Getting people to believe in your vision

It can be a struggle, endlessly trying to convince your organisation to believe in your ideas and vision.

In this post, I'll share how I managed to do this.

Having been part of a team that successfully launched Cambridge Core, a web application providing digital access to books and journals, I left Cambridge University Press to join Compare The Market.

The tech first attitude at Compare The Market was amazing. The experience taught me better ways to build and architect web applications.

In 2018 I returned to Cambridge University Press.

Having had time to reflect on technical choices made when building Cambridge Core, I now knew how we could improve the product.

Building reputation and trust

I already had trust within my team, but for management to believe in my vision, I needed to demonstrate my ability, commitment and knowledge of the existing product. I did this by:

• Getting involved when we had production issues. Using the same principles as Compare The Market, I helped the team get a better insight into how the application was performing and how we could improve performance.

• Training, pairing and helping teammates develop features and resolve bugs.

• Volunteering for things that need doing, but knew nothing about. I took on the lead role of moving an application onto a new Kubernetes platform. By learning on the job and in my own time, I gave the business confidence they could leave it to me to get the job done.

• Collaborating with product owners to write tickets and develop features to break down silos.

• Working with our scrum master on improving our workflow, and trying things to make us work even better as a team.

• Sharing ideas with developers, architects, operations and management about technical improvements we could make.

• Presenting talks about my ideas inside and outside of the organisation at user groups and conferences. The feedback from the tasks enabled me to inspect, adapt and improve my ideas.

Take a chance on me

By doing the above, Cambridge University Press gave me the opportunity to lead a new multi-million-pound project, Higher Education.

An opportunity that would change my life forever.

Hopefully, this helps or inspires you to persevere and continue carving out the chance to lead and implement your vision.