There was inconsistency in terms of practices and processes, especially as it comes to incident management. We also saw that just the operating model that we had for cloud was not really scalable to the needs. I think at one point, I counted 15 or so different steps right. There's just too many different steps in the process. This has led to a lot of silos. You've got both silos of excellence teams that are just crushing it and absolutely killing it. And then you have silos of deficit and pain right teams that are struggling sort of visibly and sometimes invisibly right because it's they're learning and doing these things for the first time.
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: