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Follow and Commit: A Player Coach Discovers FinOps with Brad Christian (1/2)

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This week in episode 263 we’re joined by returning guest Brad Christian. In this part 1 of our discussion with Brad you will hear why he chose to purse a role at a startup, what it was like learning FinOps as a cloud economist, thoughts on managers as both players and coaches, and Brad’s views on the benefits of technical certifications.

Original Recording Date: 01-15-2024

Topics – Welcoming Back Brad Christian, The Attraction of Startup Life, The Player Coach and Staying Technical, Becoming a Cloud Economist, Certifications Provide Structure

2:47 – Welcoming Back Brad Christian

  • Brad Christian now works for Computacenter.
  • Brad’s career revolved around the VMware ecosystem for a long time. He was the Dallas / Fort Worth VMware User Group leader for a long time and achieved the VCDX (VMware Certified Design Expert) certification at one point, which led him to working at VMware.
    • Most of Brad’s work at VMware was in the Networking and Security business unit.
    • Brad was promoted to front line manager at one point and did that for a while, being what he calls a player coach.
    • Brad started to feel technically stale and that it was time to move on. He tells us he will always have found memories of his time working at VMware.
  • Brad mentioned he has loved Linux his entire career, and at one point he was given the opportunity to work on Apache software at a startup. He had never done a startup and felt he needed to go for it.

5:10 – The Attraction of Startup Life

  • Brad felt like working for a startup was a gap in his resume to this point, but he was still nervous about it. Brad had worked for large customers in the past, for a VAR, and then at VMware up to the point of joining the startup.
    • Brad was going from a large, process driven organization into a startup.
    • “But it’s something I felt like I needed to do to just understand the way the world works.” – Brad Christian, on joining a startup
  • What does Brad wish he had asked about startup life before taking the role?
    • Many processes we might find in a larger organization do not exist. If you complain about a gap, be aware you may be asked to fill the gap you’ve just vocalized (i.e. a new task on your plate).
    • “The reason I went to this particular company…it wasn’t technical. It had to do with people.” – Brad Christian, on making the move to a startup
    • From a leadership perspective, Brad has experience as a front line manager / front line leader. He has never been interested in moving up to the director level (managing managers) or higher.
    • Brad shares a pattern he has seen where “herds” of people move from company to company normally centered around a specific leader. You may have seen this at a company that has a leadership change. A new leader brings in their people.
      • “I think it’s just a perfectly natural part of life that you want to work with people that you know and trust, that are going to have your back, so you can build out organizations. And when somebody’s built a dream team, you know, they like to keep the team together….” – Brad Christian
      • Brad has observed this pattern at multiple levels in different organizations.
    • Brad was invited to join one of these “herds” going to an Apache software company that was a startup with some proven leadership.
    • A leader at VMware asked Brad to come along with 7 others to go and build out the leadership organization for a marketing department at this startup.
    • Brad was invited based on his experience in field facing roles. He had built field teams and hired a number of SEs (solution engineers / sales engineers).
    • This role seemed like a next iteration for Brad. It was leadership, but it was about field enablement.
    • Brad suggests if you’ve been an SE or someone in sales, the natural career progression is going into leadership or into technical marketing.
      • “You’re crafting what the pitch is. You’re creating the decks. You’re doing the art of pre-sales, which is taking complicated subjects and breaking them down and making them simpler.” – Brad Christian, on the role of tech marketing
    • Brad was brought in to help with the employee onboarding process because at the startup, it was not great.
      • From here, Brad tells us things didn’t go very well.
    • The idea of going to the startup was pitched to Brad as being able to work with people he knew and trusted and who he knew were competent.
      • “It wasn’t just that I felt flattered or anything. It’s that I knew the people I’d be working with were smart…. I like to be around other smart people. Knowing around you’re going to be around top folks is awesome…and I knew that I would learn.” – Brad Christian
    • Brad did not have a marketing background (only what he learned from his field experience). Others going to the startup were well versed in marketing fundamentals like doing marketing research, creating marketing qualified leads, etc.
      • “There was a whole black art to that that I got really exposed to and really learned, which was very cool….stuff you couldn’t learn in school.” – Brad Christian, on learning marketing from his peers
  • John says we’ve spoken to people about various reasons they joined a company, but this might be the first time someone has knowing and trusting the people one would get to work with trumped everything else. According to Brad, there were too major things:
    • The religious disposition around Linux – Brad wanted to be involved in something surrounding an open source project a least once
    • The other thing was the people Brad would get to work with and learn from
  • We’ve spoken to other guests who have pointed out working for a larger company provides a perception of stability compared to a startup. But with the layoffs and happenings in the last few years in tech (including John being part of a 12,000 reduction in force at Google in early 2023 – listen to Episode 220 – John Got Fired for the full story), it is only a perception.
    • “There’s no certainty around working at an established company. There’s the illusion of that certainty though. And maybe that’s important for some people as long as they realize that’s all it is.” – John White
    • As a manager, Brad has been involved in layoffs. He mentions there is often very little careful planning, managers and directors have little to no control of who is impacted, and it is usually done on a spreadsheet.
    • John remembers his front line manager contacting him 2 months after being impacted (the manager mentioning they had just found out John was impacted).
    • There seems to be less differentiation in stability at a startup compared to a well established company than people might think.
  • On the flip side of the stability topic, startups may need processes and collateral to be built because it doesn’t exist like it might at a large company.
    • There were many things Brad already knew how to do (use Salesforce to build and align accounts to territories, hire and recruit new employees, train new employees, etc.) going into the startup, but he had not built all that from scratch.
    • “Being able to go into a place that maybe did not have things built out like they needed to be, knowing that I could come in there and I had a playbook and I that could quickly build the procedures and the structures…absolutely that was attractive and something I knew I could do quickly and be successful.” – Brad Christian, on the attractiveness of startup life

