When the VPE Becomes the Customer…A Seedling About Intention
August 2023
It’s been a little over a month since my last post. I guess my ambition of a weekly or bi-weekly SubStack was a bit overzealous. It has been an incredibly busy summer personally for me. I’m hopefully recharged and ready to contribute on a more predictable schedule.
I do have some news for my loyal readers…I recently started a new role with a fortune 500 company. It’s a bit of a shift for me on a couple fronts. For the first time in nearly 23 years, I’m not working at a software company. For the first time in nearly a decade, I’m not leading the entire engineering and infrastructure organizations. While I stepped into an executive role in the company’s technology division, I’m specializing in a few areas around change management, release engineering, incident management and SRE within the global infrastructure organization. I might be the only software engineer in my organization or one of a small handful.
The best way to describe what I’m doing now is predominantly serving in the role of a customer to an ISV and Cloud Infrastructure provider. That’s not to say when you're the VPE that you are never a customer. You are always someone’s customer. In this role, my organization is not building software with the intent of selling software. There’s a big difference when you work for an ISV versus working for the technology division within a fortune 500 company.
The Journey to this New Role
Many months back, I was fortunate enough to have a series of one-on-one meetings with an incredible mentor and friend, Jeff Gallimore of Excella Consulting. Jeff is also one of the primary organizers of DevOps Days DC. He also plays a very active role with the Enterprise DevOps community.
I’ve talked about this in previous posts, but even the VPE needs mentors. Having a colleague like Jeff to bounce ideas or seek counsel is something I recommend everyone attempt to obtain. I’m fortunate to have met Jeff about a decade ago through mutual friends and former work colleagues.
I had several conversations with Jeff dating back to the early winter before the 2023 new year. In our first discussion, Jeff helped me realize that what I wanted in a future employer was a company that I could get behind their mission. We both agreed that it was challenging from a human spirit perspective to go into work daily and contribute to the best of your abilities if you weren’t behind the company mission. I call this out specifically because I used the mission of a company as a litmus test to decide whether I would take an interview or pass.
Second, Jeff helped me put into perspective the difference between being interviewed by a company versus interviewing a company. He suggested I watch a presentation from the 2022 Enterprise DevOps Summit given by Courtney Kissler. The presentation provided great insight for leaders to approach the interview process from the perspective of you as the interviewer of the company and the team you are joining. This 12 minute presentation shaped not only how I prepared for each of my interviews, but also gave me another meaningful litmus test to decide whether to continue and pursue an opportunity, or simply pull-out from contention.
Somewhere around the 3rd or 4th discussion, Jeff had just come back from a trip to Europe. He had attended DevOpsDays Amsterdam. He was raving about a 30 minute presentation from author and speaker, Dr. Andre Martin, who recently published Wrong Fit, Right Fit. This presentation and book came at the perfect timing for me. I strongly encourage anyone who is considering moving companies and/or roles to give this book a read to help you navigate the journey.
The Importance of Intention
I took a lot from my calls with Jeff, as well as the resources he suggested I watch, read and/or listen. What I took from the entire experience is that I needed to be intentional about my next move. I wrote down four bullets many months back about what I was looking for in my next employer. I will share them below for you:
I needed to buy-in and believe in the company’s mission before the first conversation.
I wanted to work for a company with a world-recognized brand that was both popular and positive.
I felt obligated to give back in my next role from years and years of learning and risk taking.
I desired a role where I could be the customer and not simply have empathy for the customer.
Ultimately, it was the last bullet above which convinced me to pull-out of several opportunities to work at an ISV specifically.
I was fortunate enough to have several opportunities at a time when the market has been quite challenging for software and technology leaders and contributors. I’m one week into my current role. As of right now I feel like all four bullets qualify. I will let my readers know in a few months whether I feel the same.
More to Come About this Customer Journey
I realize this post has been less about moving out of the ISV space into the customer space and more about the topic of intention when switching roles and companies. I plan to write more about the experience of being a customer full-time in upcoming posts.
I wanted to leave my readers with one last point about intention. It’s more about providing clarity of the fourth bullet above. Good leaders are often described as empathetic. They do their best to have as much empathy as possible for customers.
I believe that I’ve historically had a lot of empathy for my customers. When I started this most recent journey, I realized pretty quickly that the way my teams had operated over the last decade in the venture-backed software world was vastly different from some of the world’s largest and recognized companies. I felt strongly that I needed to experience the customer world again if I wanted to be successful. I couldn’t just have empathy, but rather needed a discrete experience. I’m still testing that hypothesis, but I hope to share more perspectives soon.
Thanks again for coming back to Seed The Way. See you soon in some upcoming posts!