this is the art of network engineering podcast will explore tools Technologies and talented people we and to bring you information that will expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow Network engineers welcome to the art of network engineering podcast my name is Andy laptop you can find me on where have my permit IP andyandy.com I will soon be off all socials and that's where you'll find me I am joined tonight by rocket girl Lexi Cooper how you doing Lex uh I'm really tired today but I'm all right I had a lungs like tired Lexi do you is tired Lexi your favorite Lexi tired Lexi's fun she is yeah what happened at work that you're so tired well I won't get into the nitty-gritty but uh been working with fpgas and I'm not trying to like Flex by saying that or something I just I I don't program I don't know what I'm trying to test them out and fpga means field programmable gate array I think field programmable something something yeah okay I'm getting confirmation thank you all right cool um it's uh it's like a board that you tell to do shit and you can tell it to do other shit if you don't like what you told it before that's my so wait is this an Asic this isn't anything no it is different from a niece I'm gonna jump in and say you should you should watch my talk about Asics for Network Engineers the way I describe it over simply is an Asic is welded down and an fpga can be programmed it's like a it's like a superset of an Asic and the trade-off is usually uh Power and Heat and so an fpga can do all of the things of an Asic and more but usually takes more power and generates more heat okay well this would be a good time to introduce our topic and our guests so um that was PGA illustrious fpgas that well thank you Lexi thank you for telling us something about work because that rarely ever happens so thank you yeah you're welcome um The Voice we just heard was Pete lombus hi Pete hey thanks for having me all thanks man who are you where do you work uh I'm Pete Olympus I work at a startup called upbound that is in the kubernetes space I uh am a recovering technical marketing engineer and I currently do documentation so that's a nice foreshadowing to our topic so um I'm about to introduce our other awesome guests but we are talking all things tme tonight technical marketing engineer it's a fascinating role that if you haven't heard about um you should listen to this episode because it's awesome um the person who helped me discover what a tme was was our other guest Wes Kennedy what's up Wes howdy how are you guys good man where do you work so uh I was uh I was yanked into Nvidia by Pete uh who then promptly left me there um so I'm I'm a tme at Nvidia covering the Bluefield dpu product uh formerly at nutanix and then I had a short layover somewhere else between the dpu is something product that's not like gaming rigs or um ifps frame rates for gamer nerds right strap some arm processors on a cx-6 and call it something else oh it's all dirty I like it's like the super boring side of Nvidia you know like you're in Nvidia and they're like look at this sweet Fortnight thing and these like self-driving cars and you just made it hey man can you get me a 40 90. so we have one tme and one recovering tme is that correct is that accurate yeah okay yeah I mean to give you a little bit more um I was a director of technical marketing at Nvidia um before that accumulus um I I ended up running technical marketing at cumulus after being a technical marketing engineer um and then I think as part of the valuable experience I was rejected from at least three different technical marketing engineer jobs at Cisco when I worked there years ago so I have both of the the success and the failure of technical marketing you applied for three different Cisco tme jobs and they rejected you is that yeah they have a bunch of different reasons but yes not because of your glowing personality and your Charming demeanor right that was I play the fifth so to just to provide some context um I learned you know why I I came to our team and said you know I really want to do a tme panel because it's a fascinating role and I'd never heard of it and I'd been in Tech a long time so um I wanted to I was looking for another job and I was really thinking about pivoting out of operations because you know maintenance windows are great and on-call outages and that never gets old um so um I started looking around surveying you know what else was out there and I honestly forget how tme came up on my radar but it did and I think I sent out a tweet hey are there any tmes out there that'd be willing to talk to me one of the kindest selfless people that I've met in a while Wes peeps up and says hey man here's my number give me a call let's talk damn I love Tech Twitter so Wes and I hopped on the phone and it was probably a 45 minute conversation that was just awesome and easy and very informative and at the end of it he's like dude you could be a Tammy no problem like just just go for it because there was a there was a position I was looking to apply for and I just wasn't sure like I didn't even understand the role I'm looking at the job description I'm like I think I can do this stuff I'm not sure because in my mind technical marketing and you know it's like you create content it's like I like the technical stuff I like to create content so I thought like oh I'll just create technical content as it turns out it's not exactly the role um because I just thought I would do well part of it right but I just thought oh well I'll just do like podcast type stuff but technical stuff and that'll be my job and it'll be a dream job but the tmes I've met and worked with since then um are way brighter than I thought you know way brighter than me I'll just put it that way they go so deep in things so um yeah go ahead because I wanna I'm gonna start my asking dumb questions right um have we said what tme stands for did I miss it technical marketing engineer okay technical marketing engineer right okay so do we have like a marketing an engineer don't seem right they don't seem like they go together to me right but right yeah but you got to think though like marketing comes up with something and then says oh we can do this right and so you have to have somebody in the room that could say this is dumb we can't fucking do this there's two ways I I quickly describe Tammy one is the nice way which is like I Am The Lorax I speak for the users right you're you're the team's job is to be the user in the company and be like that's good that's bad I don't understand this I'm not smart enough there is there is a skill to being like um I think the the right term is like an expert beginner at things to where like you have a little bit of knowledge about a lot of things and you're really good at starting because if you're a true expert then all of a sudden you're like oh that is also easy it'll be easy for everybody else too the other way I put it is we are the dude from Office Space that talks to the customers because you can't let the engineers talk directly to the customers and the the more I have time I spend as a TV the more I'm like fuck