I’m fresh off a trip to Iceland (66 degrees north!) where I walked under many waterfalls and near two (!) glaciers. I have loved hearing from some of you new subscribers – welcome! – and thanks so much to my many DevRel and growth friends who have subscribed here as well <3
Today, I got an exciting announcement: I’ve started a new job as the Head of Marketing for Oso, the platform that makes it easy to add RBAC, sharing, fine-grained access, or any other permissions model you can think of to your apps. The permissions-as-a-service space is relatively new as the trend of offloading developer toil continues to grow in popularity, following the giants like Stripe and Twilio.
Oso makes it possible for developers to work on the parts of their app that deliver customer value, not the tedious parts of access that take time and energy away from projects and delay release dates. Oso makes authorization simpler so you can build better collaboration experiences for your customers.
Why Oso?
As Rolland Garros said, victory belongs to the most tenacious. Graham Neray, who I worked with at MongoDB for 5 or 6 years – who is counting?-- is the CEO of Oso, and although he and the team gave me a hard sell, it was a very easy decision for me to make. Graham is probably the hardest working person I know, he’s relentless in his desire to do things right and he and I share a lot of the same values that we developed early in our career at MongoDB. While he’s incredibly accomplished in his own right, no work is too low for him – he’s always down to pick up the trash – a quality I really admire and wish to emulate every day.
I also saw a strongly realized customer-first attitude on this team. Lots of companies say they are customer first, but then you realize that they only care about their paying customers or they just say they’re customer-first so they can sign deals. Oso really lives the value of “work for the customer". Engineers spend 20% of their time doing customer-facing work, and everyone on the team sits on customer calls. In the conversations I’ve had with team members, few have spoken without referencing the voice of the customer, something that is very challenging to emulate.
The Tido Framework
As referenced above, there were a lot of pros when it came to Oso. I had pre-existing trust built with the founder and the overlap of development and software security was appealing to me. Still, it’s important to have a framework for evaluating your options and I was thankful to have a great teacher in Tido Carriero, who offered me his framework for evaluating big career opportunities, which I found extremely helpful and relevant for just about anyone looking at a new role:
The Reporting Line: Do you believe that your manager and your manager’s boss are people you can learn from? Do you have conviction in them as leaders? Your reporting line is your support system. They hire your peers, and the best people hire the greatest talent. If this line is not strong, you end up working with people who you are less likely to learn from, who won’t be effective advocates for you or your career, or folks who don’t have the background to have strong instincts that make teams and companies successful.
The Francesca-shaped hole: Is there a big problem that you can uniquely solve? Is it something that you’ve done before, or an area where you feel uniquely qualified to figure out over a 6-18 month period? This, along with your reporting line, are your markers for success. If the problem was not Francesca shaped – for example a few companies I spoke to were looking for brand experts who could help with product marketing and category creation, areas of marketing where I have less expertise. With Oso, I have conviction that I can help them drive more awareness and usage of Oso Cloud and I have the leadership skills and expertise to build out a marketing team to support their next stage of growth.
The ROI: Is there an outsized opportunity that will come from this – monetary or otherwise – that motivates you to do an amazing job? For me, money is important, I’d love to own an amazing ski house, but the opportunity to learn from Graham and work alongside folks who have the same hard working ethos was critical for me. I know that working with folks of this caliber on a problem as big as authorization would be incredibly rewarding and important for my career trajectory. Additionally, I know this job is experience that will help me in my side gig as an angel investor – running an entire marketing org is a step up from running Growth, Dev Rel and Demand Gen teams, which will help me advocate for allocation in companies I want to invest in and future board seats.
I hope this framework is helpful for you as you think about future career transitions. I’m super excited to be back with my MongoDB family and I’m thrilled that I get to share some of my journeys at Oso with this community.
I’ve never been able to accomplish anything meaningful without community – and I am so fortunate to have an incredible network of friends who supported me as I explored the next stage in my career.. Thank you so much to my people, namely Ed Sim, Lenny Pruss, Ian Livingstone, Samantha Richard and Meg Goetch!