussion last week, one of our goals is to ramp up our Agile Business Analyst (BA) training programme. To make this happen, we need to refine our BA recruitment process to make sure that we find the right talents.

I need to review our requirements for the BA Introductory Call (the first interview for all BAs!). To get started, I take a look at historical data (e.g. review our past candidate experiences, past year’s hiring statistics and more) to get an idea of what we’ve done so far. From there I brainstorm on how we can improve and what discussion topics we can use to better assess candidates. Once done, I send out my first draft to the team for feedback.

While waiting for my feedback, we are right on time for the next time box of today! 

3:00PM: Training and Pairing session 👥

Today, a lovely MCT member scheduled a training session with me to learn how to review and extract take-home assignments that our candidates have completed. We need to review her quiz attempt and conduct a pairing session. 

Quiz Review

This isn’t like the usual quiz you take back in school. Our quizzes do not critique an individual’s intelligence or their ability to do the job. After all, we know and understand that everyone is learning for the first time! Instead, the goal is to give quantitative feedback on which parts of the topic one nailed down v.s. where and what gaps we need to touch on more through paired discussions. 

Pairing Session

Once our theoretical understanding is more precise and aligned, it’s time to put it into practice! This is also a good opportunity to learn good tips and tricks from more experienced Mavericks. 

After providing a demonstration, I observe my pair’s attempt and give feedback along the way. I make sure to ask plenty of ‘why’ questions to gradually develop their systems thinking so that beyond knowing what is the right thing, they understand why it is right and how it affects other systems/processes. I also share some tips I picked up along the way to help my pair build the right habits from the get-go. 

Ultimately, my goal here is to help my pair succeed in the task and grow their confidence so that down the line they are able to succeed on their own and even mentor someone else!

4:00PM: Trainer Sync up! 🔄

Time for our weekly meeting for all trainers in the team! 

This is a dedicated time and space for us to stay informed of each trainee’s progress and goals, receive feedback on our own training approach and ideate on how to better support our trainees in the long run. 

As a trainer team, it’s crucial that we are all aligned on what and how to best help our trainees succeed.

5:00PM: Review Progress and Set-up for tomorrow 🤩

Whew! It’s been a busy day! 

Time to take stock of our progress for the day and send out necessary progress updates. Since it’s the end of the week, we will also send out some progress trackers. To encourage self-management and goal setting, these trackers help define the overall end goal that we should all be aiming for as MCT members.

 For trainees, we make it a point to give individuals quantitative feedback on their progress every 1-2 weeks. 

6:00PM: Unwind with the MCT 🧘🏻‍♀️

Wrapping up this busy day, time to find my team & hang out! Whether it’s playing a game of cards, watching shows on Netflix or heading out for a pilates class. We work hard and play hard together, making each day at work unique and memorable. 

Hope you enjoyed getting a glimpse into my day as a Red Bean at Mavericks, till next time! ☺️