The Cloud Transformation of Adobe
A conversation with Brandon Pulsipher, Vice President of Cloud Operations at Adobe.
In this Spotlight, we will discuss how to leverage failure and the importance of agility and efficiency to improve the customer experience. The conversation will then shift to the power of partnership and we will conclude with Adobe’s secret to organizational transformation.
Listen to the full story on the AWS Conversations with Leaders podcast
Failure is not a problem. The same failure, again and again, is a problem.”
How to Leverage Failure
The more we can drive understanding towards agility, and the ability to be elastic and scale-up, our questions around failure change. How to prevent failure is important, but what we learn from failure is paramount. Inevitably, there will be some degree of failure in any agile approach. We have to understand and acknowledge that risk and make sure we learn from it and adapt. Failure is not a problem. The same failure, again and again, is a problem.
When it comes to agility or efficiency, it doesn't have to be one or the other. There's a sort of two-for benefit you can get.”
Agility and Efficiency Tether Together for Success
It doesn't have to be one or the other when it comes to agility or efficiency. There's a sort of “two-for” benefit you can get. Great agility and the ability to be elastic and spin up and spin down can create a great customer experience and drive better efficiency.
The concept of agility and the engineering world making its way to IT has been a fun merger of mindsets in the Cloud journey. We've had to charter a little bit of our own path through that DevOps SRE. What does that mean? How do we get there? How do we move from the CIS Admin world to this new infrastructure approach as code? We've been through quite a few organizational adjustments and changes to get there. There's no industry definition or set of standards that necessarily define that, so I think a little bit has to be defined individually by each company or organization and their objectives.
What's essential in terms of efficiency is how we make sure we're using every dollar the best way and creating value. We all want to drive every dollar we can into innovation, creativity, and value for our customers. If we're spending extra dollars on infrastructure, we're not able to do that. I think it's about making sure we have the right balance in that investment.
The Power of Partnership
There's never been a better time for Cloud migration or transformation because, unlike a few years ago, nowadays we have so many great examples. We see value in partnering with AWS because we're still migrating workloads to the Cloud, and occasionally we're hitting something that we haven't done before. The ability to call on our partners and say, “Hey, you've probably seen this before, we haven't. Help us understand how we might navigate this and what you've seen work or not work so that we can try and avoid those pitfalls.”
The Secret to Organizational Transformation
Transformational ideas often come from the people who are on the front lines. They usually have the best insights. If we make these transformations without getting the input and dialogue with the teams, it would be a mess and a miss because there's so much we can learn. We struggled a little bit with this kind of DevOps mindset transformation, but we have refined our secret sauce with the balance of frontline managers, executive sponsorships, and committed leaders.
During our organizational transformation, we sat down every week with the frontline set of managers and directors. We shared stories, talked about the need, and we didn't let up. We did that month after month. People started to see that this was real, and we're serious about transformation and everyone’s voice in the process. You could feel it, you could see our organization coming together. The push wasn't coming from the bottom as an idea that people felt would go nowhere. It wasn't a top-down mandate. It was this combination of bringing the right things together. It took some time, and it definitely has been a journey, but the way we came together was pure magic.
Transformation Insights From Adobe
- Be willing to try new things
- Be vulnerable, speak up
- Find the right partners to help you along the way
The secret sauce for transformation is to balance the frontline managers and the executive sponsorships and leaders. By listening to the stories from the frontline managers and directors we came together as an organization. Not being pushed from the bottom or a top-down mandate, it was a combination of bringing the right things together. It was an amazing experience to be a part of.”
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