How have you leveraged your influence to make an impact in the past?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

While working at ABC, I noticed that internal customers were creating expensive
resources but still paying per-use rates. This meant they had large resources
allocated but were not fully utilizing them, leading to inefficiencies in both
our fleet and overall system performance. It became clear that there were
misaligned incentives.
Task:
I needed to influence multiple internal teams and stakeholders to resize their
resources to better align utilization with actual demand. This required
gathering data, negotiating with internal customers, and proposing a solution
that both addressed the technical inefficiencies and fit within their
operational requirements.
Action:
 1. Data Gathering: I asked my engineers to gather data on resource utilization
    across internal customers. We discovered that most customers were using less
    than 5% of their provisioned capacity.
 2. Engagement with Stakeholders: I began by reaching out to two of the largest
    internal users—XYZ and PQR—both of which I had close relationships with. I
    framed the problem as a multi-phased solution that would allow them to
    resize their resources gradually without impacting their services.
 3. Cross-team Alignment: I then engaged with the Front-End (FE) team and its
    Senior Manager to inform them of this opportunity to shape the traffic and
    reduce strain on the backend fleet. This led to further discussions about
    aligning future traffic patterns to optimize fleet usage.
 4. Initiating Pricing Discussions: With the success of the initial efforts, I
    initiated discussions around refining the internal pricing model, presenting
    data to show that many more customers could benefit from resizing, thereby
    reducing backend load and unnecessary resource allocation.

Result:
 * Backend Fleet Reduction: We successfully reduced the backend fleet size by
   7-9%, leading to a reduction in overall system load and minimizing metadata
   overhead.
 * Cost Savings: Customers were able to save costs as well by reducing their
   reliance on over-provisioned resources and lowering the number of workers
   required for their applications.
 * System Improvements: By pushing out scaling cliffs for the load aggregator
   service, we avoided potential bottlenecks, improving operational stability.
 * Pricing Strategy Refinement: This work led to ongoing refinements in ABC's
   internal pricing model, aiming to align more closely with public pricing or
   move towards a more robust per-use product.

Reflection:
One thing I would do differently is celebrate the success more broadly across
teams. I later realized that while the FE team was actively working on resizing
streams, the Orchestration team had been giving conflicting advice to customers,
suggesting they over-provision when in doubt. Greater coordination and
communication could have avoided this issue and created a more unified effort.

Anonymous · Answer

In Q1 2023, as the SDM for Datapath Responder Runtime team, I was told by my
leadership to drop all the project work and focus on Efficiency work to reduce
the cost of service as it was a directive from the VP. This was conflicting with
my team’s goal to get certified to handle critical data as a platform. One of
the projects for critical data certification was to support HTTPS instead of
HTTP. The approach we took was to move the web container from the current custom
solution to Amazon standard Coral Web server. There were 3 engineers working on
this project and we had completed about 60% of the work. Stopping this work to
pick up another project which had high chances of failure would mean
demoralizing the team and delaying the certification timelines. SDE’s promotion
to Sr was tied to this project as well.
I had to use my influence with my leadership to keep funding this project. I
presented my case that moving to Coral Web server would make the platform more
efficient due to variety of performance knobs such as better thread scheduling,
more efficient metric emission, etc. I also leveraged the TPM and Security
Certifiers to provide a strong business case to not delay the certification
process. Finally, I also committed to finishing the web server migration and the
efficiency experiments with performance knobs by mid Q2 to realize efficiency
gains from this work before the Q3 and Q4 peaks.

Anonymous · Answer

At Auctane, while working on a APIs for a reporting service, my developer was
blocked due to product managers input. The product manager wanted to add more
search parameters to the API, I understand that any delays would impact the
project timeline. I had built a good rappot with this product manager and used
my influcene to prioritize my devs request. This unblocked my developer to move
forward. It is important to understand the dynamics in an org to make an
influence without authority.

How have you leveraged your influence to make an impact in the past?

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