that is that is we all laughed at that guy we all made fun of him and now here we go that poor guy like he got fired one of the most important people in that whole company yeah yeah and I I think and this is where when Andy and I talked he when we started talking about you're doing the podcast and you've got operational experience you speak to Executive you know all these things like that speaks to me of saying like Okay you can talk to people or talk at them you know whatever that is right so that kind of bridges a lot of those gaps and there's so many Engineers that can't do that because they're they're hyper technical they don't want to talk to people whatever it is and all of that is okay but when you have that skill set you need to be able to bridge that gap between the engineers that are writing C code in Israel and my my you know job um and the customer who has no idea or doesn't care how an fpga works or you know whatever and just wants their product to work right so you have to be able to bridge that Gap and just sending somebody from Marketing in there isn't going to solve the problem because they don't speak the same language as a customer who's an engineer so that's where the the Gap gets filled you need to be a technical person that can speak the language of the customer and also speak the technical language with the the nerd guys I feel like you know and all these come I feel like in all these conversations that we've had um about skills that we need in Tech have sort of touched on this a little bit but we haven't really brought up any roles that really would you know any specific concrete examples of when you would use soft skills as an engineer right we talk about soft skills here and there we touch on it why are they important you know we bring up communication important between teams blah blah blah but actually there it seems like the tme might be a role where you can actually bring you know your soft skills together with your technical skills and that's actually a great example of you know a role where that would be very very valuable right and and I would say the other one that often feeds into technical marketing would be that sales engineer role so often a sales engineer would be partnered with an account manager and depending on how technical your account manager is or how that works out do you usually have a pretty hard delineation between talking Tech but you still need to be able to talk to those customers and you need to build relationships and get to know your customer more right so that soft skill of being able to either present to them or build that relationship is also important as a as a sales engineer and you know we've got a question here about is it pre-sales versus post sale um you know pre-sales is you've got to develop that relationship build um faith in the product design the product deliver the product and then from the post side you still have to continue to manage that relationship manage customer expectations what is their experience like and then continue to work with them to sell more down the road or whatever that is right continue to meet their needs and when I've interviewed people to come onto the teams that I work on one of the one of the you know good things that I see is if they've had a history of being in sales engineering or something like that or they do talk to people and I use those as a good feeder to know that they can at least cover that portion of the job which without asking a thousand questions about how they might do something and to give a little bit more here um tme I think it's really important to state is um a really really broad job title um some tmes are like I like to say Big M little e like it's very very marketing very little engineering and so you know they're very much focused on PowerPoint slides and collateral and you know like technical white paper stuff there are also a little M Big E tmes who are like in the lab beating the hell out of chips to try to figure out exactly what are the limits and what does it works and what doesn't work and so for folks looking at tme roles I think it's really important to kind of understand what is the day-to-day what are the kinds of things that are deliverables from that role because some of them it's gonna be like well PowerPoint some of it's going to be you're going to go in and you're going to like play with Xiao all day every day in the lab and everything in between and so um for me I've liked a lot of the mix right I want to go in the lab and get really Technical and be really nerdy and then when I get tired of that I want to go and go speak at a conference and do something a little bit less technical some of that is also cyclical in which I do work in the lab figure things out and then build talking points and presentations out of that but um the reason I mentioned this to Wes's point is for my background specifically and why tme fit well for me um I came from Cisco tack I was in support like Big E there is no M at all like I can't tell you how many SES and account managers yelled at me for telling their customers this isn't supported because I'd be like I don't know man like that's the answer to the case it doesn't work not supported um you know for for a good story buy me a beer sometime and I'll tell you about the account manager who misses quota because I told his customers it was their bad product um you just read my mind when we were in Asheville for the Meetup I got to sit with you for 15 or 20 minutes you and like three other Tech guys it's probably the most fun 15 minutes I've had in such a long time if so many great stories it's just people in Tech like I can't imagine what you guys go through I I thought I had a band at a knock attack is next level I mean it's it but it's it's Ops at the end of the day like you are feeling like I felt Andy's pain every day right because you're having the worst day of your career at that moment and you're calling me for help right so you get this very very strong empathy for customers and for users and for usability because I'm also trying to troubleshoot the same thing you are I'm like why is this log message stupid I hate this this thing needs to go die in a fire right that that's what I'm doing and then I left Tack and I ended up doing what you could call post sales Consulting at cumulus where I was dedicated to a single customer and basically my job was like they bought a hundred we need to buy that we need them to buy the next thousand and they're not going to do that unless this 100 switches is successful so you get to live here until they love it and just do whatever they need and you know that's just it's tack but less urgent and then I moved into like that job oh I hated it that's that was not for me because uh I don't have any chill and so the idea just kind of like waiting around for the for the problem to happen is not it's not my ammo uh I can verify that he has no chill um and then I moved into pre-sales and again it's just like it all kind of happened by accident where I was like I'm never gonna be a salesperson I'm not gonna have a quota that's on ethical garbage and they're like uh we didn't