Find the person who’ll make your new system stick
Anytime you build something big and new, someone inside the company has to own it, and it can’t be the outside team that built it.
Part of the problem with pulling off these crazy complicated things is that you need an internal advocate. Somebody inside the business who’s actually good at this type of thing. And finding that person inside the business is the tricky part.
Anytime anybody takes on some crazy new infrastructure thing, like building out the Perfect Pipeline, there has to be an internal advocate. An owner. Someone inside who takes it over, learns it and becomes the in-house super nerd who fixes problems (whatever the problem is).
It can’t be us
If we build something and implement it, and nobody inside owns it, then checking it, helping with it, fixing it, following up and making sure it works all stays with us. All the follow-up. I don’t think that’s something we want to do. It’s not good for the company either. A company should own its own systems.
There has to be an owner. I don’t think it can be us.
Anytime anybody takes on some crazy new infrastructure thing, there has to be an internal advocate.
Half super nerd, half cheerleader
I picture someone with as many of the attributes I bring to a project as possible, except hopefully better. They can do the technology piece. And they can also do the human advocacy piece: get people excited about it, train them, teach them and help them fix the bugs.
Most people are stronger at one half than the other. A super nerd who can’t bring people along ends up with a perfect system nobody uses. A great cheerleader who can’t fix anything ends up with an excited team and a broken system.
If you have to hire them
Ideally, that person already works for you, and you find them, promote them, train them and teach them. If you can’t find them in the company, you have to hire someone to do it.
And unfortunately, if you hire that person and it doesn’t work out, they carry the weight of the entire project. Once the outside team steps back, that person is the project as far as everyone is concerned. Technically, they work for the company, and so do the people who built it. But we all know the psychology of the whole thing puts it all on that one person.
So there has to be an internal advocate, an owner, over anything this big. I don’t think it can be us. And the question I still can’t answer is how to identify those people. I don’t know yet. If you’re about to build something big, start looking for yours before the build starts.