Good bye Red Hat

Over 6 years ago I joined Red Hat. For me it was a huge step – going from a small SI to a large software vendor, moving to a dedicated pre-sales role (“Solution Architect”) in a larger team, and so on.

And I learned a lot. Like, A LOT. About how such a large enterprise is run, how a huge software vendor operates, but with the changing landscape in customers also how customers of certain sizes and in certain industries work. At the same time I learned a lot about how the sales process of a software vendor works, what a role a pre-sales engineer can take (and what not), and how good sales teams work. I was not without success in that role.

After my few years as a solution architect I had the chance to join the Ansible product team. This meant another big change since I suddenly stopped talking to customers on a daily base, but instead talked to the larger sales organization within Red Hat. Also, moving from a German team to a mainly US team meant a lot of changes in how my daily schedules were set up – but that worked well with the kids who arrived at the same time. The new job brought had a lot of new components for me as well: Technical Marketing Manager means to shape the product message into consumable bites for people with a technical taste. Suddenly I had to wonder how I can enable other solution architects to present this to a technical savy audience – especially if these solution architects are not product experts and do have to sell multiple products anyway. I had a steep learning curve, but again the feedback was not bad, and the constantly growing team was just awesome.

But nothing is forever: over the recent months I realized that I have growth aspirations which simply don’t fit with my position anymore. Thus I had to make the hard decision to look for something else – and I found this something else outside Red Hat. My future is still within the Open Source ecosystem, deeply connected to Linux – no surprises there. But more about that in another post.

Right now I’d just like to thank Red Hat for an awesome time. And I especially would like to thank the various teams I worked in over the time with all the people in there:

• The public sector Germany team, with the simply best sales person I ever met and the best middleware solution architect I worked with.
• The “Ansible workshop” crew with the greatest mind in writing workshops at the top. We rocked so many conferences and summits.
• The Ansible product team when I joined – being right there when a just acquired company settles into the arms of a new owner is a very interesting experience, thanks for all the support!
• The BTE which formed later on – I never worked in a team like that, but I loved almost every day. It was great to grow and thrive in this team, through all transitions and re-organisations.

Without you, I wouldn’t be the person I am today – thanks for that, thanks for all the support! All the best for the future =)