My first real job at an ecommerce company in Sri Lanka. It had a trifecta of awesomeness. A team that cared. A company that at least at the start had a cohesive mission and till my final day there I had a 95% autonomous role. Obviously there were certain overrides but I never felt rank was pulled on me except by 1 person in that entire time. Funnily enough that 1 person was largely responsible for the downfall of the company culture, something that he too admitted.
Regardless, that was easily the most creative period of my life. I would work on one project after another, investing into productivity tools. The company was at the time doing daily deals. I wrote a suite of tools that would take a word doc which was the terms of agreement with the merchant, and convert it to the relevant HTML blocks to be pasted into our ecommerce CMS. After that was done it would cross-check the site against the doc to see if everything was pasted in correctly, and then use a set of defined resources to generate newsletters.
I passed that autonomy down to the rest of my team and it resulted in people tweaking workflows to be more efficient and learning things and taking on other jobs around the company without having to consult me.
Regardless, that was easily the most creative period of my life. I would work on one project after another, investing into productivity tools. The company was at the time doing daily deals. I wrote a suite of tools that would take a word doc which was the terms of agreement with the merchant, and convert it to the relevant HTML blocks to be pasted into our ecommerce CMS. After that was done it would cross-check the site against the doc to see if everything was pasted in correctly, and then use a set of defined resources to generate newsletters.
I passed that autonomy down to the rest of my team and it resulted in people tweaking workflows to be more efficient and learning things and taking on other jobs around the company without having to consult me.
Easily the best work of my life for now. By far.