People Over Process: How VP Kwesi Ames Empowers Our Site Reliability Team
One day in school, a young Kwesi Ames walked by the computer lab and saw a kid playing Ghostbusters on an Apple IIe, which he thought was the coolest thing since sliced bread. The next day the kid was programming and let Kwesi try it out. He loved it so much that he told himself, “Whatever I do with my life will be around this box!”
These days, as Salesforce’s Vice President of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) based in Herndon, Virginia, he spends less time on the keyboard than he once did but finds the work challenging and rewarding in different ways. Although he was first recognized for his leadership abilities as a Boy Scout while growing up in Trinidad and Tobago, Kwesi says he moved into management somewhat reluctantly. His supervisor suggested he was well-suited for a management role, which Kwesi initially turned down. But the supervisor was persistent, eventually saying Kwesi could move back into his individual contributor role if management really wasn’t for him. Within a few weeks, however, he had two impactful experiences involving feedback from people on his team that convinced him making the move was worth it, and he’s been in management ever since.
Since joining Salesforce 10 years ago, Kwesi’s focus has been on helping his team members find meaning and value in their work. He says, “If employees are happy, likely the business is more productive, our customers are happy, and we’re delivering business results.” He views his role as coming up with strategies to improve our availability to customers and looking for the right partnerships across engineering, support, and product to implement them. “The work is never done,” Kwesi says. “Customers are getting bigger and more demanding and the environment is more complex. I daydream about strategies and how to remove roadblocks in order to get alignment across the business.” As he’s advanced in his career, he sometimes misses the more coding-focused work, but he knows he has to pull himself out of the weeds and delegate, letting his teams focus on the hows and the details of getting it done. He strives to empower his people the way he was empowered.
Nowhere has his people-focused management philosophy been more apparent than in 2016 when Kwesi was tasked with integrating the SRE team from the Marketing Cloud organization (an acquisition formerly known as ExactTarget) into the main Salesforce SRE group, which he says is still the thing he’s most proud of and enjoyed the most in his tenure at Salesforce. Kwesi was entrusted with running the project how he best saw fit, given only the guideline, “Don’t mess it up!”
Kwesi approached the integration by asking himself, “If I were part of an acquired company, what would my concerns be?” He chose to prioritize people and give them reassurance before moving on to processes and technology. In fact, he set up an entire epic for himself to get to know the people of Marketing Cloud and wrote a V2MOM (Salesforce’s method for focusing goals and aligning on business priorities) specific to the integration! Because of his experience moving to New York City from the small island nation of his birth to attend college at age 16, he placed a high value on respecting the local cultural norms of Marketing Cloud employees, whose headquarters were in Indianapolis. “Once we got to know each other,” Kwesi says, “they really loosened up and it was easy then to talk about technology and process.”
One of his favorite parts of the integration project was talking to the Marketing Cloud employees about Salesforce’s values. What the heck IS the V2MOM? What does trust really mean? Yes, we really DO prioritize doing Volunteer Time Off (VTO). And when things get stressful, managers really are empowered to order lunches for their teams, or whatever else will make them feel valued.
Aligning on processes and methodologies came last, but of course was not least. Throughout the entire integration, the Marketing Cloud customers were at the forefront of everyone’s mind, and they didn’t suffer any ill effects from the organizational transition, which was naturally an ideal outcome. To Kwesi, this is the merest baseline of Salesforce’s value of trust; trust, he says, means really taking care of your customers. “[It’s] a powerful distinction. Striving to earn your customer’s trust is very different than striving to earn their their satisfaction. It’s more intimate and connected.”
Since then, Kwesi has been involved in two additional SRE team integrations, which also went smoothly, and he now has over 160 people in his organization, spanning product lines, geographies, and cultures. As a Black man in such a visible role, Kwesi has realized that representation really matters. Through his volunteer recruiting work at his alma mater Howard University and through coaching his son’s robotics club, he’s come to appreciate that people often don’t know what’s possible until they see someone like them doing it. He’s adopted a responsibility to be seen and be present. He enjoys making a connection with students to show what a person of color can do. “I may not see the culmination of our equality efforts in my tenure at Salesforce, but I can continue making progress for the next generation,” Kwesi says.
To keep up in an industry where the constant is change, Kwesi says he reads a lot and is not shy about engaging in conversation with his network of peers in the industry at other companies and from college. He also talks with Salesforce customers across a variety of sectors about how to effectively do Site Reliability Engineering. He takes in all these data points and different views and brings them all back to Salesforce, marrying them with his vision of where the industry is going and tailoring them to what will work at Salesforce’s volume and scale.
From getting into cloud computing at a relatively early stage when he joined Salesforce, to scaling an organization and serving as a role model, Kwesi’s main goal is simple: to help others fulfill their potential. He’s never been overly concerned about what his title is, but rather, prefers to keep an open mind about the challenges and opportunities in front of him. He maintains a maniacal focus on ensuring that Salesforce services continually evolve to remain resilient to failures, and that incidents resulting from failures are communicated and resolved as soon as possible. Kwesi hopes to continue playing a role in serving our customers better and better for years to come.
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