14:41 – The Player Coach and Staying Technical

  • Nick cites the above as architectural principles applied in a new area.
    • In Brad’s career he’s never wanted to stay in one area too long. It was his experience as an architect and a pre-sales leader that positioned him well for tech marketing.
      • Brad mentions being a manager / leader is absolutely a skill.
    • “Being in tech marketing meant that I could take all these things I knew how to do as a pre-sales leader and create stuff from the next level up.” – Brad Christian, on relatable experience
  • Brad was a manager at VMware for about 7 years, and in that role it is challenging to stay technical.
    • The number of meetings you’re involved in as a manager can make it difficult to spend time doing hands-on-labs, for example.
    • Managers are pulled in many directions and often times putting out fires.
    • Brad says managers look good because of what their people are doing.
    • “I considered it my job to make my folks look really good, to promote what they were doing.” – Brad Christian, on being a manager
    • Brad has managed teams of about 13 direct reports consistently during his time as a manager. He feels it was a high compliment that none of his former team were laid off when VMware was acquired.
      • Brad built teams around products such as Cloud Foundation, vSAN, and focused on networking and security while serving as a manager at VMware. All
      • Part of Brad’s skill as a leader was “picking the right folks and enabling them to succeed.”
    • Brad mentioned the servant leader (what he considers his management style / disposition) doesn’t have the time a leader who is tooting their own horn would have.
  • In Brad’s time as a manager he was a player coach.
    • It’s less about metrics and more about attitude. Brad gives the example of early football teams where the quarterback would also serve as the coach.
    • “Having somebody who is in there as the quarterback who hands off the ball…to me that’s what a player coach is. You are watching what’s happening in the field. You are watching, and you’re seeing where the holes are. You are seeing where the gaps are, and you’re filling them.” – Brad Christian
    • The player coach is also a player. In pre-sales, that means going to meet with customers.
      • Brad really enjoys whiteboarding and discovering customer business problems, especially when a customer realizes the solution to their problem will save time or improve what they are doing.
      • A player coach can be active in engaging with customers in this way, but once you reach a certain number of direct reports, it prevents you from going into the field. Brad says then you’re no longer a player coach because you are no longer a player.
    • “It’s not about responsibilities on paper. It’s the fact that you’re actually out there participating in the activity that the organization is busy doing.” – Brad Christian, on being a player coach
      • When Brad’s responsibilities become so much that he can no longer be a player, in his mind it’s time to change roles.
    • John says this really rings true along with his experience as a first time pre-sales manager and asks about what Brad meant about staying technical. Was that about product level knowledge or technical skills involved in managing people?
      • Staying technical in the product you’re focused on isn’t too hard. You can understand the roadmap and really have no choice but to know it well.
      • When Brad says technical, he means things happening in real businesses and the concerns which need to be addressed.
        • Brad was a customer for many years before moving into pre-sales, and he feels this experience made him better positioned to succeed in pre-sales.
        • This experience as customer allows a level of relatability with customers which people who went into sales out of college likely will not have.
        • “When I say technical, that’s what I mean…keeping your finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the industry.” – Brad Christian
      • John mentions if you didn’t experience logging into individual consoles to manage things and do everything now with Ansible or Terraform, you may have lost a level of technical relatability. That’s one example that goes along with our discussion.
        • Brad mentions cloud as crippling a generation of engineers in not experiencing earlier days of building it. He’s seen numerous folks who don’t know networking as well as they should, for example.
        • Being technical isn’t only about a depth in one area. It’s about technical breadth according to Brad.

