On the Rocketship
My job is fun.
That’s a wild sentence to say as we’re still in the midst of a raging pandemic, remote work, a recent insurrection, and a civil rights movement. But, that’s also what makes recognizing the fun moments even more essential. Moments like today.
Perhaps I’m in a Dickens mood and want to write additional oppositional sentence fragments in repetition, akin to the renowned opening line, “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” but I think you’re catching my drift, and I’m not paid by the word like he was (which is actually an urban myth and an example of the “Mandela Effect”) or trying to anger English teachers with a paragraph-long sentence, and comma splices.
…is anyone catching my joke yet?
Beyond amusing only(presumably) myself with nerd-lit humor, at C2C, I learn and write all about Google Cloud each day. It’s exciting even when I get to write about semiconductors, but my day is even more thrilling when my writing connects to headlines like these recent eyeball-grabbers:
Google Cloud Jumps to #3 on Cloud Wars Top 10; Trails only #1 Microsoft, #2 Amazon
Google Cloud Lost $5.6B in 2020
Jeff Bezos to Step Down as C.E.O
What each of these disparate articles has in common is they’re all talking about a rocket ship. Either it’s the funding of a literal rocket ship or the metaphorical ascent to success and transparency its production demands. Okay, that last one is a stretch, but launch with me here.
As Bezos moves toward his goals to join Elon Musk in space (maybe a little jealous here), he places Andy Jassy, his cloud infrastructure head, at the helm.
Google Cloud reports losses but shares its operational metrics for the first time and reveals they’re fitting their sales team with spacesuits and counting down cloud providers until they’re to infinity and beyond (whew — made it!).
And as Bob Evans wrote, Google Cloud pulled out ahead of Salesforce in the cloud providers' top ten list, for reasons that net to listening, responding, and providing what the customer said they needed and wanted.
So what does this have to do with me? or Dickens?
As the content manager, I get to lead my team to connect the dots and bring the entire cloud ecosystem together. I get to stand in the hardest of times and ride with Google Cloud as it catapults to new heights fueled by a customer-first mindset. And through C2C, I get to honor a favorite author and provide keen observation and insight into the cloud-verse without injecting bias (much like the way an AI is taught).
As our community grows to 2,000 members, claiming 200+ new members last month alone, I am challenged each day to listen, respond and provide what our community says they need and want. In return, I get to learn from the engineers who invented the tools I used every day and amplify their expertise through my team and the content they create.
I also get to understand how our future is shaping up and how, exactly, we will survive by using our ingenuity, innovation, and pure grit. In content terms, I get to have a peek into the future through our Google partners and strategize the topics and content types that will allow us to grow, provide value and build our community using persistence and just getting scrappy.
Finally, I get to partake in conversations with leadership where I can freely expand my inquisitive mind with questions that never feel stupid. And now, I get to share my journey with you.
Through this blog, I’ll take you on my rocketship. I’ll share my stories about building a content strategy and leading a developing team at an organization that launched only months ago but is already churning out a roster that would make any developer jealous. I’ll take you inside the decisions we make as a team with all our stakes staked and heeds heeded. I’ll even give you a little peek into our roadmap and upcoming programming (hint: it involves a celebrity developer and a podcast, to name one!).
But most of all, I’ll share how we, as writers and editors, aim to serve the Google Cloud community through connection, communication, and camaraderie, in a way that would make the journalist in Dickens proud.
After setting my start date with C2C, the next thing I recall saying to my new manager was, “I’m going to wake up on November 3 to a whole new world,” and man, was I right.
As Dickens wrote, “It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done….” I take this position and the opportunity to build a team, a strategy, and hell, getting a ride on a rocketship, with that same perspective. This feels like the culmination of all my experiences thus far and I’m excited to share what I’ve done and how it informs what I’m doing.
So….
Get your goggles, and get in. We're’ going to the Cloud.
Want to get in touch and share a Google Cloud story? Email me, sabina.bhasin@c2cglobal.com. I’m looking for expert writers and speakers and will respond promptly. While you’re thinking about it, why not join our community and really see what we’re about?
