 Hi, my name is William Chia. I am a product marketer at GitLab and this is a customer persona video now a customer persona is a generalized way of looking at a particular role within an organization and What do you folks that are sit in that role? What do they tend to care about what tends to trouble them and Understanding and empathizing with them so that when you talk to them you can speak their language sort of say now this is not to say that Specific people are all different and so specific people are all different and they have specific needs So a customer persona is not going to apply everything in the persona is not going to apply to every single person But this is kind of saying generally what do most people who are in this role or in a similar role? What what are the most of the things that they care about in most organizations? So it's kind of a generic way to let you kind of understand this person and understand how you might speak to them differently than you would speak to a different persona For this video, we are going to be talking about a chief architect Now the chief architect, what do they actually do? So they provide architectural leadership Strategy and vision this is definitely a strategic role not somebody who's an implementer but somebody who is thinking at a high level about the strategy and vision of the company and How can they architect that? How can they bring together multiple pieces? To in order to to get that vision and move them and move the company in a certain direction So this is somebody who is often focused on a single highest priority Rather than trying to manage smaller little bits and this is someone who is going to take a proactive and Holistic approach so chief architect is going to be proactive in the sense that they're always looking to the future There's someone who is looking to say what new technologies do we need to adopt? Evaluating those and saying what direction do we need to take the company in as a strategic thinker? And it's also holistic So they're gonna want to say how do we adopt this technology across the organization and multiple functions And what is everything that the company needs to do to execute on this strategy? They are going to value implementing standards and common practices that can be generalized across the entire organization So rather than seeing things done in piecemeal or rather than caring about one team doing their one thing This is somebody who's going to care about the whole company moving in a direction together In fact the chief architect can be responsible for all elements of the IT environment Everything from infrastructure the cloud what platforms are on what products they're using the applications the integration the security the user experience basically everything across the entire chain of product delivery can be in the chief architect's purview and Can be part of their strategic vision? They're thinking at a high level. So they're not necessarily cared of they don't necessarily care about all the implementation details that are down low but across that broad swath of Different functions and different Places within the org They are defining a strategy that can work in all of those places So they can understand monetize and opera operationalize new technologies and they're thinking long term They're looking at what is coming down the road three to five years. This is what the chief architect cares about What are their drivers what motivates them? chief architect is often Focused on transformation So this can depend what this actually looks like within an organization can depend on what their maturity level is So they might just be adopting DevOps They might be moving to the cloud or they might be trying to embrace full-on cloud native But wherever they're at in that maturity model the chief architect cares about driving that strategy within the organization and taking that organization in that Direction and transforming the organization They definitely care about increasing the speed and the reliability of product releases This could be part of implementing their strategy. They're not necessarily cared with how that actually gets done But they it is as they're trying to transform the organization and move their organization forward Definitely moving faster and doing so more reliably is something that they care about as part of their strategy They are going to be organizing ways that improve operations So they're going to be reusing technology and systems across teams and projects and they're going to be doing coordination between groups So carrying less about what specific groups doing and more caring about multiple groups Sharing information doing things in a standard and cohesive fashion They are one of the strategies that they're Likely to be concerned with implementing is is moving towards automation What are the ways in which the organization can automate their processes more and so that they can move faster and do so more reliably They need a good strategy at all levels to make sure that they have enough visibility and Access to quickly identify and address problems So as they're trying to solve problems for the organization with technology and architect a solution for that they want to make sure that they can they have visibility into what the problems are so They notice is again, they don't necessarily care. What's what's down in the weeds But they do care about is information being surfaced the level that it needs to be surfaced so that the Organization can execute on problems that they have Even though the chief architect is a strategic thinker and they're they're caring about high-level initiatives They are heavily influenced by the engineers and the developers There is a a desire for the architect to want to allow developers to use tools and to work with technologies that they care about it are familiar with and and Care about and like so rather than trying to dictate and say they want standardization across the org But not necessarily to say This is the one thing without holding any opinions of what are the developers and the operators within the org What do they care about right that that opinion weighs very heavily