23:39 – Becoming a Cloud Economist

  • There were a number of things Brad already knew how to do for field enablement purposes going into the startup.
  • A couple of months into working for the startup, the leader who encouraged Brad to join the startup left the company.
    • Brad has kids and remained committed to doing the best he could at the startup despite that leader’s departure.
    • Over the next several months almost all the others who had followed the above leader to the startup also left the company.
    • “If I ever do go join a group of people that I respect, I’m going to make sure that they have kids. The attitude is a lot different when you’ve got mouths to feed.” – Brad Christian, on a lesson learned from joining the startup
    • John mentions it’s important to think about the constraints other people have (family and age of kids, financial constraints, etc.).
  • In the aftermath of all of the above people leaving, the company changed Brad’s role and made him a cloud economist.
    • COGS = cost of goods sold
    • Any company providing a SaaS service has costs they incur as a result of offering that service (cloud infrastructure, HR costs, other product costs, etc.). The company would then add margin to this cost and sell the product. Brad says understanding COGS is extremely difficult.
    • If you’re running a service in AWS, for example, the rates can change and effect the rate you then charge your customers. It can also cause the SaaS provider to lose money on providing their own service to customers!
    • Brad needed to understand the economics of all this and started working with some accountants on staff at his company.
    • “I knew at a technical level how clouds worked back in the day. It wasn’t until I got the cloud economics hat on and started understanding the money involved with it.” – Brad Christian, on understanding how cloud works in his new role in cloud economics
      • Brad had to learn the nuances of import and export control, whether US companies could actually offer a SaaS service in specific companies (like Brazil, as one example), etc.
    • At first Brad didn’t want to have to talk about money all the time, but he decided to dig deep and discovered FinOps.
      • Brad got certified in the discipline of FinOps from the FinOps Foundation and read the book [Cloud FinOps](https://www.finops.org/community/finops-book/ O’Reilly)
      • “I have a feeling FinOps will be more and more important in our industry as time goes by.” – Brad Christian
      • Brad says the lift to learn FinOps is not hard for those who have worked in IT. The difficulty comes in most of us not wanting to talk about money or budgets.
      • Getting certified in FinOps can be valuable to anyone in IT. You do not need to work in sales or SaaS for a tech vendor to gain value from it. Note that there are several flavors of the FinOps certifications available.
      • Brad highly recommends reading the [Cloud FinOps](https://www.finops.org/community/finops-book/ O’Reilly) book and reading the FinOps Foundation website. You can take courses or just take the exam.
      • Brad learned from the book that Target was one of the first companies who really got FinOps working well.
      • The US federal government’s OPM (Office of Personnel Management) has a system in place to evaluate any SaaS offerings before they are purchased. This ensures the provider of the SaaS service is adhering top FinOps principles and can provide cost transparency to engineering teams. If the federal government can do this as the largest company in the world, likely your organization can do it too.
      • Nick mentions there are technical aspects to learning FinOps and that we should not be fearful of not being technical if we go and learn it.
      • Brad says it has long been a challenge for developers to really understand how making a change will impact the bottom line at a company. It’s very hard to show that certain activities moved the needle. Brad says getting FinOps in place for cloud cost containment or other cost containment is a powerful tool which can help justify salaries and head count.
      • “I think if you’re a manager and you’re worried about keeping your team fully staffed and not losing head count, you should be doing FinOps.” – Brad Christian
      • John references the Technology-as-a-Service Playbook: How to Grow a Profitable Subscription by Thomas Lah as another helpful resource.
      • John says FinOps could be another tool in the toolbox to justify projects / a team’s existence and show increases in productivity.
  • Brad has received numerous calls from people he’s managed or mentored asking for advice.
    • The term unicorn is something we apply to people who are technical and have people skills. People Brad hired for pre-sales roles are those he considers unicorns.
    • Brad would ask people how close they were to money.
    • “If you are tied to profit, the closer you are to that dollar symbol the better off you are when it comes to surviving cuts.” – Brad Christian
    • Brad tells the story of one of the most talented pre-sales engineers he’s worked with who was let go because the person was not tied to any future company revenue.
    • John says it’s a fascinating idea to measure your career using the metrics that will be important in the future. It’s about potential to do something important in the future perhaps more than what you have already accomplished (like the incoming pipeline or lack thereof for someone in sales).
      • John gives the example of being tied to a greenfield sales territory during his time at Google. The work was challenging, but the pipeline present in new customer accounts might not be a representation of how good someone is (if that’s the only metric).

