2023-2024
Lightspeed POS
I was a over a shared services that included platform engineering (SRE) team and a team over shared internal services, including authentiation and later data management. The group lacked long term direction and planning leading to building and maintaining services of uknown value to the organization.
Highlighted Outcomes​
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Cut SRE development time costs by 30% (~$300K a year)
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Led direct reports to achieve 70% of their team OKRs
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Enabled unaided deployment rollbacks, reducing service downtime by 50%
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Created and led implementation of cross-product scalable strategy
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Decreased the time to create a microservices to minutes rather than days, speeding up feature delivery for product teams.
Vision and Strategy
The shared internal services group lacked a clear vision and struggled to prioritize work that delivered real value. By engaging with support, billing, sales, and product teams, and validating pain points through customer research, we uncovered long-standing problems that were repeatedly deprioritized by individual product teams. A key gap was account management: basic capabilities like viewing invoices were missing across many products creating inefficiencies and increasing load on support and sales, regardless of customer tier.
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I established a clear vision and strategy to address these issues: build reusable UI modules backed by a product-agnostic API, enabling consistency across products and laying the groundwork for a unified user dashboard in the future. This approach not only scales, but also improves the experience for both users and internal teams. The first of these modules, billing, has started being used within products.
Showing Value in Work
One challenge platform Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams often face is demonstrating their value to the broader organization. Their impact tends to go unnoticed, until customers start experiencing errors or outages. By quantifying engineering effort and time saved through faster delivery and reduced cost of delay, we can clearly show business leaders how and why initiatives are prioritized. This enables data-driven conversations rather than relying on gut feelings. For example, we replaced a legacy incident management system that teams were unhappy with by presenting the benefits of a new SaaS solution. Not only did it reduce costs for current and future development, but it also improved the user experience, scaled with organizational needs, and freed up the team to focus on higher-impact work for product teams.
