Darian Wilkin Email & Phone Number

Managed Pre-Sales & Success (post-sales) Solutions Engineers & Architects through a tumultuous period of reductions in force, leadership changes, and challenging market conditions. Through that, I'm most proud that I can say nobody on my team left. No quitting, no lateral moves, and no firings.In my role, I worked closely with the Success and Sales teams to shepherd key growth opportunities and net new customers through their journey, as well as handling churn and contraction risks directly with my team and their customers. As one of the most experienced in the entire revenue organization, I mentored almost every member of the Sales, Success, and Solutions team before I was a manager, and continued that mentorship and guidance as I transitioned into leadership. I did this by acting as a player/coach who could step into any interaction with a customer and show the account team how to execute in an organized, empathetic, and pragmatic way.I've also designed and implemented several programs with specific objectives and driven those programs to success:Product Capability Requests:- Designed, implemented, and managed the PCR process, which drives product feedback directly from key customers to product & engineering teams for quick action and roadmap prioritization. This quickly became a favorite process of the ELT and has been implemented as a core product roadmap process.Fish School:- Created and ran a daily enablement session open to all members of Sales, Success, and Solutions-- Designed to help new employees onboard more quickly with a daily Q&A-- Became a cultural touchpoint for the organization that is now well known and a popular daily sessionDashboards & Metrics- Designed and implemented dashboards in key tools to monitor metrics that were previously invisible-- This led to a several hundred percent increase in our generated product feedback-- This also drove "deal hygiene" to a point of rigor and consistency that it had previously lacked

Greater Denver Area

Worked on the bleeding edge of Cloud Infrastructure to deliver creative solutions for DigitalOcean's largest customers. Owned several million in revenue in conjunction with my account team.

Greater Denver Area

DigitalOcean's Product Documentation team had only recently been created when I joined, so there was still a lot that wasn't stable.- Helped create and refine onboarding materials (which didn't exist yet)- Helped define process in a rapidly growing team- Wrote large portions of the Managed Databases documentation- Completed a review of all existing documentation to ensure the material is still accurate (hundreds of pages)

Greater Denver Area

This role, which was essentially a training and quality assurance manager, was brand new in DigitalOcean's Customer Support & Success team. We were growing rapidly and realized our current training methodology didn't scale. As I was already operating in a training capacity, I was offered the job outright when it was created.- Built ~30 hours of onboarding materials from scratch, with different versions for different roles- Ran an RFP process for an LMS, found the best candidate, negotiated the contract, and implemented it within our team integrated with our internal SSO.- Traveled to India and New York multiple times to train new hires in person- Trained our team extensively on Salesforce as we implemented it in late 2017- Delivered multiple company-wide briefings on various important topics- Worked closely with multiple other departments to level up their training- Portions of my training were co-opted by our People team as part of company-wide onboarding

Greater Denver Area

Managed DigitalOcean's third shift support team in the interim while we the team was re-organized.At the conclusion of this period, I was offered the position of first shift lead, but another exciting opportunity came up at the same time, the role of Senior Enablement Specialist.

Greater Denver Area

Responded to tickets from customers asking for help with complex Linux topics, DigitalOcean products, and billing. Although DigitalOcean is a self-managed provider, Support provides guidance for almost any topic we can research. As a result, on a typical day I would write responses that would tell a customer:- How to set up a LEMP stack- How to access log files for a web server- How to optimize MySQL- How to configure a CMS like WordPress or Drupal- How to recover from a compromised server- How to better secure their serverAnd many, many, many more.- Received a stock grant in recognition for exceptional work- Was selected as "trainer" in an unofficial capacity- Over the period of a year, trained DigitalOcean's entirely new Indian support team (~24 people) personally onsite in Bangalore.

Greater Los Angeles Area

Due to my previous success with the company-wide server optimization competition, I was brought onto the CloudTech team. CloudTech at MediaTemple handled VIP support for customers who paid a premium.- Rebuilt and optimized multiple internal CloudTech scripts used for server optimization- Was originally hired for the night shift, worked my way up to the day shift- Was appointed as "trainer" when required by a new addition to the team- Received multiple commendations as a result of positive customer feedback and optimization work

Los Angeles, California

- Responded to customer phone calls, tickets, and chat messages related to billing and technical issues for mostly CentOS servers running Plesk and CPanel- Moved from L1 to L2 tech faster than any previous employee (so I was told)- Received multiple commendations due to positive feedback from customers- Won a company-wide server optimization competition

Washington D.C. Metro Area

- Received honors at the Defense Language Institute for scores in Arabic.- Received battalion-level award for work building classified applications at the National Security Agency- Discharged honorably in 2014

Computer Science

Education record

Activities and Societies: Drama Club, ASL club, Wrestling