SC in the Northeast Pete lives in the Northeast guess what Pete your SC Downs like I wait what um and so you know like I've kind of found my way but it turns out all these jobs have kind of overlapping spectrums of roles and so a really good tme is kind of an SE and there are things about being an essay that I'm really really bad at and I will never be an Essie again but make me some fantastic tme and it's the same thing on the post sales side where at cumulus I worked super super close with our post sales team and both myself and our post sales team knew exactly when I needed to step away they'd be like that's that's very cute one that's like please just step away from the console the the adults are now here to fix the problem that you've created mine real quick what is the difference between a sales engineer and Technical marketing engineer because for me it is not clear at all before you define that before you define that real quick I just want to state that I'm glad that Pete talked about the overlap because you know Bridging the Gap between users and Engineering being the voice of the customer that seems like an Essie's job a tme's job and I'm a product manager and it also is my job so it seems like a bunch of people are doing similar jobs and it does get murky and I I want to ask that question so yeah but I mean back to your question Lex you know what what's the difference right I mean an sc is more sales driven right throw a product manager in there too like what are what are all the nuances so yeah so so the other thing you'll see is you'll see technical product manager and often that's a TIA me in disguise um but uh so so I've been both an SE and a tme have not been a PM because I like having open space on my calendar um but I I would say the biggest difference that I have experienced is I don't have a quota I'm not comped on a quota I have one customer and that's my product and then I am bringing the voice of the customer in right so like I don't own any customers I'm not a tme dedicated to any customers I'm dedicated to a product just like a product manager yes a product manager will talk to customers and they'll build roadmap and they'll work with engineering to kind of Define what features are important tme's kind of do that too depending on the organization um and yes there's lots of fuzzy overlap in all of this um but but yeah the the biggest delineation between an sc and a tme is there is no ownership of accounts and there's no compensation based on uh quotas my three best friends at cumulus were the director of product management the director of sales engineering and the director of post sales and the four of us we all had different relationships to each other but like you know there's some PowerPoint uh you know graphic art thing that you can put in that's four circles with arrows pointing at each other about that relationship and and who needs who For What and so for PM that relationship was a lot of like um the way I put it is like sales takes the feedback from their set of customers here is who my customers are and what they're asking for and they go give that you know to product management product management collects all of that feedback from everybody and then decides what they want to ask and negotiate with engineering to get right engineering can deliver in a healthy organization say 80 of engineering time uh will will be for new features what is that 80 going to be based on is basically based on what the product manager says problem is the product manager is like that sounds really cool I don't know if anybody actually gives a shit or the flip side they might be totally oblivious to just the most amazing coolest thing that has ever existed I mean like I don't understand why anybody would want this and the tme's job is to help product management that way right so you you end up being uh I always like to say like I'm a really bad product manager but I can I can fake it when they're on PTO and then as soon as they come back I'm like oh thank God please here's all of the stuff that I've I've been I'm the bad substitute teacher the kids have taken over the classroom they're melting crayons on the heater but nobody died uh I opened 3 000 jira tickets while you were gone by the way good luck yeah but if you look at the other relationships with pre-sales I mean I love talking to customers and I would go and I would talk to customers just like an SE would but you are in some ways Special Forces and it's not because you are smarter or better like this is not a qualitative thing it's a like my job is to come here and talk about this thing in a slightly less subjective way meaning I'm sorry yeah subjective way meaning I don't care if you buy it or not I mean I want you to but my salary this quarter does not directly depend on that so I have some disconnect but of course I work for the company and I have the badge and like all right I am interested there's more credibility that comes along with that exactly and so for SES that you end up being there and part of that is you can be bad cop sometime as a tme where the SE cannot and a good team and a good account team will like figure that out beforehand without like they're trying to do this thing and it's terrible and we don't want them to but we also can't tell them no and so I can go up as a tme and whiteboard and be like oh definitely don't do this this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen oh what's that you were gonna do that you probably should I had no idea and then on the post sales side they're the ones using the product every single day and you're using the product and thinking about customers and again having that more of a global view and it's you end up being kind of the middle person between product management and post sales where post sales thinks everything's terrible and they're the most miserable people you'll meet part of the job part of that's the people um but but you take their like their feedback about support and features and functionality and like common practices and designs to be like wait what are our customers doing what is actually happening in the world not just on the Whiteboard so that's and that's a long-winded way to kind of frame that for you and what's cool about the tme role and all of this by the way this entire conversation is prefaced around in a healthy organization um what's cool about the tme role is if you're taking all this feedback and you're seeing all of these higher level trends that are happening with your product you can then start thinking about how can I build cool experiences for the customers from a demo perspective how can we um how can we do podcasts or how can we reach them in different ways that they're actually consuming uh what types of content would they want to see from us right and a PM a product manager is not going to be thinking about those things completely directly right they're going to think oh it would be cool if we could test drive our product on the website but then it's it's not driven any further than that because then it's all right well what's the logistics of actually delivering a product like this right and