“Of course,” I said.
I sat down. I’d been standing the entire time, and I sat down now because if I didn’t, my legs were going to take care of the matter for me.
Sutton tilted his head slightly. Like he was considering how to phrase the thing he’d already decided to say.
“You’re asking us to allocate a meaningful chunk of next year’s engineering capacity to a feature whose direct revenuecontribution isn’t clear. The deck makes the engagement case. It doesn’t make the dollars case.”
There it was.
My hand was still on my notebook. I could feel my heart in my fingertips.
“That’s fair,” I said.
I hadn’t planned to start my answer withthat’s fair. I’d planned to launch into the deck I’d built specifically for this question. But the words came out before I could stop them, and the second they were in the room, I realized they were the right ones.
“Itisfair,” he said.
His voice was quiet and not unkind.
“The engagement-to-licensing conversion path isn’t immediate,” I said. “It’s secondary. But it’s the path that turns Myrror from a tool our partners license into the tool our partners can’t replace.” I held his eyes. It was harder than I’d expected and easier than I’d expected, both at the same time. “If a competitor ships Outfit Builder first, our licensing moat doesn’t hold. Our partners start asking why they’re paying us when someone else has the stickier consumer surface.”
I stopped. I didn’t add anything. I didn’t oversell. The bible of every product manager I’d ever respected had taught me that you make your case and then you shut up.
Sutton didn’t move. For three full seconds, no one else in the room so much as breathed. The head of engineering looked at Mira. Mira looked at Sutton. Sutton was still looking at me.
Then he nodded once, more to himself than to anyone else, and turned to the head of engineering. “I want to see the engineering estimate before we approve the allocation. Get it on my desk Monday.”
That was all he said.
He stood up. He looked at me one more time as he passed my end of the table. I couldn’t read what was on his face. It wasn’t approval and it wasn’t dismissal. It was something I hadn’t seen on a person’s face before, and I knew, with a certainty I had no business having, that I was going to think about it for the rest of the day.
Then he was gone. The door closed behind him, and the head of design exhaled. Audibly.
“Okay,” Mira said. “Let’s wrap up. Joss, nice work. We’ll circle back Monday.”
I gathered my things slowly because my hands didn’t want to behave. My notebook. My laptop. The clicker. By the time I’d packed everything into my bag and made it out into the hallway, the head of engineering and the head of design were already gone, peeling off toward their respective wings of the floor.
Mira was waiting for me.
She’d stopped about ten feet down the hall, her arms folded, her glasses up on her head, watching me approach. She let me get all the way to her before she said anything. Then she looked at me over the rim of her glasses, and the look she gave me was somehow still the most withering stare I’d ever received.
“Well,” she said.
Just that. Justwell.
I waited.
She tilted her head about half an inch. “That was something.”
Then she turned and walked away, leaving me standing alone in the hallway with my notebook clutched against my chest and a pale-blue-eyed memory I had no idea what to do with.
It was 9:15 on a Friday morning. I hadn’t yet had my second cup of coffee.
I was, I suspected, in significant trouble.
2
SUTTON