on the chief architect So what are their challenges and the pain points that that come their way? So they have organizational challenges They they need to make sure that every team that's that's already been empowered to figure out their own issues using their own methods Now they want to get them to work together using common practices in communication Right, so a pain point could be different teams using different tools Could be a pain point because what one team learns can't necessarily be that applied to other teams So standardization is something they care about and different different teams on different tools can be a pain point Getting developers to change habits and use new tools is very hard Especially when folks are used to things are used to they care about the tools they care about Driving change can be a very painful thing But developers that Will rely on the architect team to be experts on new tools Right, so everybody is not necessarily trying out everything new but a chief architect Needs to be needs to know about the latest things and that can be a pain point keeping up with everything Similarly lack of people with the right technical skill set Can be a pain point now. This is across many personas And also in particular for the chief architect that as they're looking to exit You know implement a strategy across the organization and an architect a solution Knowing that they have human resources that have familiarity with certain tool sets is going to make that tool set more attractive whereas Using new unfamiliar tools has a training cost has an implementation cost as an adoption cost and so those things can be pain points There are also technical pain points that they have for example too many moving parts Having too many different teams on too many different tools and trying to make them work together are Areas those the surface area between those tools are places where things can break down their places that can be insecure their places where there could be duplication and Multiple different teams doing the same thing and so duplication of effort it can be wasteful or even just having to duplicate effort by this team doing something and Now they need to go and move it over to this team Having both teams do the same thing essentially twice is wasted effort and that can be a pain point Too much manual work Not only between two different teams But even just could be a single team that is not automating enough And it can be a pain point because some teams may just feel that that their work can't be automated that they may not Want to automate it and so there could be there can be resistance to that there can be a desire to have ownership and it into to keep manual work and so not only is too much manual work to inefficient and Doesn't drive the org fast enough. There could also be resistance to to automation because of some of the control that you give up and Finally problems can be very very hard to diagnose So when looking at the organization and saying what technology problems do we have? It may be very hard just to get an answer for that question You need to have enough visibility instrumented. You need to have enough monitoring Intermented need to have enough measuring instrumented in order to to have enough visibility to look at and say okay This is a problem and here's quantifiably why we know it's a problem that doesn't exist in a robust way or sometimes even at all and So being able to just even diagnose a problem and know why something is not working Can be hard to figure out. It can be hard to troubleshoot Sometimes small bugs can cause really big effects and it can get be very hard to get down to the root cause of that Be another pain point So what are the barriers of the blockers for chief architects adopting new technology? Well, first of all, it can be difficult to quantify or measure the benefit of improved efficiency. This is if you don't have Instrumentation in place now to measure how productive you are if you don't have a number to say Where this is what our productivity looks like today? How are you going to know what it looks like when you change it? So this can be a blocker just not even having having measured What things look like today to be able to measure and improve efficiency can be a blocker from even saying You know, they might they might feel the effects of the organization that we're running slow But they might not be able to put a number to it And that makes it very very hard to adopt something new or to justify adopting something new Similarly having the time to to get down in the details and look at all the existing tools This can be a blocker a chief architect is concerned with strategy a chief architect is concerned with broad technologies They're not really concerned with focusing on tools So they would care about driving an organization to move to being cloud native They would care about saying we want to move to containerized micro services as a deployment strategy, but They're not necessarily going to care about what the underlying tools are To to make that happen So this could be a blocker from a technology vendor perspective of getting to care about those tools because they they care more about the strategic initiatives They need to get buy-in from multiple stakeholders, so they need buy-in from Management as well as from developers like I said, they're going to care about the developers and operators that are using their tools They're going to want to implement tools that those folks Care about and enjoy but they also need to get some buy-in for management and so this can require one-to-one sales effort it can take a long time especially in enterprise buying cycles where someone is unfamiliar with the technology to begin with take a long time to Not only sell a chief architect, but now that chief architect needs to go and drive adoption within their organization And so that process just can just be a lengthy one Sometimes lack of a dedicated platform team or lack of a dedicated owner in a particular area can be a blocker to a chief architect wanting to adopt a new technology and Sometimes it's just getting management alignment on the top one or two priorities It