Category Archives: Career

Architecture, Career, Digital Ecommerce Transformation, Minneapolis, Software Development

A Digital Ecommerce Transformation – Lucky to Have a Coach – Part XVIII

Part XVIII in a multipart series, to start at the beginning, goto Part I.

2012 was the year that I really began working for the VP of Operations at TWLER, Judy D. In 2011, the Chief Architect for TWLER decided to leave as the investment in the rewrite of TWLER.com was cut in half, see Part VII for more on that episode. Over the course of 2011, I became the main point of contact for the team, but didn’t completely take over till later that year.

To this point in my career, I had been leading many large Enterprise Java programs, mainly as a consultant, and had just finished an MBA. I had about 18 months of pure engineering management at United Health Group, having a team of about 25 writing online wellness programs. However, that management position didn’t end well, and I learned much and more about politics at large companies.

I did not have an extensive track record of management, but because I had spearheaded the funding effort and defined the vision for the future Ecommerce platform, I became the manager of the team and was promoted to Director. Much of the work we did is detailed here, or will be detailed here in the future, today the discussion is about having a great manager as coach.

I’m going to say, as a manager, I was very rough. During my time at UHG, I had four managers in 18 months, so I received very little direction or coaching. As the lead Architect and Engineer on many programs, I was only interested in software competency and delivering systems. If you couldn’t help me do that, you were dead to me. I was rightly accused of being blunt, straightforward and lacking empathy at this point in my career. I didn’t really care, I knew how to hire great engineers, build teams where everyone had fun while delivering more than asked, and being a total pain-in-the-ass to whoever was lucky enough to manage me.

But Judy decided to invest her time and started giving me feedback on how I was acting and how I was being perceived. It was the first time in my career that someone had explained perception being reality, not logic and data. In meetings with the VPs and Senior Directors in IT, I would get worked up because they knew how to push my buttons. Once you’re in attack mode, you’ve lost the room; everyone thinks that if you can’t manage yourself here, you must not be a good manager overall. Judy helped me understand how to deflect criticisms and attacks on my project’s direction, by acknowledging the speakers point, and then presenting why I thought our direction would work. Never directly saying the other person was wrong, just that our current direction was working.

Learning the managerial arts of controlling meetings, protecting my reputation, and letting others be right (even when they were wrong), helped my project thrive by giving me the tools to fend off the IT team without offending them or giving them ammunition to take back to their leaders.

Judy always took the high road, she didn’t care if others were being assholes, it wasn’t an excuse to be an asshole too. She would always let me know she’s heard about my latest escapades at meetings across the company. She no longer wanted to hear negative news; she only wanted to hear how I was helping people, nothing else.

This process was long; Judy would debrief me after meetings and point out exactly where I lost the room and when I went off on a rant. But I was willing to listen, and I corrected my mistakes. Over time, it was as if I had been in management my entire career. I had learned to manage my reactions, while also managing the outcomes of the meetings and the perception of my team and myself.

I can’t thank Judy enough for the coaching effort she put in to teach me to be a Director at TWLER, and later a VP for Fortune 100 companies.

Goto Part XIX

Architecture, Career, Digital Ecommerce Transformation, Minneapolis, Platform, Software Development, Twin Cities

A Digital Ecommerce Transformation – Making the New Mission: A Whole New Architecture – Part VIII

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Part VIII – To start at the beginning goto Part I.

I’ll admit it, the deck I made was terrible, I’m not a master of Power Point, and the color scheme left a lot to be desired. I had crude animations showing how we would shift our monolithic application into the cloud, while retaining the customer data and checkout processes in the datacenter.

For about three weeks I worked mainly with another architect to take the many ideas we had discussed over the last year, and what we’d learned about operating in a cloud, and turn that into an architecture vision and implementation plan. We settled on three years to transform the ATG system to a distributed service oriented layered cloud architecture. The deck outlined the current issues with the ATG system, the future state architecture and how we would get there, and the cost of the first year of development.

My colleague urged me to begin presenting the deck to interested parties to get feedback and learn what resonated with the various digital teams. He was instrumental in networking across the organization and arranging meetings with Directors, Senior Directors and VPs in Digital and Business teams.

