I can do anything. I can do more than I thought.

NOTHING TO DO BUT TO DO.

Starting a new job always feels like trying to hop backwards through cresting ocean waves with a little boogie board and big dreams. You get tumbled over, thrashed around, and then you pop up for air and slosh forward.

Sony was like no new job I’d ever had.

Sapient was hired as a consulting group to take over SonyStyle.com, and it was the standard ‘Yes we can do that’ and then figure it out after the contract is signed. They quickly hired an onsite merchandising experience team, including myself, Michael Bennett, and Andrew Guerrero. We became known as merchandising managers, but the job was far more involved than the title suggests.

We each had different skills, and we would need all of them and more, because it was wide open. There were some amazing folks that I learned a lot from, like Kyle Laughlin, who was the user experience manager at the time.

We walked into SonyStyle thinking we were there to contribute to an e-commerce project.

What we found was something very different.

There were no clear swim lanes. No neatly defined roles. Just a global brand that needed a full e-commerce experience to actually work. Product catalog, checkout, content, integrations. All of it, all at once.

It was the kind of environment where you either wait for direction or you step in and figure it out. Russ stepped in.

What can you do in a week?

So one of the the projects I stepped in on - leveraging but also stretching my skills - was to create an online marketing campaign for the latest Sony Walkman debut (2005). The banner above represents the core messaging of the campaign.

Sony was getting its ATRAC handed to it by Apple, and there was nothing our US-based Sony site could do about it. We'd release a Walkman with an LCD screen, Apple would have color. We'd have 256MB memory, they'd have a GB. And so on. The home office knew each offering wasn't going to sell, so they provided zero online marketing budget. 

We came up with a marketing campaign in a week, putting all our chips on the one advantage we had over Apple — battery life. Sony players lasted significantly longer than competitors, so we focused on what a person could do during that extended play time (70 hours). I was able to sneak in some unique content like "practice your pop locking" and "grind every curb in Burbank." I'm still proud of that.

Sales were slim compared to Apple, but we actually went well above the forecast, and upper management was impressed.

Kyle jumped in and organized the team that cranked out this campaign. His confidence and can do attitude helped me learn I was capable of much more than I thought.

This was an example of stepping outside our defined roles, demonstrating a commitment to the success of SonyStyle, not just doing well at our individual jobs. Andrew Guerrero is particularly good at finding non-obvious big wins, so this story fits.

so much to do, so much to learn.

The Walkman marketing campaign was certainly a shiny moment at SonyStyle, but as we all know - a good chunk of work is less glamorous, but no less valuable. As a small team, with broad responsibilities, we handled it all in the beginning.

But I didn’t walk in with all these skills. I got help.

Specialization is the path to quality, but rarely are the demands of a job narrowed to your best talent. The key is to get help on your gaps. Michael Bennett already had experience with online catalog management, so he was a good resource for that. When we had to hand code promo pages, his superior HTML skills came in handy. I didn’t hand over the work, but learned the skills from him and moved forward.

As an ecommerce site, that sold hundreds of Sony products, you can imagine we spent a lot of time adding and updating items (SKUs). Some of this was repetitive, low skill work, but there were challenging jobs to be done. Like establishing a consistent voice and tone across the site. Creating promotions. Guiding visual design. Front end coding. Sometimes we even had to translate specs from Japanese when we didn’t get the content in English! (No Google Translate in those days!)

Art, science, and the unknown

Sony was the biggest dog in consumer electronics when we were there. The look and feel of Sony was critical, given it was a premium product, but the US division didn’t get full support from Japan. This created a challenging, but often rewarding situation for our team; we could explore new themes and styles, while doing our best to adhere to the global brand.

I had worked with talented designers at a previous company, but I was more squarely in the content realm at the time. At Sony, I was asked to help shape the marketing approach, which included providing some creative direction. To be clear, the designers owned most of this, and also had a creative director advising them. I was a bridge - you could say - between product management and design. I knew how they wanted to position a product, and I often influenced the messaging and approach because of my growing knowledge of the product space. AJ very quickly understood the value of his design work, and how deep collaboration with the merchandising managers benefitted the final product.

I learned a lot from the talented designers at Sony. Composition. Hierarchy. Brand adherence. With a site not well supported by the parent company, they were often figuring out workarounds and short cuts to make deadlines. I gained a lot of insights from their craft, but also their resolve.

Jesse Mellon was great to work with. He was exceptionally creative, but also thoughtful and thorough in his approach. If there was one thing that was true, Sapient hired great design talent.

Productivity comes with a cost.

The Sony job, in many ways, was an assembly line. We had product releases, with a dozen new SKUs, and you just had to build them all out, however long it took. We didn’t think much about time spent on tasks, estimates, etc. That is, until Rebeccas Alvarez showed up. She came in as a program manager, with the hefty challenge of organizing us, breaking down tasks, and ultimately establishing clear project estimates that could be used for staffing and billing the client (Sony).

I hadn’t reflected much on what I learned from Rebecca until I started revamping my portfolio. Program management was not my discipline, and while I had experience following project structures, the practice itself was tangential to me. I have realized that the skills I learned at Sony carried over to my next job at PayPal, where project estimations and tracking were at another level. Rebecca was pretty persuasive, and eventually my mind opened more to the world of organization. It has helped me throughout my career.

Lots of love.

There were so many awesome folks I worked with at Sony, and while I would have loved to include quotes and stories from them all, this section would have become an infinite scroll!

Still, I feel compelled to make some shout outs. I learned from brilliant engineers, program managers, writers, designers, and managers. Some of them continued in tech, others pivoted. Successful dentist. Widely renowned modern artist. Great humans. Cheers to them all!