Oh no, an Uber Problem

I woke up on my own this morning and got a chance to video chat quickly with Korey who was over at her folks house. I was going to go out for a short run, but it was raining for the first time during the day here in Qingdao. So instead, I went down to the gym and did some exercises in the hall until they opened, and then ran (and read) on the treadmill for 20 minutes.

The rain also mean that traffic was worse than normal, so it took a bit longer than normal to get to the office. Our regular driver (Mr. Ma) pulled a few crazy maneuvers to get us there, but we did make it safely. Carosa has been asking Matthias a lot of questions which we hope to sort out when we met with her today, as management training is becoming a higher priority to make sure we have buy in at the top.

I also figured out while looking at Mint that there were a bunch of rogue charges from Uber that popped up on my credit card. They all were from Uber which in a way was a good thing, since that meant my Uber account was somehow compromised, not the card itself. When I tried logging in to see what was up, I found out that my account was disabled, which is actually a good thing. Uber recognized the issue and locked the account. The downside of course was that now, I have no access to Uber until it gets sorted. I also called Capital One and was pleased that they were willing to leave the account open since I’m going to be in China for another week, so I won’t be without it. Given that it was all Uber related and the account is locked, I don’t expect any more issues.

When we got to the office, we met with Carosa and Jat most of the morning. We had our mid-way check in and then spent the rest of the morning going through product planning for their SaaS offering. The two of them have some differing opinions on where to invest next, so we heard out their plans in quite a bit of detail. We then gave some recommendations on how to sort through all the ideas, prioritize them, and then hash out the differences in a productive fashion.

We tried out a new place for lunch today which turned out to be pretty good as well. Nearly 3 weeks in and I’m not even close to being sick of the food. I really like “roundy round” style where we just order several dishes and shared. It also helps that there are several of us going out to eat so you get to try different things.

In the afternoon, we spent some more time consulting on some more ideas on how to do the prioritization with Jat and Carosa before going into the workshop session. Matthias went through the next set of Agile practices, specifically creating user stories. User stories break down the hills into manageable chunks that are manageable and can be tackled one at a time.

Traffic was terrible getting back to the hotel, so by the time we got back, there wasn’t a lot of time before our team meeting / checkpoint. I stayed in the room and ran through the Ab Ripper exercises before heading down with an apple and a Tsingtao. We were a little bit surprised to hear that that our final presentation would be on Wednesday, but given the approach we’ve taken with near daily updates with Han Te, it will really be more of an effort of summarization more than creating any new content.

After the meeting, Susa, Maria, and I went to 7-11 to look for some post cards, but all they had were big packs of painted ones so I held off. The trip wasn’t a total bust though since we ended up buying some really nice frozen yogurt Popsicles.