in West to interrupt you really quick I'll say one of the things I say about that is like who are you paying to be anxious about that thing and like PMS aren't being paid to be anxious about that like tmes are right and I think that's that's kind of like as you you like think about everything that can possibly be done and who needs to worry about that and be anxious about it and like that's how you start to bucketize those things and that Spectrum sorry less Oh no you're okay yeah so so I think that's one of the coolest parts of the job is being able to kind of look at those I want to say Global level trends of your product and figure out what will help Drive the business what what do our customers want to see uh what am I seeing in the in the broader industry that maybe people aren't seeing in our product but it could do that how can we then demonstrate that um and then you dive into the lab and you start building it out does it work does it not work um and then you start building those repeatable experiences or whatever right and I think those things become and it depends on how your mind's wired but for me being able to to develop a repeatable experience for my customers that that showcases value that really like that gets me to open my laptop every day right um and I can tell you like when I was at nutanix and we right when the pandemic hit we we had just started building out nutanix test drive and we had 12 or 13 tmes and we took a good portion of like three or four of us and like that's all we did day in and day out was just build test drive um and if you haven't done a nutanix test drive you should go do it because it's one of the best test drive experiences I've seen to toot my own horn and a few other people on the team um by the way I didn't do a lot of the work I was just involved yeah um but you know when you're able to build a repeatable experience like that and then you're tracking it through a marketing pipeline you can also show tremendous value back to the business so I can say that that team helped build tens of millions of dollars in Pipeline and out of that we went from having customers on the website for three to five minutes for a long session to 40. and when you're delivering a customer that spent 40 minutes with your product to a sales engineer and say this is your customer they've already used the product and they love it you have a warm lead that's excited about it and they're more likely to close that sale um is that typical for tmes that you're qualifying leads no well so that's that's a that's a function of the greater marketing entity that you live in but the experience that you built then gets tied into all of that you built that test drive which was people trying out the product right yeah yes we went from like one like a a really terrible interaction of our interface to having 16 of our products on the website so I'm guessing when you guys sat around and said how can we get people more engaged and get them more experience and what can we build out and I mean well and I mean think about the use case right like it was when the pandemic hit sales people aren't going into offices how are we going to get our product in front of people when it's an Enterprise storage product right so and I think this is um sorry sorry lucky before you ask your question I'll just say I think there's two big things I think one is again about like who what are you anxious about right what are the things you're paid to be worried about at work and I think for technical marketing Engineers it's it's a lot of the gray area what's the gray area between marketing and sales what's the gray area between engineering and sales what's the gray area between marketing and engineering right and I think tme ends up kind of playing that zone defense to use a sports metaphor and a lot of those things and I'll say you know to Wes's point we had a very similar thing uh which we also called test drive by the way at cumulus where we had paid eight hour training and we're like this is great if people can pay for it I just need customers to not be spooked off because I'm like this is Linux and as soon as you show never comes in your Linux they're like oh I don't know about that I just I'm maybe not and so it's like what we need and so like I I presented a challenge to my team is like I need eight hours into two it cannot be two hours in one minute it has to be two hours or less full stop just throw throw everything off the race car right if it's gonna add weight Chuck it out the window and we did it and we made it self-service and we had some videos on demand and again what do you worry about and part of that is like what is that marketing relationship how do you measure starting to look at pipeline pipeline being like customers who might buy your product basically did you did you do a thing that gave us your information to register for something did you download something did you watch a webinar and sales which is like did your potential actually turn into dollars right and you just see like you know our work become some of the highest Pipeline and revenue related products you know components in marketing that that's good tme work also the fact that Wes and I are an echo chamber is why I hired him um so I want to spend like 30 seconds on Pipeline and why it's important for for a vendor specifically but um as somebody who was an SE for a long time I would receive leads for my accounts often we would buy the leads right these would be people that reached out to some third or fourth or fifth party company and said hey we might have an interest in buying storage right or virtualization and so we would take these leads and then go in and make cold calls and go into these accounts and we would have to do so much legwork but if you have a very very well qualified lead that comes through you already like it's it's I don't want to say slam dunk but like the amount of effort that has to go into selling to that customer is way lower if you've seen Glengarry Glenn Ross High qualified leads are the Glengarry leads and if you haven't seen Glengarry Glenn Ross Put it on the calendar watch it it's incredible well and the other side of that though is like the customers aren't wasting their time because they know they're interested in this right so when that salesperson calls you're not annoyed and feeling like you're pressured into taking this meeting you've already spent 30 40 minutes with the product and you do want to talk to somebody right so I think that's that's a that's a bigger difference too we may have talked about this already but were you guys Network Engineers prior and the reason I'm trying to bring it back to you know it's right so so what why I'm asking is this is the art of network engineering and we've just spent 20 minutes talking about Pipeline and product and life cycle and feature like this stuff's going to be bouncing off of people's heads like when did this just become the product show so I guess none of this none but you were a tech engineer well right exactly so what I'm guessing about sales I'm attack like I wanted to fewer sales so that I had fewer cases like so if the