I love to fast forward a little bit then to so you'd done these interviews, put out a lot of communication and you developed a vision for where the company needed to go. Can you share more about what this kind of vision was and how you conveyed it to the company? Absolutely. So the four personas that I saw from a platform offering and capability perspective that we have a DAT were one what we already have today, which is a self managed platform. It's got integrated guard rail with some best practices for infrastructure security networking. The second persona that we said we really need to build is a managed platform. We want to be able to support those broker platforms and even if they
Ian White, Director of Platform Engineering at DAT, joined the company to scale their Kubernetes-based cloud infrastructure, which has come under stress as their business has grown over the past couple years. Here he shares how he partnered with developers to learn about their challenges, how we conveyed a vision for how the company needed to evolve, and how he’s been working with development teams and business stakeholders to successfully drive change.
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(01:00) - The challenges DAT was facing as Ian joined
(05:13) - How Ian used customer interviews to understand problems
(10:48) - The typical journey companies take as they scale their infrastructure as they grow
(16:20) - How early changes were positioned and received
(20:00) - The four personas Ian identified
(25:14) - How Ian evangelized the vision
(28:48) - Areas of pushback Ian foresees as they introduce new changes
(33:00) - Handling teams that want to stay on self-managed infrastructure instead of moving to a managed infrastructure
(41:55) - Managing business stakeholders
(45:00) - Partnering with finance
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Where to find Ian: