Welcome to the Engine Room
Author: Asanka Jayasuriya
Four days. One engineering department. What could happen? Let’s dive into SailPoint’s first-ever internal engineering conference: Engine Room 2022!
I knew water cooler talk would become a thing of the past. The shift to fully distributed teams was a long time coming before COVID-19; the pandemic just happened to accelerate the move to remote work. But it’s not all bad, I’ve seen how distributed teams can be incredibly effective — it just takes a lot of hard work and intentional focus to make it successful and keep the team collaboration alive.
Since being at SailPoint, I have been amazed at the different pockets of innovation, projects, and challenges in all departments. As we started 2022, I knew that the engineering team had significant challenges to tackle in the year ahead. But did other departments know what their crewmates would be working on? Could they help us avoid mistakes that have been made in the past? And better yet, could they help us solve these problems through collaboration? Could we build more connective tissue across our teams? Cue Engine Room.
We held Engine Room 2022, SailPoint’s first annual internal engineering conference, in early February. The goal of the four-day-long event was to have a series of micro talks that would showcase different engineering teams and the obstacles they are tackling this year. From understanding how our customers use SailPoint products to the use of GPUs to accelerate AI, we dove into a vast array of technical topics while discussing industry and market trends. It was awesome to see the excitement in the team
We were lucky enough to have our founder and CEO Mark McClain join us too. Mark opened the event (as he often does) with a focus on our company values. In this case, it was a focus on our value of Innovation — and how important that value is to the success of our customers and business. It’s not always new features and customer capabilities, but innovation is also about improving our platforms’ reliability, scalability, and security.
To say this event was a success would be an understatement. We were able to talk through problems and have some fun. By sharing our work, excitement, and even frustrations at times, we were able to break down distance barriers and bring back innovative and thoughtful conversations. This conference instilled inspiration in all who attended, and it was a great example of SailPoint’s culture and commitment to innovation and collaboration. We also had a lot of fun with trivia between sessions! In fact, the feedback from the teams was so overwhelming and positive (you know it went well if folks are asking for meetings in today’s era of zoom fatigue!) we’re going to do it again in September. Thank you all to those who attended and participated; I can’t wait for the next Engine Room!