company started spiraling down the drain and going out of business My Life as a tech engineer would have been exponentially easier but you were you were a tech engineer so were you a network engineer before Tech I mean you how did you kind of sort of I mean I uh I did not come directly out of college and attack but uh you you can consider that I had a highly paid internship right before I went to tax so I was like I was in hops for six months for a company before I went to Tac but like I didn't know what sales was I've never bought anything like I had no budget or authority or I've never bought anything I've never bought anything that was purchased or sold I've never sold anything that was bought sold or processed but that that's that's why I'm asking what's behind that question is you know who can become a tme what are their prerequisites you know do you have to be a networking person you just have to be a little technical can you be computer science person like how you know and and I want to I also want to mention well I also want to mention tmes get paid very well I was pleasantly surprised when I started the interview and it was almost double what I was making killing myself in prod and I thought oh my God yes I want this this is amazing yeah so I'm going to cut off West because I I see him uh waiting but I think um number one tme's care they care about the product they care about their customers right and I think there is again this is not a derogatory thing this is not it's a difference this is different from Essie's who are much more um what's the word I'm looking for like money driven money the function of the system that they live in though yeah compensation is set up that way right yeah they're like they're like this is gonna like it's all about opportunity costs like this customer is going to take me 20 hours this customer is going to take me 10. they're going to drive the same Revenue I know where I'm putting in my 10 hours full stop Tia means don't think like that they think a little bit more broadly they like the the downside of being a tme is uh it's a good way to burn out because you have to figure out how to have those controls over your care of the product over your care of your customers over your organization's ability to deliver against your vision or your organization's Vision or what you have a delusion that the vision is um that can be really hard where again as a product manager you're looking at a set of tickets how many of them like it's much more like inputs and outputs in product management it's much more inputs and outputs in sales engineering much more inputs and outputs and support and post sales and Technical and Technical marketing it's super fluffy and as a result you have to learn how to control your empathy and apathy levers and if you do a bad job you just get like you're just zero apathy 100 empathy and you feel every pain of a customer and you go crazy and and that that's the hardest part about the job in my opinion hey A1 fans still getting calls at 3am rest easy knowing that you've deployed open gear to the market leader the gold standard their award-winning Network resilience platform gives you always on access on day one every day and during an outage sure there's Alternatives but when it comes to your environment wouldn't you prefer the real thing you know the OG 18 years in business seven Best in Class products one comprehensive platform what more could you need plenty of reasons to choose open gear as your smart out of band vendor what reason will you choose schedule a demo today to see how they Stack Up accept no limitations trust your network to the market leader how do you interact with customers are you pulled in by SES into like account calls that's usually the yeah that's usually the pipeline um and I will I'm going to jump back three minutes to your question about do you have to be a network engineer or whatever so I my my background was a virtualization engineer and before that desktop engineering and then I moved into the vendor world as an SE and then I moved into Tech marketing so like there's there's definitely multiple Paths of entry into this depends on what portion of tme that you are probably going to fill too right like there's going to be there's if you've got a team of 15 you're going to have skill sets that broadly vary right and it all depends on what's the product that you're selling you're you're covering what's what's the business and then what is what's the strengths and weaknesses of your team and if you've got a good director um you know they'll start piecing that team together um he's pointing to himself if you're not watching the video um they'll start piecing that team together to make sure that you have people that cover different parts right um so why did you go to a vendor because I yeah right I mean I just went to a vendor this past year and I could fluff it up by you know I mean I'm I'm helping make things better and and but it's a big jump right I've had people bust my Stones like oh you're working for the enemy or you know however they frame it right like so these are all vendor roles everything we're talking about right product managers tmes let's see like so why do we go to vendors did you just say comp West I cut you off so that was my original jump yeah it was because of comp I was also extremely burnt out but I love the product too so I reached out to somebody that I loved the product and asked it was my my SE I asked him hey you guys have any openings and like yeah we've got a sled opening and I'm like I don't know what that is but I'll take it you're like I love toboggan and originally I thought I was going to be an SRE and go be in support and support the product and um but that required me to move and I wasn't willing to move so then I all right well I'll take this this sled SE roll sled was a drag it was terrible but you know what I learned a lot of good skill sets out of it yeah state and local government education ah okay that was that was good times um 300 Day sales Cycles yeah things like that it was it was good uh sled takes a certain type of person to enjoy sled work yes again no chill bad terrible like the worst possible person for sled did you go to vendor life for a comp too uh no uh lucky lucky for me I I like grew up really poor and didn't understand what money was and I was like sixty thousand dollars you're so dumb for giving me all that money um I mean I now recognize still like how much money that is but like in our industry like that's you know that's not a ton of dollars um no I I just absolutely hate not knowing the answer to things um and that that is a huge I was like no no no no I want to go shake down the person who built the thing like or at least like have a database full of like that I can like Google search through enough like emails and newsletters like I want to do legal discovery on the technology that is so relatable Pete yeah like this is like I don't think you understand how how much I feel every comment you have like I I know you I understand this one thing I tweet yeah that's I'm like I'm not just smashing that like button to be nice I'm like