Solution Architect: 2nd week iteration on my job at Yahoo!

(Jardin des Tuileries)

It has been an exciting 2 weeks for me in my new role as a Solution Architect for Yahoo! Media

I have been meeting with a few of our customers which has helped me firm up my thinking of how to approach this role.

I break it down into 3 areas. How am I measured? What are my daily duties? What is my approach to my job?

1) How am I measured?

• First and foremost, I represent my team and the product. I am first point of contact for my customers. I am measured by customer satisfaction. I need to understand the customer expectation, whether those are realistic, manage the expectations, and then deliver to those.
• In order to do that, I need to find a way to measure cust sat on mailing list, the various team’s customer sat number and the overall engagement. Take a baseline, set a target, get support from my executive team, and measure iteratively.

2) What are my daily duties

• I will break down requirements into queue items for my teams.
• I will prototype.
• I will troubleshoot and unblock the developers
• I will document architectual changes, facilitate architects to reach a decision in an SLA that the customer expects.
• I will identify large gaps early on and feed only important items to my teams.
• I will document solutions, communicate them internally as well externally.
• I will provide training to new engineers, editors, product managers
• Feedback to the executive team on large pain points, proposal for process improvements, known short coming of the system.
• I will plan ahead for my customers and my development team.
• I will fix and write new documentation
• I will be an evangelist
• I will document the current process, measure, set target and figure out who needs to improve the long pole.

3) My approach to the job

• measure and iterate on customer expectation verses what we are delivering
• encourage dark launches of sites, so that when something is good enough, we launch and iterate. Don’t do huge 3 month long projects
• answer a question with a link to the document or write it and send a link to it
• hand the customer a working environment. Do the grunt work, and if it’s painful, then automate it
• feedback to my team, and make sure my feedback is small in volume, big on importance
• figure out a way to have peer feedback for my self, my teams, and even my customers to build in customer satisfaction one of the key feedback loops and measurement of success