Tell me about the project you are currently working on. Why does it matter to the user?

My most successful recent project was a project where I shutdown services in the non-production environment during evenings and weekends.
This saved us 65% of our monthly cost.

As a team lead, I realized that my team wanted to work on things beyond the scope of infrastructure and deployments.
They wanted to write scripts to improve something in our infrastructure.
Knowing this, as a lead, I declared that everyone could work on a private project or learn a new technology that could benefit the company.
We all decided that we wanted to do this every Thursday.
One problem that I wanted to solve was to lower the cost of our monthly bill.

As a solution, my teammate and I worked on an automated cron job of jenkins that would shut down all services including RDS at 7pm and bring them up again at 7am.
It also shuts down the services on the weekends.

The impact of this project was apparent within a day.
The end users, in the case, the product team that was paying the bill, saved 65% on their monthly bill

What I’ve learned, especially as a leader, is that you have to be actively listening to the needs of the team.
In my case, my team wanted a day to be creative
When I enabled them to be creative and work on solutions to improve something within our organization, the end user, in this case the product team responsible for paying the bills benefited from our project.