In the fall of 2021, I found myself burnt out both professionally and personally. I was ready for a change. At NCR I was proud of what our team had accomplished - we built a group of over seventy people across four timezones, leading the journey to the cloud, and adopting better incident response and observability. The pandemic, however, had taken a great toll on me and my family. I spent much of it working long hours making sure restaurants could continue to conduct business and survive, at the expense of my personal health and the health of my family.
So it was quite fortunate that I was introduced to Splunk, a software company that had a great product, with smart people who really cared about doing things the right way. There was a Senior Engineering Manager position that was open there, which was a step back title-wise from my Executive Director role at NCR, but the opportunity to work at a high growth tech company with top talent intrigued me. I spoke to multiple people during that process who talked about how easy the promotion process was and that I didn’t need to worry. So I jumped in.
Almost three years later, I was still a Senior Manager. What happened? Well, I chalk a lot of it up to mistakes I made in the onboarding process.
Define Success
In retrospect, the first big mistake I made was that I took what I heard in the interview and what people told me as the criteria for success in my company. Splunk seemed to me to be very culture-driven (and to its credit helped me numerous times put my family first as I came out of my burnout from my previous role), and so I doubled down on ensuring that my burnt-out initial team was healthy and thriving. I also made it clear that I wanted to be on that path for promotion to ensure that we were all on the same page.
What I should have done was ask: who has gone from Senior Manager to Director in the last 12 months, and what were the things that they did that got them there? What kinds of impact did they have? If I would have asked those questions I would have seen that I was nowhere near a position that would have warranted a Director title at Splunk. We all later admitted that to each other but only after about a year of working hard toward something that didn’t fit my goals.
So when people onboard, I recommend to define success based on actual facts rather than what people say. The U.S. culture especially is very positive and encouraging, and one has to be intentional about getting to the real facts.
Limited Window
The second big mistake I made was that I had a limited window for onboarding to certain responsibilities and I didn’t respect the size of that window. After a year of my first role owning the metrics for Splunk’s Enterprise Cloud, leadership expanded my role to include their entire logs solution, and in addition another observability-oriented team. This was coming off an unexpected layoff in February 2023 and what, in retrospect, was the beginning of Splunk’s journey to acquisition by Cisco.
In the book The First 90 Days they talk about as a leader spending the first 30-60 days listening then really providing your opinion to a team. But I didn't follow this advice and was in the mentality that I had a limited time to make a good impression, and therefore aggressively sought to showcase my leadership within the first few weeks. The third observability-oriented team had ambitious, smart people on it, and, without first establishing a foundation of trust with them, I shared with them candidly that I thought they were off track of an important project. This, to me, was all in the spirit of getting them to where they wanted to go, but they took it differently.
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