(Post Theme: Lost the Breakup by Maisie Peters)
Last Friday (30th June, 2023), was my last day working for N-able after 18 years (a bit over 12 years of that for SpamExperts, then after the acquisition a bit under 4 years for SolarWinds MSP, then after the split the last almost two years for N-able).
I’m more able to write about things now, and have a lot of ideas of topics I’d like to cover, and hope to get to a bunch of those before starting my new job in September. For now, mostly for my own record, a brief summary of how it all ended.
Scaled Agile & the introduction of a Product Owner role
In 2020, SolarWinds decided to adopt the Scaled Agile framework (SAFe), under the name “SolarAgile”. The plan was to introduce this within the MSP side of the business first, and then extend it to “Core” (the traditional, large, part of SolarWinds) and “Cloud” (Pingdom, AppOptics, Loggly, Papertrail). I was part of the pilot group helping to shape this in the initial adoption, which was actually pretty great.
One aspect of this project was the introduction of a Product Owner role. There were a few POs across different products, but no real consistency about what they did, and most teams didn’t have a PO. For Mail Assure & SpamExperts, I handled the PO role in the initial pilot (one of the requirements was someone that was both extremely familiar with the product and also very experienced with Agile), but the intention was that I would move to PM after the pilot period.
By this time, the Mail Assure & SpamExperts engineering team had shrunk in size quite a bit (down to two teams), and wasn’t expected to grow again. Similarly, from a product perspective, the goal was high retention rather than a lot of growth (especially new logo growth). I argued that we did not need both a PO and a PM for a product of Mail’s size (a “practicality beats purity” type argument). However, TPTB went ahead and hired someone for the PO role anyway.
In some ways, the acquisition (August 2017) was the beginning of the end – particularly since SolarWinds and then N-able were both very focused on people in offices (covid disrupted this as it did everywhere, but even now there is strong encouragement to be back at an office at least part of the time). However, I feel like adding in the PO role to the Mail team was the real beginning of the end, because it was always clear to me that we were ‘overprovisioned’ in product people for the nature of the product.
Everything went well enough for almost a year – a lot of that time was our new PO learning the ropes while I learnt more about the parts of PM that I hadn’t done before, and tried to extend out our strategic planning.
Reorganisation and Product Owners transformed to Product Managers
In late 2021, after the split from SolarWinds, N-able had another one of its frequent leadership changes, with a new CTO followed not long after by a new VP of engineering and a new VP of product. This (mostly) spelt the end of SolarAgile, and the decision was made to completely remove the PO position, with the actual PO work being brought under the responsibility of the PMs.
Essentially overnight, all the POs were now either PMs or moved elsewhere within the company (e.g. into an engineering role) – many have since left N-able. This transition was handled very poorly, with the news of the change arriving to at least some of the POs at the same time it arrived to the company as a whole.
Most relevant to my journey, this meant that Mail Assure & SpamExperts now had two PMs, the former PO and me. I already felt like both a PO and a PM was too much ‘product’ for the team, and this obviously made it that much worse.
Again, everything went ok for some time – while we were both PMs, we did still tend to split up the work in similar ways as before, with me focusing on the higher level strategy and prioritisation and my fellow PM working on more of the operational aspects.
Interlude: Promotion and Pay
During 2022, I was promoted to Senior Product Manager (although as a contractor I technically didn’t have any title at all). This had a reasonable pay bump, which was particularly welcome in a year where inflation was suddenly something that was relevant again.
This was the third significant pay increase that I received in my SolarWinds & N-able journey. The first was after SpamExperts was acquired – this was basically adjusting to be closer to ‘market’ rates (SpamExperts being fairly small was generally at the lower end, although it had certainly improved and in the last 5 or so years there I had no complaints about how much I was paid), and also essentially for retention purposes (ensuring as many key people as possible stayed after the acquisition). The second was a couple of years later, after the former SpamExperts CEO & CTO had left, and I was very unhappy in my architecture role and with the direction of the product. This was again basically a retention play (which worked – I also got other changes, which helped, but for the most part I was willing to stick around for a while because of the comparatively high renumeration).
It was never made super explicit, although it came up in some conversations, but I feel that these actually ended up contributing to the end (of course, in the meantime, they contributed plenty to my financial security). If you looked at the cost of PMs for the Mail team, then I was the bulk of that, and my salary was somewhere in the ballpark of 2-3% of the product’s revenue. When I moved product (more on that below) this would have been even more noticeable, because the strong retention motivation was no longer there (or at least no longer visible to the people making the decisions)
This isn’t a complaint about being well paid for a few years, by any means. But I do think that it was one factor in the eventual end of my tenure.
Moving Products
Around August 2022, it was clear that people had looked at the budgets for Mail and decided that having two PMs was not justified. I don’t disagree with this (and indeed had argued it all along), although I think things would have played out pretty differently if we’d never had a PO at all (which is certainly not her fault, and is not to denigrate any of the excellent work she did).
Either I would need to move or the other PM would need to move. It was made clear to me that the preference was for me to move – as a senior PM who was well regarded by many in N-able across several products (although certainly not universally; you can’t please everyone), the expectation was that it would be simpler to put me in a new product and have the other Mail PM continue with Mail Assure and SpamExperts.
I didn’t like this plan. I did have, in my performance planning documentation, some statements around either joining a new product or building something new within the same product & team. However, those were in the 3-5 year range, and I was pretty clear about having some work that I really wanted to finish with Mail first.
(As an aside: I never really got the chance to properly implement a strategy as Mail PM. The first 12-24 months were taken up with (a) work on security as a result of the SolarWinds Hack, (b) work to adjust as a result of the SolarWinds/N-able split, and (c) finishing off and cleaning up after the previous PM, who really didn’t understand the product at all. After that, we were just starting to get underway with some new work, and then I was moved away).
However, it was clear to me that me moving was going to be best – it would hopefully turn out well for me (wrong, as I came to find out), and for the PM who would stay (somewhat correct), and for everyone else as well (unclear). So I accepted that this was going to happen, and was moved to Cloud User Hub, which was a product born of another acquisition (spinpanel), and had just a month or two earlier launched. More on how that was sold to me and what the reality was another time.
Another Reorganisation
The first couple of months on Cloud User Hub were rough (mostly because of the state of the product and the disastrous launch), but by the middle of October were improving and things were looking up.
At this point, N-able joined many other tech companies and laid off a large chunk (maybe 15%?) of employees, and did a bunch of restructuring as a result. I was kept on, but my immediate manager was gone, and the product was moved to a separate group as well, under the leadership of someone completely new to N-able.
At this point, looking back it feels like a foregone conclusion that this would be it. The product was in a huge mess, and although I worked on improving that and some progress was made, and although I joined after the mess was made, you couldn’t look at my work in Cloud User Hub and see anything like success. In addition, I was now reporting to someone (my manager’s manager in particular) who had no history with me at all, so there was no existing goodwill or understanding of quality work that I had done in the past.
Final 4 Months
On February 28th, I was told that I was no longer required and would have 4 months of notice, finishing up at the end of June.
The official reason was the challenges around location and time zone. To be fair, this was much harder in Cloud User Hub than it had been with the Mail team. The majority of the engineering team were in India (good overlap with NZ), some in the Netherlands (good overlap with NZ, long history of working with people in that time zone), and some in the UK (reasonable overlap with NZ, several years of working with people in that time zone. However, N-able has almost all of the senior management in the US, and combining the US (or Canada, where there are other teams) time zones with the Europe/Asia ones leaves no good times for working with NZ.
For all of the 18 years I was with SpamExperts, then SolarWinds, then N-able, I was extremely flexible around working times (anyone who worked with me would attest to this). Until Cloud User Hub, this was the occasional meeting during the night, and working around 4-6 hours in my evening (which suited me well for many years anyway). After moving to Cloud User Hub, I would regularly have meetings at 3 a.m., 4 a.m., and so on – at least weekly, generally multiple times a week. I made this work, but it wasn’t good for me (or for N-able, really).
Ironically, this was much worse in the December-February period (excepting the week I vanished in February thanks to Cyclone Gabrielle) than later, when there was less need to be meeting with senior leadership and more work with the actual teams, where time zones aligned well enough. Travel to do in-person work (to Edinburgh, for example) was expensive for someone in NZ, though (none of the engineers in India would be doing that travel either).
More to say about my adventures over the last 18 years, but that’s essentially how it all came to an end!
TonyAndrewMeyer 