I was tasked to help out one of our offshore team members to create product pages for the EU marketplaces.
He has never done it before and to save time, the task was assigned to me due to my experience with creating the product pages for the US marketplace.
I have created countless product pages for the US marketplace.
I have confirmed with him: are we going to create product pages for EU that is an identical copy of the US product pages?
Yes was the answer.
So, naturally, it will be a simple copy-paste process, right?
Wrong.
As always, simple tasks need to be complicated by my boss.
And, I guess Lodi (insert eyeroll here) probably thinks I’m stupid.
He wants me to create a roadmap of how I will approach this task.
This confused me because it’s a matter of having the US product page on my left screen and the UK marketplace on my right screen, clicking the button to “create” the new product page, and copy-pasting literally everything about the product I will be creating the page for.
He then asked me, “Do you know why I’m asking you to create the roadmap?”
I answered, “No.”
He sighed and said, “So I know how you will accomplish this task.”
Again, confusion on my end.
Normally, when he asks something like this, it’s so when he gives the task to other team members, they will have a set of instructions to follow and not have to consult with me.
But for this specific task, only I will be the one doing it.
There has been no discussion of passing the task on to others.
So, again, confusion on my end.
Knowing I will not win against him (he’s the king, anyway — meaning, his way is always the correct way), I just said, “OK,” then proceeded to create the steps of how I will be accomplishing this task.
I started listing down each single step for me to accomplish this task, and I started with:
- Log in to the seller portal
- Click on the menu icon
- Move mouse down until you see the link called Advertising
- Click on the link called Advertising
- And so on…
In the end, I had around 15 lines (I wasn’t really putting numbers, just the next step on the next line.)
He wants to waste time, then let’s waste time. I’m being paid by the hour.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay