Every time I go to a job interview, I ask the same question: “who are going to be my clients?”. Having spent the past 15 years in B2B companies, I get big brand names made to impress, but that’s not what I’m asking for. Maybe I should rephrase that, as what I want to know is “As an infrastructure leader, who am I going to provide a service to? Who are the people I can talk with to know if they are satisfied with the infrastructure? Whose needs do I fulfil?” These people are my clients, big names are the company’s clients, and that makes a difference.
As an infrastructure leader, who am I going to provide a service to? Whose needs do I fulfil?
When I joined Synthesio in December 2014, I spent most of my first week talking to people from various departments. I wanted to know who they are, how they work and how I could help them. I didn’t spend my whole time discovering the infrastructure, I wanted to understand what people were expecting from me. This time spent meeting people helped me to shape my forthcoming infrastructure strategy.
They were lots of expectations.
The R&D team needed up to date, easy to use local development environments, continuous integration, centralized logging and the ability to get an infrastructure for new feature in a few days if not hours.
Product people needed usage metrics I could provide them, a staging environment we call Theory because “it works in theory” and the ability to get the new feature live fast, including large clusters.
Support wanted easy to read business oriented metrics to know if a problem was local to a client, due to a bug or a general infrastructure issue. In other words, not being in the dark anymore when they face an angry clients.
Project managers and sales wanted a stable, reliable, fast infrastructure that won’t let them down when they work on the product or during a demo. They wanted a better communication about problems and ETAs about incident resolution.
Talking with people from various departments helped me to understand what they needed and build my infrastructure strategy.
After a few days, I knew who my clients were, what they expected from me and I was able to build an infrastructure strategy: automation, redundancy, reliability and metrics. All I had to do was making priorities, build a plan and deliver.
2 years and a half later, I still talk with people from the other teams a lot to understand if their needs have changed and how I can help. These are informal talks during coffee breaks that allow me to adjust my global strategy and the team priorities.
As an infrastructure leader, I’m client obsessed. I don’t consider the infrastructure as an end, but as a way to provide other people a service. It means getting out of my sysadmin ivory tower and understand the world around me. It also means moving fast and (sometimes) breaking things. In my career, I’ve seen too many IT people refusing to make their infrastructure evolve, and consider the developers and users as a nuisance because it could break what they spent so much time to build. This is not how you deliver a service.
Photo: Didriks.
Infrastructure People, do you Know who are YOUR Clients? was originally published in Fred Thoughts on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
April 30, 2017 at 01:11PM
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