The Early Bird gets the Worm, but…
… the bird that swoops-in at the right time catches the fish
This week’s post are my reflections from the world of business. I’m exploring a new avenue of storytelling with an eye toward actionable insights. Let me know how you find it in the comments!
We cover the value of speed in business; and talk about going fast and slow, and why you have to straddle the two when navigating new areas.
No doubt, speed matters in business, a mantra Amazon imbues in their people. But my first week at Oracle has started to bring a new perspective — while speed matters, it is not everything. Timing is.
Not being the first is actually pretty neat in its own right. It brings valuable perspective and flexibility in approaching the market. For instance, Amazon was the first to market in many businesses including the Cloud, built to navigate growing pains, with the obsession to get the customer strategy right.
Guess what? When players like Oracle later came about, they had ready case studies about aspects of the Cloud that worked, and more importantly, ones that didn’t. So Oracle (OCI — Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) took a more surgical approach, differentiating their cloud offering from the market leader with cloud offerings like enterprise-grade autonomous databases and on-premise integration.
And just like that, it lowered the adoption barrier for its customers.
Now more than ever, the media and entertainment industry is finding their cloud investments with other providers simply aren’t meeting current demands of cost and scale. And Oracle is bringing its playbook.
The Studio in the Cloud organization is innovating in content production and streaming workflows, taking a SaaS approach to thoughtfully offer cloud solutions to accelerate their workflows while achieving cost savings.
OCI is working backwards from the studio customer, designing delightful production and streaming experiences. More to come in this space.
Excited, We are hiring! drop one of us a note!
Moving Fast and Slow
I had a chat this week with a co-worker in an intro meeting as he was sharing the lay-of-the-land in the new space. He had ventured into similar pastures as I am recently, and was sharing a cautionary tale about things that didn’t work for him.
While the chat was good-intentioned, a lot of what he spoke about went back to the principles of moving fast and slow.
When navigating a green-field project, it takes an almost split brained approach toward progress. What does that mean? Senior leadership (ergo business owners) want to see fast, tangible results for the investments they’re making in the new space. While product and engineering owners want to see the right product built, which naturally takes time.
My co-worker’s approach was to build the right product first. However by taking the slower route, he inadvertently built uncertainty among leadership that the team wasn’t delivering quick enough, prompting them to pivot to other ideas — even though they had made tangible progress. But this is nothing unique to Oracle.
As an engineering leader building from the ground-up, you own balancing two seemingly opposing forces. Managing upward expectations around results, while building the right team to deliver at the ground level.
Over-index on either side, and you’re left with nervous leadership that want to pivot, or nervous engineers that feel they’re on a death-march dealing with an impossible feature set. But get the balance right, and you reach a rare space called harmony.
How does that look like in reality? Three aspects:
- Coaching the team the difference between one way and two way doors.
- Having regular leadership and stakeholder demoes that take a scrappy approach with slightly ambitious timelines.
- Aggressive hiring and building a team with the right skills to keep the ground-level architecture aligned.
Easier said that done, but isn’t that where the fun lies?
