365 Days at Appian
Words can not describe my joy and fulfillment as I celebrate my first Appian birthday!
Here is that first year summed up:
The People and Professional Services teams gave me their benefit of the doubt.
This was scary to shoot for as I really did want the job!
However, kudos to Kim Parkhill and David Metzger who gave me a brilliant intro into the company culture, mission, and vision and truly took an interest in me, having their best aim at heart — to set me up for success. I have never been much of a shy one, but I felt so much more confident in my abilities after talking to these guys about who people at Appian are and what they do, so they truly helped me position myself into it!
This experience was followed by an in-depth interview, conducted by Matt Brook, Americo Mazzotta and Ben Crawley, which was difficult (but completely fair play) and proved to me that in Professional Services at Appian, there is space for stretching my potential and abilities by being challenged and awarded exciting opportunities.
I remember I received the offer on a Monday and I did feel like it was my birthday :)
The on-boarding included a 3 week trip to DC!
The hype continued as I was paired with the most talented bunch ever imagined for a 3 day company orientation, followed by a 2.5 weeks of product academy for the technical folks. The orientation training was delivered by the fantastic Terri McCormick and Eric Thibault who sold me on the company’s values and vision, but who also helped me discover more about myself, recognize my strengths and weaknesses, and helped me leverage those characteristics in a teamwork environment.
We also had sessions with one of the fantastic 4 founders, Michael Beckley, and the product marketing guy at the time Zach Messler, who were both so spot on in terms of the business value that Appian brings to the tech table and delivered pure inspiration!
Then, David Pullen, Eric Pierre, Tristan Newmann, Ramon Riquelme, Alvaro Corraland a bunch of other crazy cats went through what is known as Appian Academy, delivered by Kara Peeler. This was a simulation of an application project, which was a great opportunity to get our hands dirty and play with the product!
The job at Professional Services
Consulting at Appian is a full time, hands-on training on all things exciting:
- Mastering customer satisfaction
- Diving into cross-industrial business issues
- Delivering high quality, strong performing, highly efficient, completely custom applications and bridging the gap between Business and IT, leveraging cutting edge technology
Special thanks to my tribe of mentors Eamon McCusker, Lisa Lundegard, John Cuyler, James Carter, Stewart Burchell, Shaun Killby and Rob Woods. Those people are true stars and an absolute pleasure to work with and learn from! I wish I can tag some more people, but the number is now over 1000, so maybe another time :)
Above an beyond the job
We have the tech and AGILE guilds where we share experiences and learn cool new things.
There is also AppianWOMEN, which was established in Europe this year under the leadership of Lisa Lundegard )along with Shayleigh Raab, Cindy Cheng, and Martina Pastocchi). We have made a number of incredible events happen over the course of 2017, including sponsoring people to attend a TEDx talk on confidence, a General Assembly workshop on entrepreneurship, and an internal talk on the theme of success, courtesy of our very own power house Silvia Fossati, just to name a few!
AppianPRIDE exists due to the leadership of Courtney Connolly, and this establishment means that at Appian, the best idea always wins, regardless of gender identity, expression or sexual orientation of the person that it came from. :)
If you also share a positive company experience — brilliant! I wanna hear about it!
If you are unhappy and feel like your talent is being under-utilised and you are wasting precious life time, perhaps it is time to reconsider your decisions and switch to a place that will best reflect your personality!