oh God it's in my bones it's in it's deep in there where I'm like you you mentioned like you your thing the other day about like oh I invented this 20 years ago but the guy some other dude at ietf was an asshole so I'd do it like that happened to me I had I couldn't remember the details but I remember having this Isis bug and I was like who's this dude fixing my bug and I'm like oh he is the Isis guy it's Cisco like it's literally him like and it's not about that's not a comment on zapping like he is the super Distinguished Principal you know King Isis and he's like oh that's really broken and you created a great point and it's like I yes sir I did don't make my contact don't show your back to the Isis king like you know but there's for me Bender life was like I wanted to be able to go to the court of the Isis king and ask him why this decision was made and either to be told oh you're right or no you're an idiot let me tell you why that's okay so that was advantage it was and you know there's like vendor life is great it's not perfect there's trade-offs everywhere blah blah nothing's you know the Grass Is Always Greener uh but it turns out that's just the reflection of the light and I asked just from a day-to-day perspective this has been sort of rattling around my brain since we started talking about like what a tme is and the differences you know between like your thought process throughout the day and what you're doing how much autonomic it seems like a role that you would need to have a lot of Independence I guess I'm not really saying it correctly but like you need to have a lot of initiative that's what I'm looking for initiative to start your project you you've come up with an idea and you go for it is there is that how it goes or do you get any guidance from a manager or how does that work as a team especially a new one so Wes I want to I want to cut you off just because I want to give um perspective yeah I want to stop you no no but I think um he does this indeed too by the way I can mute him if you want no no we're good no but but I think that uh besides the listening to the sound of my own voice I do think there is a difference between the manager and the individual contributor perspectives right and I think that's that's kind of important and so as a manager as a director of technical marketing um my job is to know that the state that the health safety and success of my team is entirely based on intangible political capital and so our ability to exist is because essies like us marketing likes US post sales thinks that doesn't think we're idiots like we need these different functions and Engineering wants to have a conversation with us maybe not every day because we're not smart enough for engineering but like occasionally they'll at least entertain an idea and so which is why a good director hires somebody from engineering to be a technical marketing engineer um she's also the best tme we have she's so good God I mean I just that's that was the hardest part about leaving that team I mean Wes is okay but like just being like all right super duper Rockstar I'm gonna not gonna watch you be amazing anyway as a as a manager though like you are watching kind of these different organizations and how they believe in you what you've given to them lately on like there's the outbound sign um and again this is different for every organization different for every tme group um you know I'm sure maybe I'll have a conversation with bushong and he'll have a totally different like perspective on this but for me it was like look I have to manage kind of the political capital of both where are we how high or low is that Reservoir and what do I need that Reservoir to be in the future right what is it that we would like to do in the future and who do I need to help me do that because if we've been ignoring the SES and we're feeling like our metrics are poor and we're not generating a lot of pipeline well I I need to refill that Reservoir before I can start asking to go on road shows and go meet with ses and like go start talking to customers and doing stuff so I think that's one thing he doesn't have to fill the pipeline right that's not their job it's products that we create do right yeah the deliverables that we put out often do create Pipeline and it's not ISO so to be clear like I don't think about Pipeline on a daily basis it's just an after effect of our job real quick it's just literally report quick quick aside because I I realize there's another I think I know what it means but no one has defined it for me the word pipeline can we just very quick go over for business pipeline is um you'll hear the word Pipeline and funnel used interchangeably and it is the funnel of sales so anybody who could possibly give us a dollar enters that funnel and then they shunt off as they decide not to and then the people that come out the bottom of the funnel is a sale or a closed deal that is somebody who wrote you a check and so tme you'll you'll also hear a lot about top of funnel middle and bottom of funnel top of funnel being like a billboard on the side of the freeway is top of funnel like you don't know us you've never heard of us we just want you to go to our website so we can give you a cookie that's type of funnel middle of funnel is like your second visit you're looking for something specific you've got you've actually formed a question bottom of funnel is like maybe you're testing it maybe you're trying it out maybe you're like doing a bake off like you're you're halfway committed but you haven't read the check yet and so tme also thinks about all those layers of the funnel but a lot of what we do passively is building that top of funnel pipeline so Wes's conversation about um test drive earlier right it's self-service you go do it yourself the team your organization built that everybody that goes and does that now puts a check mark in the tme column and so for again as a manager I have to justify my team with something that had a number political Capital doesn't do that very well I need to unnumber even if I know that number is mostly bullshit and so every single thing that my team built we checked a box we edited this paper we ran this webinar we were one of five presenters on this panel whatever it was that if marketing had a way to track it I wanted to be like wait a second Timmy's fingerprints on that and so then I can go and look back and be like look we didn't generate 30 million dollars I will never claim that but our fingerprints are on 30 million dollars for the revenue so that's kind of my my big picture of the the manager view I I think it's important for Wes to give his kind of his day-to-day view on technical marketing and you know what is what does that look like and you know what what drives you what are you thinking about it's hazy and blurry most days um and have I taken my ADHD meds today um put a flag a thousand yards out and I have to eventually get to that flag before he notices yes um so there's a lot of inbound um and depending on how your organization is structured I'll get inbound either directly from product marketing or from PM or sorry product marketing or product management um from SES or from my director or VP or you know some random Shmo that sends me an email that's a typical request what do they want from you usually it's uh collateral honestly if it's an inbound thing I'm going to talk to a customer we need to talk about this thing we don't have anything that explains the thing well please explain the thing well 98 of the time the collateral exists and you send them a Google Drive Link and you're done um I mean this is the nicest way possible but um sales Engineers are some of the laziest humans that God has ever created um and they'd be like okay there's our next guest is going to be a sales engineer for the last 10 minutes please just shit on tme it's like I welcome that but the thing is is that tmes also play air traffic control and so because we're talking all these functions we kind of know where all the stuff is where the Essie is like do we have a storage thing and as a team you're like oh my god I've been talking about storage every single day the last six months how do you not know where it is you're like because you haven't thought about it since the last time a customer asked you that's right that's really what I mean like they're not really lazy just it's a function of what they're working on today right and that's the and from our perspective and you nailed it like I do this all day long why don't you know this right I Market this all day long why don't you know this and it's because there's 3 000 SES at our organization and I haven't spoken to every single one of them right like um so so from a day-to-day basis um what did I do today uh so I racked and stacked some some gear that I'm using um to build out a reference architecture for our product um and then I presented to sales leadership for a specific product a new lab that we've designed and by Design I mean I've literally just thrown it into draw.io and this is what we think we might build um and then I started kind of scoping out what that lab looks like like that was my day today um so good question yeah what's a reference architecture so so in my case today I'll I'll deliver you exactly what I'm building so so I our product the Bluefield dpu is used by a lot of storage vendors to build storage appliances so what I want to build is a reference architecture a design of here's how you could build a storage appliance using our product and here is some test code and some documentation around how it might be designed so this product doesn't exist yet so reference architecture is if this product existed this is this is the design you could go with right um in other companies in other products you could have a reference so like something that we know is true and good and works and then you can design your infrastructure around that so like at nutanix there's a golden infrastructure reference architecture it's like 300 pages long um kind of yeah it's like a best practice meets so we've actually built it a networking specific example at cumulus we built a a spine and leaf data center network of raxa servers exit leaves to get out of that data center fabric yeah we said this was our reference architecture here's the routing protocols to use here's how to do IP addressing here's how to do the configuration here's the associated automation with it and our goal and this actually is like you want to talk about where post sales and Technical marketing works together our post sales people were ansible experts and so it's like I've got some ideas on how to do things but y'all are the ones doing it every single day and so I work with them to help build that reference architecture to say how do we not only want to design it on the Whiteboard but what does a config look like on the page what is an ansible automation look like on the page and then again as you think about those spectrums that reference architecture our goal was number one look copy pasta into your data center if that doesn't work use this you know I said this was the office off the shelters off the shelf suit or dress go get it tailored higher Pro serve to tailor it all right we've got a whole team of tailors we'll make this look a little bit better for you or put in the trash because you've got all your own ideas and you know what you're doing but then the other thing was that this became the conversation piece for all of our sales people all of our pre-sales started with that became like the the common language the lingua Franca across the organization and then that also ended up going into all of our documentation and so wherever we meet a customer right this is the kind of things like team you start to think about is like how do we cut grab a customer in a technical conversation at anywhere along the line and draw that line across and so if you're looking at document if you're talking to a pre-sales engineer they're talking about that reference architecture if you're looking at our documentation it uses that reference architecture when you buy and you go talk to post sales it uses that reference architecture when engineering goes and does QA they're using that reference architecture all of that it's not exclusively tme but tmes are the ones who like have the anxiety to go annoy everybody to try to march in the same direction we're like uh we're like The Sheepdogs of an organization high energy no chill really annoying if you guys get pulled into escalations not now I know it's like org.org right but if I see a tme get pulled into an escalation I'm kind of surprised yeah that would be rare um if I if I I can think of maybe once or twice where I've been pulled in but it's not to do work it's more to observe and figure out where we fucked up right so that my customer has a big problem oh no yeah CMEs to look at it like that's not typical yeah we're not going in and Engineering or solving problems yeah no I mean I would tell my customers I would be like I'm actually less good at this than the people helping you right now um like it's no longer on the Whiteboard I'm significantly less effective um it's not that I couldn't it's about efficiency um but a lot of it it's like you know like also about insurance yeah but it's like I'm gonna copy my VP on this email and you're like okay like I mean there's visibility somebody cares like and so for a lot of these escalations that I would get pulled into and be like I am aware of this problem I care about this customer so in one if I feel the need to I can go reach out to that customer directly but two and the off chance that you know the organization's not doing what they should be I can go like yellow multiple functions who are not talking to each other right like we especially saying one thing in engineering saying another I can be like all right marriage counselor time all three of us are going to sit in the room yeah and the the relationships that we build because we're that Hub in a huge wheel um you know gives us that ability to reach into engineering because we know that you know Jane Doe wrote that code um and we can you know not necessarily connect them directly to a customer problem but it's more of like all right how are we actually