Find the Missing Context: Perspectives and Observations from Enterprise Experience with Daniel Lemire (2/4)

When you’re missing a specific experience in your career, how do you get it? Daniel Lemire was missing experience in a large enterprise to pair with the things he learned from pursuing a graduate degree. Join us this week in episode 324 to hear the story of what happened when Daniel got that experience that provided the missing context to apply what he learned.

Throughout this discussion, you’ll notice Daniel’s continued openness to new opportunities lead him from a contractor position in a large enterprise all the way to technical lead. There’s also a parallel process of Daniel’s development of expertise and credibility alongside his observations of the enterprise organization as a whole that encourage us not to limit our focus only to the technical work we’re doing. Near the end of our discussion, Daniel shares his perspective on an organizational decision to begin outsourcing and the way it impacted his work. What would you do in that situation?

Original Recording Date: 03-20-2025

Daniel Lemire is an AI Consultant working for ServiceNow. If you missed part 1 of our discussion with Daniel, check out Episode 323.

Topics – Missing the Context of Experience, Unexpected Opportunities, Confidence and Feedback, Enterprise Experience Meets Educational Background, Gaining Organizational Perspective, The Cascade of Objectives, Technical Leadership and a Change in Strategy

3:03 – Missing the Context of Experience

• Daniel said after completing his master’s degree at UNT he did not have the context of experience to pair with his education.
  • As part of the master’s program, Daniel got an education in marketing, management, and technology.
  • In class, they might have a discussion about how CIOs make decisions or have a guest speaker to provide additional context from the business world.
  • “I knew what the right questions were, but I didn’t understand why those were the right questions. And it was a real challenge for me because I couldn’t place what I was learning…. I was learning the right things. They really were the right things, but I didn’t know what to do with it. The curriculum I took in getting the master’s degree was exactly what I needed to be successful in a large enterprise. But because I had only ever done the independent consulting, I had only ever worked with very small companies, companies that had less than 100 employees…. So much of what I was learning about management discipline and program development and project management was for these really big organizations, and I didn’t have the context to understand why all of those things were necessary….” – Daniel Lemire, thinking back on his master’s degree program
  • Daniel makes a reference to the 150-person relationship limit known as Dunbar’s Number and says this requires very different business management techniques.
• Upon finishing the graduate degree, Daniel had learned 3 very critical things:
  • Daniel discovered through conversations with classmates and through completing specific projects that he had an aptitude for the subject matter. He also realized the program had been the right place for him.
  • Daniel knew he had a lot to learn but that he was missing enterprise experience. It was something he really needed to get the full value from what he had learned pursuing the graduate degree.
  • “The third piece of it that I didn’t understand until much later was that journey of taking turns between being overprepared for something and getting into something that you’re overwhelmed by. That’s yet another dichotomy because in some ways by getting the graduate degree I