I love the thoughtfulness around giving teams that the choice, right, the agency to decide. You know, we've talked a lot about how you've managed stakeholders in terms of developers and how you've interfaced with those teams. I'd love to ask you about who the other stakeholders are in this and then ask you about how you're managing those relationships. All of those activities are definitely involved legal compliance finance as part of the design sprint process when we're designing all these things.
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: