two awards

Dell allowed for recognition from peers and other departments, and my two awards both came from my biggest project there, Dell Cloud Marketplace, for which I was lead UX architect for not quite a year.

recognition from my peers

The beginning of cloud marketplace for me was an education in cloud engineering. I was given a ton of industry data to absorb. I created accounts and spun up instances (virtual machines) on multiple cloud providers like AWS, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, Joyent, and Digital Ocean, to see what was involved and learn the different taxonomies they used. Someone even connected me to Bernard Golden, author of AWS for Dummies (one of the three books I read as part of my user research), and he would kindly give me time to review the design concept of the moment, as I got closer to something useful. (Bernard came to Dell when his company Enstratius was purchased and became Dell Cloud Manager. Enstratius/DCM was a brilliant idea; you could connect very different cloud services into it as a platform, and then use the same UI to manage them all.)

This was a fun time at Dell, when it went private and became "the world's biggest startup." This project was symptomatic of that innovative, growing attitude. Along the way I collaborated with content strategist Jim Braden and lead visual designer Sarah Masciana as well, both of them making key contributions, and account manager Rana Walker, who probably felt keeping our work organized was as close to herding cats as you can get. I also had the great joy of working with Subbu Rama, the product owner for our cloud marketplace MVP, who went on to found BitFusion and accomplish much more.

Early on, I was happily surprised to receive this from my manager, Jim Machajewski.

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It feels great to be acknowledged by your team, and I cherished the moment.

recognition from other teams

Cloud Marketplace was a big project, involving three lines of business: mine (eDell), Dell Software Group, and Dell Ops (operations). A lot of my role was acting as liaison between the differing goals of these three groups, integrating their goals into a single design. I also participated in multiple summits, when people came to Round Rock to hammer out direction and approaches in person. This was a precious chance to learn how things happened at a high level (and contribute somewhat), and I've valued the experience.

After almost a year of work, the project ended. Dell was moving in a different direction, and rather than make a standalone cloud marketplace, add-on options were added to the DCM platform as upgrades. But before it ended, awards were given, and Subbu recommended me for a Platinum award. These were precious, as they were approved by Michael Dell himself; I was told there were only 8 given that year, in a company of about 115,000 people. The cost was split between Dell Software Group and Dell Ops.

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Recognition from other teams feels even better, because there's no hint of self-congratulation. Full disclosure: because this was from another team, my team, DCX (Digital Customer Experience), did not celebrate this award. The DCX quarterly awards were dubbed the "Selfies," which were awards given by and to our team. I therefore didn't get a presentation slide "certificate" like I did with the bronze award, so I pieced this one together with favorite excerpts from emails and internal 360 evaluations from Cloud Marketplace people I worked closely with. Money is not the heart of recognition, people are; you have to have something to remind you of them and warm your heart.

Initially I couldn't even find out who nominated me for the award, but months later, when he was leaving the company, I discovered it was Subbu. Thank you!