Great Work Does Not Speak for Itself

How I became a self-promoting dirtbag.

Dec 05, 2024

“We should build a map.”

“What? Why?” I stared at my boss, Almis, thinly veiling my frustration.

“A map. For the Mayor. He committed to paving 1000 miles of streets, and he needs something to point to during interviews to show all the repairs we’ve done.”

My soul crumpled like an empty Yerba Mate can (I drink a lot of those). I still needed to meet with data coordinators from 12 departments. I kept hitting bureaucratic roadblocks trying to get access data. All while the policy deadline for a comprehensive City data inventory was looming in a month.

“Why are we making a useless shiny thing when there’s a ton of work to do?”

This was not the deal when I signed up to be the first Chief Data Officer of San Diego.

In my mind, the road to success was straightforward: inventory the City’s data, centralize it, build a data team, and split time between internal efficiency work and publishing open data. I moved from the other side of the country because I was convinced that government data in the right hands at the right time is a tool that saves lives.

Now I was supposed to build a stupid map. A stupid PR stunt, just so that the Mayor can point to it on the news.

"Look," Almis said, reading my expression, "I know you think this is a distraction. But trust me."

The guy was half the reason I came to work at the City. He wielded an unexplainable amount of influence despite having been in the organization for only a few years. He could open doors locked to everyone else, and had a direct line to the Mayor.

I trusted him. And I made the map.

Journalists loved it. Elected officials loved it. The Street Repair team looked good. It also didn’t hurt that the underlying data setup saved them over 40 hours of manual reporting per month. They became our biggest champions - the people I could call on to back me up when I started getting suspicious looks from other departments.

I could’ve spent hours in meetings trying to get access to data. Maybe I could have figured out how to break into the network and get it myself. Either approach would not have resulted in the trust I gained with other departments.

The “important” work I had to do had no voice. It was hidden behind a veil of technical complexity. It was unable to speak for itself. I had accidentally figured out how to let it speak - by building a “stupid, shiny” map for a PR stunt.

Having grown up with an awkward mix of Soviet values and Midwestern self-deprecation, this was … weird. I learned from my grandparents that if you work hard and keep your head down, eventually good things will come. Everything else was fluff that charlatans peddled to scam honest people out of their money.

But I couldn’t deny an effective strategy. I explored further.

Soon, I was doing more … weird things. I was going to lunch with people to “catch up.” I was applying for awards I knew were pointless. I was meeting with council members every three months to give them progress updates.

I even joined a “steering committee.” 😱

Was I becoming a self-promoting dirtbag? Was I just wasting time? I felt ashamed that I was beginning to enjoy these activities almost as much as the “real work.” With my boss’s encouragement, I doubled down and went deeper.

Level 1: Relationships (or: “Never eat lunch alone”)

I had coffee meetings, lunch meetings, happy hours. Sometimes I had an agenda, but often, I was just curious about my colleagues’ work and what drove them nuts. I started seeing common patterns. A department director staying late to copy data between spreadsheets. A streets engineer manually re-building the same report every Friday. An ambulance crew unable to identify someone that called too often so they could refer them to the right service.

Sometimes, I could help with a casual suggestion - a new tool, or a connection with someone else in the City could save countless hours of repetitive work. Other times, I could help with bigger projects that resulted in a strong relationship, better data sharing, and larger impact.

What started as monthly lunches with two Fire Department colleagues evolved into an emergency dispatch overhaul. Over soggy caesar salads, we had the idea to analyze how emergency vehicle deployments matched up with actual call outcomes. We aligned dispatch protocols with real needs, ensuring ambulances and fire trucks were available for calls that truly required them.

The impact went way beyond work. I came to San Diego not knowing anyone. But these coffee meetings, lunches and happy hours turned into real friendships. Years later, long after moving on, my City colleagues are still some of my closest friends.

Level 2: Showing Progress (or “How to look busy while being busy”)

At first, I was hesitant to go around presenting what we have been working on. This kind of self promotion felt like the charlatan-ism I have grown up rejecting. Plus, with a long and growing backlog, it felt like a waste of time.

But I soon realized that if I didn’t talk - my team’s work was invisible. No one cares about lines of code deployed on a server, or the failure rate in data pipelines. My job was not to pump my chest. It wasn’t to self-promote. It was to educate my colleagues about the amazing work my team was doing.

Not just to educate though. Keeping “stupid” work off our plates was helpful too.

I didn’t want my team being pulled in multiple directions “shiny” projects to feed the PR machine. So we planned ahead for them, sprinkling launches like breadcrumbs that led to the holy grail of centralized data.

Eventually, every “stupid” thing I did -- like building the Streets Map, doing a presentation, or seeding a news story -- became a strategic tool to gain influence, and buy time for the backend work. It was a way to “buy” time for what needed to be done, but doing so on our terms - in the least disruptive way possible.

Level 3: Reading the Room (or: “Speaking Human”)

The first time I pitched the idea of a data orchestration system to a department director, I got the “glazed eye” look. It was a lunch meeting, and he didn’t get the burrito, so I knew it wasn’t a food coma. Turns out the director of the Public Works didn’t care about my data infra dreams.

Eventually, I figured out it wasn’t about the technology. It was about what the technology could do for the person on the other side of the table, eating their grilled fish taco.

For the department directors, it was “Your analysts will now be able to get reports on a schedule in their email.”

For the council members, “We’re going to have more accurate data, save money, and look more innovative than other cities.”

For the head of cybersecurity, “We’re implementing a data orchestration system with access to most MSSQL and Oracle databases on our network. Since the server is on-prem and sits behind our firewall, security should not be a big concern.”

At first, I felt icky - like I wasn’t conveying the truly exciting parts. But changing my communication to the audience helped me build trust, and make sure that I could get everyone excited for the journey.

The Quandary

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