35:56 – Certifications Provide Structure

  • After his time pursuing FinOps, everyone else on Brad’s team at the startup was let go, and he was the last man standing before also getting laid off. After taking the role at the VAR where he is now, Brad needed some goals stepping into it besides just sales goals.
    • As a starting point, Brad wanted to look at what would be most useful over the next few years for him to study and learn.
    • “Why are certifications good? They are good for me because I need structure.” – Brad Christian
    • Brad says he is obsessed with Neovim. This comes from roots in Vim, a text editor often used in many UNIX / Linux systems.
      • Brad follows Takuya Masumaya, also knows as devaslife and his YouTube Channel. This person uses Neovim to create and build software.
      • Brad has always wanted to be expert level using vim. He was decent at it from the Linux command line, but now Brad uses Neovim to write code, take notes, and do all kinds of things.
      • Brad also follows another YouTuber called ThePrimeagen who is a developer at Netflix.
      • Brad suggests we don’t need to use VSCode to write code but should instead adopt Neovim. The goal is to never need to touch the mouse and to save unneeded wrist motions.
    • After adopting Neovim, Brad found he would get obsessed with his setup and configuration to the point where he would lose focus. Certifications help him hold that focus.
      • Having a certification blueprint helps give you a syllabus or course of study.
      • Brad says the Red Hat certification probably isn’t a requirement for his job, but he has always wanted to achieve the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE).
      • The exam for RHCE is a live lab exam, and Brad has always enjoyed those types of exams.
      • “It’ll force me to stretch myself out of my comfort zone, do some things I probably wouldn’t, and just have more breadth.” – Brad Christian, on pursuing a Red Hat certification
      • There isn’t a VCDX level certification equivalent on the Red Hat side, but there is an architect level. Brad plans to pursue this also.
      • Brad also wants to work on the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) line of exams as well.
      • “But the very first thing I did when I started the new job was ask for a Pluralsight subscription.” – Brad Christian
  • How do you link certifications back to revenue?
    • Brad says you can’t link it to revenue because it is a cost center and one of the prices of doing business.

Mentioned in the Outro

  • Following someone to another company does not protect you if they leave the company. What will do you when they leave, and do you have a plan for when that happens? It’s worth considering before making a job decision.
  • It’s always possible that our roles and responsibilities could shift, regardless of where we work. It’s not just for startups.
  • The description of the player coach here is really interesting. Being the coach and the player is about being involved in what individual contributors are doing in more of a collaborative way.
    • Make sure as a player coach that you give your team members a chance to shine. Check out Episode 51 and Episode 52 for more about learning this lesson the hard way.
  • Brad’s certification choices involved knowledge of how he worked best and what motivated him, the kind of exams he did well on, and a willingness to lean in and learn new things to sharpen technical skills.
    • More on the decision process

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