Page 13 of The Hard Launch

“It’s so fucking stupid,” she says. “There’s no reason it won’t work.”

I’m sure there is, but if my last thirty hours spent mostly in her company have taught me anything, it’s that disagreeing with Lacey is more trouble than it’s ever worth. She takes everything so personally.

“How about you put your screen up and let me take a look?”

She sighs and screencasts, showing me where she’s seeing a series of hash marks instead of the numbers she’s expecting.

“Can I give you a suggestion? Edmund humiliated me over this a few times, so I learned it the hard way. It’s okay to copy a formula from one cell to another, but you should never reference a formula that’s in another cell.”

“Why not? It’s efficient.”

She’s belligerent even when I’m trying so hard, when I’m going out of my way and using three times the number of words than I would normally. I give up; if she’s going to be mad anyway, I might as well be blunt.

“It makes it impossible to find and fix your errors.”

I choose to assume the exasperated sigh is directed at Microsoft, not me, and watch her pull apart her formula full of referenced formulas.

“Sorry that I’m being a baby about this,” she says without looking up. “I vastly prefer product development to spreadsheet bullshit.”

“You and me both,” I tell her.

“Ugh. There it is,” she says as the first cell of hash marks is replaced by a number.

“I believe ‘whoomp’ is the correct phrasing,” I tell her. She shakes her head. Not funny.

“But I had this Executive Assessment done, and it said I come off as humorless.”

“It’s better if you don’t try,” she says. With a smile, though.

I wait for her to finish reassembling her formulas, and when she’s satisfied with it, I send her a DoorDash link so she can add her sushi to the dinner order. Then I propose we walk to go pick it up.

“I need to see something that isn’t the inside of this office,” I tell her while she orders. “And while we walk, we can figure out the framing of the story for the deck. That’s just as important as the numbers. Maybe even more important.”

“I’m down for a walk,” she says, getting up. “Are you about to tell me about how Steve Jobs took most of his meetings while walking?”

“No,” I lie. “But you read the Isaacson biography?”

“It’s not about product management, but it’s the most important product management book I’ve ever read,” she says.

I don’t tell her that I see it the same way, but for starting and running a company.

She follows me out of the conference room, waits while I grab my sneakers from my office, and instead of figuring out the framing for my presentation, we talk about our favorite parts of the Jobs book as we walk to get the sushi. We both want to go to Japan, we both think it’s deeply strange that he ate mostly fruit for so much of his life.

“How about how emotional he was?” she asks me.

“What about it?”

“Just that you don’t really seem, I don’t know. Tapped into that, at least work-wise.”

“I guess I don’t really consider that one of his strengths.”

She raises her eyebrows. “Noted,” she says.

“Ah! Hello, Mountain Carrot,” the woman at Gochiso says when she sees me.

“It’s my favorite roll,” I explain to Lacey. “I come here a lot.”

“He does,” the lady says. “Always for one, though. It’s why I didn’t recognize your order tonight.”