Eighteen months ago, a colleague and I were on opposite sides of a pretty significant disagreement. And it left a mark – the kind where you walk away thinking you’ll never want to have any relationship with said colleague.
It so happened that we were put in a situation immediately after that required us to work together as partners. And, having accumulated scar tissue from our previous experience, we decided we didn’t want to go after incremental change and bet the house on rebuilding our job search and recommendation systems with LLM-powered “semantic search”.
Somewhere along the way, we chose to give each other a real shot. And the deeper we went into the trenches, the more commonality we found in what we were solving for and how we wanted to get there.
The year turned out to be a breakthrough year for us and for the team. After years of struggling with point improvements on search and recommendations for job seekers, we finally had a system that was a step-change better. And, while it will never be perfect, there’s a clear path to continuous improvement.
Through it all, this colleague became the person I communicated with most outside of my wife.
If you’d told me that would happen eighteen months ago, I’d have laughed. It is a turnaround story that drove home a simple, but difficult, lesson – give people the benefit of the doubt.
Or as that old proverb goes, “walk a mile in their shoes.”
When you get the chance to really go into the trenches with someone, to move past surface interactions and see how they show up when it matters, you might be surprised.
And who knows? You might walk away with a best friend you never thought you’d have.
A Learning a Day 