The first screenshot I saved from the new job said, “No Apps Available to Test.”
That was funny because Apple had approved version 10.0.5 of the TRX app a few hours earlier. The release was ready for sale. A TestFlight invitation was sitting in my inbox. My phone just had not gotten the message yet.
It was a pretty good picture of the first few weeks.
There was a real product, a strong brand, a lot of talented people, and a long list of work already moving. There was also basic operating information that was harder to get than it should have been. Definitions did not always line up. Pulling raw data took time. Reconciliation was incomplete. Even a simple question could produce a longer discussion about which number was the right one.
The first digital operating review had to say that plainly. Before we could make better decisions, we needed a shared view of what was happening.
That did not mean stopping everything else. The app release moved. The team was working on a data warehouse, another version of mobile, a better onboarding questionnaire, small-group training, and an employee-wellness idea. We kept shipping while we worked on the reporting underneath it.
I was also learning a new commute.
I flew from New York to Orange County on Monday and back on Thursday. A weekly one-on-one had to move because I would be on the plane. I had spent years traveling for work, but this was a new version of it: live in New York, help run digital work for a company in Newport Beach, and keep showing up often enough that the distance did not become an excuse.
Apply was still running in the background too. The automated report arrived every morning. Friday coworking was still on the calendar. The company I had been building did not disappear just because I had accepted the TRX offer while emptying the Poughkeepsie house.
By the end of the week, TestFlight was working. The reporting was not. We still had disconnected numbers, different definitions, and big plans moving faster than the system underneath them.