In this role I continued my leadership in customer adoption; leading a team of TAMs. The challenge here was the scale of the Commercial segment with a higher ratio of customers per TAM. The pooled TAM model was introduced soon after my arrival and was a new one for New Relic. Implementing this was challenging, but achieved through deep partnerships grown with the NR business, sales, and the individual TAMs.I started by creating a skills matrix that covered product capabilities as well as industry tech. The TAMs then self-evaluated their ability in each of these from Low to SME. This accomplished two goals. It facilitated assignments of the work items coming into the queue, and identified areas where TAMs could "Level-Up" their skills by shadowing the SMEs in their delivery of enablement content to our customers. It also fostered the team of mentorship that always reaps great rewards when establishing a team and identified areas where individuals could step into leadership tasks.I continued to develop my somewhat unique approach to leadership. This is one where I create a space where my team can feel free to share with me and each other what they are feeling and needing to be successful; calling out the importance of a work-life integration. This differs from the traditional concept of work/life balance that implies that the two are separate, when in reality work flows into life and vice versa.This was also a role where I stepped up and created many strategic partnerships across NR orgs. I partnered with education to develop persona-based customer training and certifications which leveraged my experience as a customer. I built bridges from the East team to Central and West where there was low interaction when I first joined. I built many bridges to product teams to escalate feature and bug fixes and to help with prioritization. I placed no boundaries on myself for how high and broad I could reach and New Relic supported that fully!

In this role at AppDynamics I led a team of Americas Customer Success Engineers that covered the Enterprise/Strategic segments. The overall book of business for our segment totaled over $200M and our accounts covered by CS resulted in retention rates that were three times that of non-CS covered accounts. I built my team around the core of mentoring and collaboration. I established a program through COVID to increase customer engagement by creating a library of content that brought consistent delivery by the CSEs and brought valuable adoption hints/tips/tricks within the context of the customer data. Delivery of this content was reviewed by the team to consistently improve individual performance and a polished result to our customers. The results for both building the team and increasing adoption rates was amazing.We also created a process for measuring the success KPIs for our customers that generated a health score. That score could then be used to identify the customers that were at risk of churn or to dig deeper into why they were so successful. In the case of churn that would generate engagements with those customers to ensure that they were aligning the product to their own goals and create a mutual success plan to get them back on track.As a leader of ICs, I created a space where they were free to share challenges, struggles, and successes from both their professional and personal lives. This was the synergy of the work/life integration. Through weekly touchpoints I was able to share, listen, and coach my employees as well as get them the resources that they needed to be the most successful in their roles. This gave them the ability to bring their best self forward to their customers. I received 100% employee NPS for my entire leadership tenure at AppD; something I will always remeber with great pride!

I am very passionate about the quality of the end user experience. I make it my goal to align that passion with the business and technical needs of our customers. I take the time to understand the customer perspective, and the perspective and needs of their customers, as I feel that is critical to moving them forward in a way that fits them best. Working in coordination with my customers and team, I help develop plans that drive adoption of the AppDynamics products that my customers already own; making sure that they have the tools that they need for success.My perspective as a customer of observability platforms gave me a unique perspective and advantage when engaging with customers. Knowing at a personal level the pains associated with MTTR, Uptime, Defining SLA/O, Cost of Downtime, Impacts to SDLC Pipelines, showed instant credibility. Then being able to align product capabilities to deliver on those success KPIs was where the magic happens.Being a part of a team of Sales Reps, and Engineers, my individual book of business was over $25M. Here I learned how to identify and mitigate risk, as well as develop deep relationships with my customer champions that revealed expansion opportunities.It is a pleasure to work as a part of a diverse global team that all share this vision. I feel that the unique perspectives and experiences that each individual brings to the tale and shares, makes us so able to deliver innovative, and quality solutions to our customers.

I have earned the opportunity to take a lead position in a group that I have helped to form over the past four years. It's exciting for me as I have, and will continue to be heavily invested in the group's success! My goal is not to manage, but to lead extremely talented individuals to accomplish amazing things. I look forward to the triumphs, accept the challenges, and strive to never stop learning!One of our goals is to Increase the efficiency of the 1st level team. This is being accomplished by:1. Leveraging our Observability tools (Splunk and AppDynamics) to their fullest capabilities2. Increasing the knowledge of the 1st level through training and documentation.3. Reducing the volume of non-actionable alerts.4. Improving their utilization of troubleshooting toolsets.5. Bringing in new alerts that are proper indicators of application health.These have increased the number of calls that are handled within the 1st level team (90% first call resolution) and have reduced the number of call-outs to the 3rd level Engineering and Development teams so they can stay focused on building out the next generation infrastructure and code to deliver a class-leading software experience to our clients.

As an Operations Engineer, we have the ability to add value throughout the I.T. organization, but our primary focus is to reduce technical debt among all Operations groups. The main way that is achieved is to bring operational tasks into our NOC so we can free up our Engineers to improve our current infrastructure and technologies as well as work in delivery teams to bring new products and features to market in a much more rapid fashion.We also promote new applications/tools that identify system issues/bottlenecks faster to reduce MTTR reactively, and MTTF proactively. Some of those are:AppDynamics: We use this APM tool to instrument our applications to identify application leading up to and during a failure and using those to determine thresholds for future alerting to avoid failures in the future. We also combine these metrics into dashboards that can be used to quickly spot-check the health of an application. The implementation of a tool such as AppD allows us to also shift from being "metric focused" to "business transaction focused". What this means is that the speed of the business transactions can be an earlier and simpler determination of health through its baselining, which many times can precede the failures by minutes or even hours. It is a culture-shift, but one worth investing in.Splunk: This tool gives every I.T. group instant access to the logs critical to determining what an application is doing at any given time without having to grant access to thousands of complex systems. Those logs can be used to correlate events and generate reports on when errors started and stopped within an application. Dashboards are also created to keep track of common errors within applications to give a health-meter over time.It is truly an art to correlate and confirm events between AppD and Splunk to provide concrete evidence of what went wrong in a failure, as well as to provide data for how it can be prevented in the future.

Work as a member of a team that stands up and maintains the web front-end and middleware tiers for all of the internal and client-facing applications.To achieve this, we have a high-level of knowledge of both what is directly within our scope, as well as understanding what is needed from our partners in Security, Networking, Server Engineering, and Development. To be honest, we were doing Dev-Ops before it was a buzzword. To us, it was a natural progression of a logical workflow, where projects thrived through constant communication across all of our partners to get the job done. We worked very hard at building relationships across these groups based upon trust.Setup, Integration and Administration of many technologies including:IIS6/7/8, WebLogic 8/9/10/11, Sun Web Server 6/7, Layer7 SSG, Windows Server Platform, Solaris 9/10, RHEL, F5 LTM/GTM