The first presentations did not go well, the business leaders didn’t get much from a highly technical deck with $13M of capital tied to it in the first year. Mostly the feedback was that we’ve heard this pitch multiple times over the last ten years, why should we believe you? They had a point, numerous consulting firms had been through with grand plans to rewrite TWLER.com. It had already been attempted twice, the last attempt a failed implementation of the Microsoft Commerce system that was relegated to powering the Canadian site and failing miserably even at that effort.

We regrouped and tried to determine what would make this a better presentation. We knew many of the core problems with the site and that the business teams had been unable to make changes in the homepage or product detail pages (PDPs) for years. There were a few decks kicking around that defined the UX driven future of TWLER.com that would never be implemented due to technology failure. We decided to modify the deck and highlight that in the first year we would transform the homepage and PDPs into a new architecture that would allow fast changes and high scale utilizing the CDN for more caching and isolating all calls to the cloud layer. In that way we would severely limit the number of calls making it back to the ATG commerce system running in the datacenter allowing it to scale by relegating it to the Cart and Checkout functions.

There wasn’t anything we could find that outlined a similar architecture so, as far as we knew, we were embarking on a bold new way to use clouds at scale.

GOTO Part IX

Architecture, Career, Software Development

What Do Architects Do? – Part 1

Having been Chief Architect for Best Buy and currently Chief Architect for Target, I get this question frequently.  The question occasionally comes at your neighborhood party but generally it’s from people in Engineering or Marketing.  At the neighborhood party you attempt to answer this question at risk of becoming known as the “boring tech guy.”

What do architects do?

People ask this question because they truly don’t understand.  They are really asking “Are architects necessary?”  They ask this question because they have rarely seen value from the architects they’ve seen in the past.  This is the sad reality of much of the architecture world, enterprise architecture in particular.  My opinion on why architecture has devolved to a place where many companies are eliminating the practice altogether is simple.  Most architects in the upper echelons of companies were never software engineers.

Why this is important and is a point I harp on continuously, is that if you haven’t spent your 10 years writing code and building and running systems with higher and higher business complexity, you cannot do the first thing architects should do.

Answer #1:  Architects create the environment for engineering culture to thrive.

To create an engineering-centric culture, you have to have been an engineer.  You have to have a few large scale Agile/DevOps systems under your belt.  You have to understand what drives and motivates engineers that want to work on six person teams tackling the toughest problems facing enterprises.  You need to feel it in your gut when one person on the team is a hack and can’t pull their weight and your management won’t address the problem.  You must have found the rock and through sheer force of will, pushed it up the hill, leading in such a way that the rest of the team helps push it along with you.   If you haven’t done these things over the course of years, you haven’t been a software engineer.

Architects that understand how engineers want to work, spend all of their time and energy creating an environment where hard problems are solved, new solutions are found, and everyone sleeps well at night.  Architects make decisions based on whether engineer’s will understand them and choose them regardless of what else is available.

Architects also create the constraints that allow engineers to solve their problems quickly.  With the near infinite array of tools, frameworks and packages available, to remain economically competitive, enterprises need to limit the scope of technology in some way.  Make no mistake, architects select and limit technologies, but only those that involve large expenditures.  If a technology selection will cost a company in excess of $1M for licenses, subscriptions or maintenance over a five year lifespan, architects should be involved.

Architects essentially act as the aggregated will of the engineers.  Architects are there to make engineer’s lives easier.  Architects in effect are servants of both engineers, and the enterprise and walk the fine line that brings the maximum value to both.

 

Career, Software Development

I’m In the Library!

This may be a bit self-promotional (but then it is a blog) but I made it into the library!  Wow, you say.  Well let’s step back to childhood and growing up in an academic family where the measure of worth was not just how many Bachelors degrees a person had, that was small potatoes, but how many PhDs, law or medicine degrees a person had.  In my extended family, two or more was the norm.

So imagine the horror when I dropped out of the PhD program for Nuclear Fusion at the University of Wisconsin.  Yes, I am a failure at life.

Fast forward 20 years or so and I just wrote an article for IEEE Software magazine.  When I was writing it I didn’t realize that IEEE Software is one of those journals that appears in libraries in Universities around the world.  However, I discovered that today!  I have an actual citation!  I’ve finally done something the family can be proud of!

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