Impactful work takes planning, preparation and follow through

(The art piece is done by a SF local artist of migrant workers working in California central valley)

Yesterday, my direct report, a principal software engineer who is an expert in our C++ code base presented to over 150 engineers on a piece of code walk through of a “Life of a single data event as it is indexed and searched”. This is a very detailed, meticulous piece of work over the span of 3 months. 3 practice runs (with me, my team of 3 engineers and with 6 beta students). 5 interactions of content to clarify the content and presentation. 1 trial post production video editing.
After the 1 hour and 30 minutes of video content, we are doing one more round of post production editing to get better audio, camera and webcast material spliced together.

All this work is in preparation for

  • Presenting this material to every newly hired engineer to Splunk
  • Have existing engineers watch it before they join the Splunk C++ team
  • As a template for how to build deeper content

All this work might go under appreciated if we also don’t invest in

  • Finding a good baseline measurement before the training
  • Measuring again after the training
  • Taking feedback to collect what other pieces of content to create

It is a lot of work to prepare, but hopefully worth the effort