Doing everything in your power to make your team successful

Problem

"Our product at DocuSign uses some of Microsoft's APIs and we happen to be early adopters and beta testers of their products. We have access to versions before they are released and generally speaking, they are quite good partners. However, two years ago, they unexpectedly decided to make a major change to their Authorisations and Permissions management, leading to our company experiencing downtime due to issues on their side."

Actions taken

"The team started to panic a bit as we have a strong policy regarding uptime. While some of my engineers decided to handle the issue via an official communication channel with Microsoft, I decided to leverage some relationships I had there to escalate the problem faster. Thanks to my calls, Microsoft reverted the update and we were able to have our systems back up very quickly."

Lessons learned

"I believe a manager's role is to set up an ideal environment for engineers to work in. In this type of situation, where technical roadblocks appear, it is a manager's role to be very concerned and to do everything they can to solve the situation." The lessons I have learned from this are:

• "Monitoring is key! The earlier you are aware of issues, the better. Following this problem, we implemented a new way to detect errors, which detects errors as early as possible."
• "Don't trust anyone! Think about the worst-case scenario and then build the processes or make the necessary trade-offs."
• "Relationships are key and they are a manager's responsibility. Don't forget to have up-to-date contacts, especially when you are dealing with large companies."