takes a long time to get that one priority if it doesn't fit into that one thing They're working on the one or two things that they're working on then they're not going to care about it Finally, there is a perception among chief architects in general that the core tooling is already pretty good Right, so they might feel like what we're using today It works pretty good and I don't really want to dig down into all of the nitty-gritty of why there's a problem there They're only going to care if something's really bad So they're going to want to go and address the burning hot fires rather than slightly Optimizing something that's working pretty good, but could work a little bit better So the key here in this can be a blocker if it's not you know If it's not a migraine headache the chief architect might not care about it if it's just a small pain So what is the purchasing journey look like for chief architect? First thing you want to do is they want to understand and get agreement on the top enterprise priority Again, they might be working on only one or two strategic initiatives So that's the first thing that they care about are we moving to cloud native? Are we doing digital transformation? They're going to need You know customer delivery improvements could be one improving cx and improving customer delivery And they are going to want to get alignment across different organizations Right, so a problem might be different orgs are are not communicating So this might be a problem. I need to go solve. They're going to care about solving that one problem Next up they need to create a strategy and an approach For how i'm going to go and address this one priority They take an organizational wide view and they're going to determine any necessary components But not get too detailed about it Then they're going to try to get buy-in of course from all of the stakeholders from management and developers operators and depending on the organization then they'll typically recommend to cto or You know Maybe cio Someone someone who is a budget holder within the organization. They're going to make a recommendation on their strategy But they're probably going to also lean on other stakeholders to select specific tools So the the chief architect themselves is not usually a budget holder So what's some potential messaging that you can use when talking to a chief architect about gitlab First of all, gitlab is a single application for your complete devops lifecycle And this fits really well with the mindset of an architect that wants to do shared standardization across the organization so a chief architect wanting to have multiple teams being able to share processes being able to share learnings being able to have a uniform Implementation and and being able to have things be consistent This is what the chief architect cares about and the fact that gitlab is a single application Rather than multiple different tools cobbled together and you know have all these apis running between them This is something that actually plays well to the chief architect However, you want to distance gitlab from being a low level tool so that architect You know, they probably don't care about about jira or github or you know any kind of different low level tools That's kind of out of their preview. They're more concerned about the strategy so Pitching gitlab as a technology rather than a tool Pitching gitlab as a way to help drive their digital transformation as a way to Help drive their strategic initiatives like going cloud native This is going to be what's going to resonate more with the chief architect using language that enforces the value of consistent standards So the fact that gitlab is a single application And you don't have to have things named differently and different tools and making making sure that's consistent Otherwise, you end up with weird bugs the fact that uh, you have a consistent set of user permissions across the tools The fact that gitlab in general is just very very consistent from the user experience to the to the government's governance of the security That consistency it's going to play well to this persona with a longer term view Because the chief architect is concerned about long term strategy and long term roadmap Talking about the fact that they can future proof The roadmap is something that's going to be appealing to an architect So the idea that gitlab can be a strategic partner for the organization That's something that the chief architect cares about in this sense. We are an organization that ships software very fast We're one of the top 30 fastest shipping open source software fastest Fastest, you know fastest shipping open source projects on the planet. So we ship software very very fast That That means that we're always innovating. We're always shipping new things. We ship new code Once a month very very consistently on the same day every single month And so the fact that we are always shipping new features the fact that we are always innovating the fact that not only Do we have great features for you today? But we're a strategic partner. We're going to help future proof your roadmap So that in the future you're also going to have great features because we're also innovating at a very very fast pace That's something that's going to help you as a chief architect execute on your strategy So uh high level associations transformation automation cloud native these strategic initiatives That's what the chief architect cares about And finally in order to address their problems with with different teams. So adopting new technologies has a cost This is a great place where we can highlight various educational resources Whether it's our you know our documentation is very very thorough our great community that's uh 1800 members in our open source community and a hundred thousand businesses around the world The fact that there's a there's a lot of best practice out there And in particular our technical account management and customer success teams that are can come alongside new customers To make sure that they're successful in their adoption of git lab. These are things that the chief architect will care about And that is the chief architect