Each Of Us Has A Part of The Solution, Together We Have The Whole!
Splunk is a company of thousands of talented individuals, distributed across product development offices in 8 offices in the U.S., AUNZ, Europe, and Asia.
How do we do our best work collectively and continue to push innovation while expanding at hypergrowth rate? How do we overcome the boundaries of timezone, physical location, and organization rigidity in order to create the most innovative products and solutions for our customers?
After working on Engineering Productivity at Splunk for the last 3 years, I struggled to understand WHY I chose which projects I devote time and attention to. There was a common thread, there was something there to the madness.
The list of seemly random efforts all have some type of common theme that my beloved wife, Katherine point out this weekend when I ask her for her always piercingly accurate perspective.
Here is the laundry list of random efforts:
- GO URL Shortner – Community bookmarking
- Founding Engineer bootcamp – 6 hours of hands on workshops
- Founding #weekly-tech-talks – weekly tech talks for thousands of engineers
- Starting engineering book of the quarter – 2 books per quarter to every engineer
- Founding Friday Tips – Weekly technical tips from Tony’s perspective
- Starting #ama-[any person] and starting the first #ama-with-VP-eng
- Voice Of The Customer – Bring in customers to talk to engineers about use cases
- Founding and participated in numerous Slack communities (#bookclubs, #coffee-geeks, #badminton, #women-in-tech, #hackathons, #women-engineers, #noob-splunk-eng)
- Mentoring 8+ engineers (7 female engineers and 1 male) – Intentional choice
- Writing technical documentation on how to get things done
- Tools to enable engineers to publish, write more docs and be found
- Answering questions on Slack
- Founding of impactfulengineer.org – Inspiring Engineers Through Interviews With Engineering Leaders
- #eng-blog – public Splunk Engineering blog
- Bringing in world-renowned technical speakers
- Helping with really random questions from engineers (helping to advocate for a East Bay shuttle from Dublin to San Francisco)
In my next post, I will try to talk about the common themes I have identified
- Building Communities
- Working and Thinking In Open
- Continuous Learning & Growth Mindset
- Amplify and Leverage
- Diversity Leads To The Best Solutions
- Breaking Down The Silos