How Amazon Web Services Changes Your Team’s Culture (+ Bonus: Makes You Lose Weight In The Process)
It is always challenging to lead a team. While I like writing about leading I wanted to step back a bit and write this in two separate parts.
If you are interested in a high-level technical part you can continue reading, if you want to know about the cultural aspects of it skip to Part 2 directly.
Part 1 - Why Amazon? (Technical)
As a manager, I have always worked with external providers. A third-party service provider normally works like this:
Salesperson: Hello here is a great service. Do you want to try it?
Me: How can you help me?
Salesperson: With this app, you can manage your servers, make sure they are up to date, we are secure, we are…
Me: Ok. Why not?
Salesperson: Great! Here is your account.
1 day in..
Me: You said this would do the awesome thing you said it did but it does no.
Salesperson: Yes, no problems I will ask the team to do it for you.
Me: When will it be ready?
Salesperson: We need to talk but you can be sure it will be there next year. It will be available as an add on package which you can subscribe for more $
Me:
And let's change and see how it does work with Amazon Enterprise Support: When you sign the enterprise support agreement with Amazon you will be assigned a TAM(Technical Account Manager). Unlike other account managers, I have seen during all my years of work AWS TAM is not a guy that bugs you to sell more of their services or just listen to your complaints without any resolutions. In fact, the moment you sign the enterprise support you are getting a person that you will be working 24/7 (yes really) and you can call any time for any problem you have and more importantly you know it will be resolved in record time.
In fact the moment you sign the enterprise support you are getting a person that you will be working 24/7
Technical Account Manager: Hey! I have seen that you are trying to take out some reports and I see that you are using our x service which costs x$.
Me: Yes you are right! I am really happy about it.
Technical Account Manager: Yes but did you know you can do it better using y technology and it will cost you less $?
Me: Wh? Of course.
1 day in:
Me: Hey! I was checking the service you have mentioned I already set it up and it works well. But I also see that I can create this awesome report but I need to add this field to here.
Technical Account Manager: Let me check with the team and I will get back to you
10 mins passes. Your phone rings.
Technical Account Manager: I have talked to the product team. You can do this by using this other field at the moment. I also added this function to our roadmap. It is being worked on and it will be available in 1 month.
Me: How much the cost will be?
Technical Account Manager: What cost?
Me:
You see the difference here. This is called a great client service and great teamwork. I can start writing about all the good things we have achieved with Amazon and by the end of the day I would be still writing so I will just give you a couple of examples:
- We have managed to re-create our infrastructure in different zones to avoid any downtime. You can say goodbye to downtime with Aws- Really!
- We have managed to reserve instances. Saving over 15K monthly — Really!
- We have converted our instances to spot instances. Paying %60 — %70 less than what we normally pay with on-demand instances.
- We have managed to secure every bit of our infrastructure. We have passed all GDPR requirements so smooth we didn’t even need to search for any document. We downloaded all the necessary agreements and legal documents as well as all the necessary material to detail our security infrastructure right from our console.
- We have gone further and migrated 10TB of images from one of our data centers to AWS with the snowball. Sounds easy and it was dead easy!
These may be technical details but the most important as a result we now have a system that is growing securely and in control in Amazon and we continue cutting costs every day.
Part 3 -Why Amazon? (Culture)
I have written a lot of articles. I always think of growing my team and making sure they are comfortable and without any blockers. If there are any blockers it is where I come in to clear the road for them. Now it is not always you that can get things done. Mostly there are obstacles bigger than your reach that continues affecting the culture in your company and in your team. Such as a competitive (bloody type) ambient in the company will end up burning out the people if you cannot control it, or not being given a clear direction or responsibility will make your life as a leader quite difficult as you cannot transparently explain this clear direction to your teams and it always ends up your team members working on pieces which do not add up to a final great product. At the end, you check what has been done during the year and you see very few important tasks done.
So let me continue with the same layout as before. Let’s see how does it differ:
Third party service provider:
Your team member: Boss this is a blocker. I am trying to reach these guys in this datacenter they won't answer.
Me: Let me get on with it.
Calling…
Datacenter: Hello
Me: We are trying to reach you but seems we can’t. What’s the problem?
Datacenter: Ahh! Our ticketing system was broken. We will get on with your ticket.
2 days passes
Team member: No answer yet
Me: Let me talk to them
Datacenter: Hello! Yes we were about to start with it
Me: Ok
4 day passes:
Team member: they have answered today after 6 days they told me it wasn't their fault.
Me: What?
Datacenter: Yes we have checked the server it was ok.
Me: But did you check the server graphics on day xx
Datacenter: Oops no. I'm sorry we will get on with it right away.
6 days passes….
It goes and on and on. So what happened here?
- You have been waiting for an answer to remove a big blocker for your team.
- Your team is waiting for it to be able to continue working.
- Passes 12 days.
- You have lost your patience.
- Your team member already started working on other projects.
- You have all the business people waiting and complaining (they are right in that)
- Your Client already changed mind about your company and already started looking for a new provider.
Summary: A third party provider made took away the chance for your team to do this great project, caused the business team to get worried, caused the project to pause and cause your clients to wait for more for this functionality you promised.
Amazon:
Team member: I have this blocker in AWS.
Me: Ok let me call them
Technical Account Manager: Let me check with the team x whats the problem
10 min passes
Tam: it's done. It was because of the problem we had and now it is fixed.
Team member: Great. The project is done. I also found that we could do xx here so I ended up adding this good to have functionality.
Me: You’re the man!
Business: You guys are great!
Client: You guys rock!
If you know me you will know it is really hard for me to recommend a service or a product. Something I deliberately avoid that I don’t like giving empty recommendations.
But Amazon Web Services? I will recommend you with all the confidence. Not only for you but for your team members so that they can work without any pressure or big blockers, for your business team so that they can deliver the products they promised, and finally for your clients so that they can get the functionality that they asked for and needed desperately.
And before I forget. About the losing weight part. It’s easy math:
Less Stress = Less Headaches = Less M&M’s = Less Weight
