Faking It

Just got home from a Providence Geeks meeting where the folks from Treanor Brothers Animation, a 3-D animation studio in Providence, talked about how they got started and how they work. On the way home I kept thinking about their footage of actors in black with marker dots all over the body enacting scenes for video game sequences. The phrase “faking it” popped into my head, not in the negative sense. I was thinking more about how faking it can be an art.

I’m the product owner for a six-week project that we’re having to pull off without much availability from Development, because they’re tied up tight in a massive redo-our-entire-backend-system project. The scope for our six-week project isn’t that large, but one of my direct reports, Hristo, and I are having to take on some development tasks. And we’re most definitely faking it.

While he’s a talented graphic designer, Hristo is in over his head with some of the JavaScript programming (but he’s swimming just fine). The two of us have had to architect some logic that we would normally get from Dev. On top of that, because we’re taking some new approaches with managing the project and I insisted we take on more than the original scope (so we could make a better user experience), we have the eyes from above upon us. It’s a little bit of pressure. Like putting on a skintight, polka-dotted suit and pretending to be a superhero with 50 cameras rolling. It’s also a little bit of fun.