gonna solve this once this case gets closed and then we can and I'm driving that direction um it's it's a so to color a little bit more for you Lexi so yes I like today was an RA and then I delivered a diagram on a sales call um but then you know if I dial The Wheel back a couple months I was providing life support for a project that we're working on that just would never fucking ship and it is actually shipping um but uh you know it was all all hands on deck like this version of uh firmware doesn't match this version and why doesn't this Hardware work in this box and you know all those things and because a lot of the stuff that we touch is pre-release it's Alpha it's barely working in engineering and somebody drops it in our lap and says here do something with this this is what blows my mind about the role they'll like give you something like why doesn't this firmware work with this box you have to figure that out I don't know kind of you know what I mean I don't know why it doesn't work um there is this there's problem solving definite problem solving well that's a dumb way to put it right like what I mean is like I think we're sort of hitting this line between like Okay tme and like you're we were talking about sort of traditionally like being on call and fixing problems in the moment right like we're sort of we're probably at a product level okay yeah but the hard Hearts right like hard technical like we don't know why this is happening if you tell me where is it working on a box and to figure it out but I'm not damn I'm not working on that firm one I'm saying so this comes this shit isn't working here I'm pushing it back to engineering and here's why it's not working right so I'll I'll jump in and say I think there's a disconnect here um in which again I the tme's role is entirely predicated on political capital I don't know what that means I wanted to ask earlier so what's political um yeah sorry that's thank you he likes you pull it yes like how much credit do you have who likes you um like yes influence of votes give a shitness however you want to put it like I got it so the problem is that it's a tme if you're like this doesn't work and you go to engineering you just spent one of your little little Karma tokens right and you only got so many of those and so as a tme you end up spending you go to like 140 of like no no this is super broken and this is not what it's supposed to do so when you go to engineering like we don't always so that there's also a difference between tme and support in which um as a support engineer and I'm not going to speak for a Wes here but as a support engineer I was significantly smarter about the products I worked on but I had way less time as a tme I have more time to work on it but I have way less of an idea and so I was more likely as a tme to make a stupid mistake but if I didn't make a stupid mistake I got really deep as a tack engineer I'd be like all of my work is good I didn't do enough work if that makes sense like I could have gone deeper I could have done more research this smells pretty broken I'm now passing it off as a tme like I basically want to get to the last line of that mathematical proof and then hand it over to engineering be like what's wrong fix it solve it right you want to go that extra mile you can't throw the problem over the fence to engineering until you've given them some more data that didn't exist like hey here's one or you do it like you tie your you like duct tape your problem to like a six pack and like a bag of Reese's I'm sorry I have no idea this is so terrible I do not have a well-formulated question include a couple hundred dollar bills it's like I can't imagine being like I clicked the install thing and it just didn't work WTF how do I troubleshoot this and there's either you have some knowledge and some background or the time to just like dig and like be a technology archaeologist right or you duct tape you know a 12-pack to your question both of those things happen our method of troubleshooting and figuring out why something doesn't work is all about building context so that engineering doesn't waste a ton of resources in fixing the problem and they fix the right thing because we have the context from either the customer or from my fuckups in the lab or something else that I can build that context document it and then send it over the fence right um and using his analogy the more context we build the fewer tokens we expend when we send it back that makes sense I'm gonna have to bleep every f word Wes I'm sorry you said I could swear into cars listening you're joking Andy I don't I don't know I might be I might be joking I have two questions do you have a question because oh well I was just trying to Google real quick like where the tmes haven't always been around right is this a semi-new role did somebody make this up 10 years ago have there always been TMA technical problems tmes have existed at Cisco since before 2009 when I started I want to say they created them right I feel like somebody told me Cisco created the tme role for reasons that wouldn't surprise possibly yeah it wouldn't surprise me and I think that's actually one of the places where if you meet a tme at Cisco some of them are just ietf people like they just write standards and like go to ITF conferences and it seems like a pretty fucking cush life one of the tme roles that I got rejected from was super focused on competitor intelligence right like we buy the Juniper box and the uh I don't even know who all the other competitors were at that time space well this is a service provider routing and we're like oh well Nokia thank you Jordan uh if we blast this multicast stream with this type of mpls thingamajig and this like super nuanced thing it's a piece of crap you shouldn't buy it would you trust your family with this multicast stream I wouldn't like basically how do you build the political like the political negative ad out of the the competitors like that sounds awesome um and then some of them like I said are like more salesy and they're just like they look like PMS that look like SES for a product and you know or any mix in between so I can say that I've seen a big mix of them at Cisco since at least 2009. okay I have two things so one I'm glad that earlier you mentioned the Big M literally and then the inverse of that because after I talked to Wes I had a five five day interview hellscape with some company who shall remain nameless because I didn't get the job for a tme role and at the end they told me that I wasn't technical enough which is fine that totally did didn't hurt my imposter syndrome at all but you know I I I've always kind of like I'm technical but I I feel like the marketing stuff is much more intuitive to me and like hey you know the talking to the customer and the empathy and what's the problem and how can we as opposed to the super deep technical stuff so I'm glad that you said there's a wide range of it because it really hurt my ego and then I stopped trusting Wes because I'm like well Wes told me I could be one and you people didn't hire me so Wes is alive which is why he's a PM now because he didn't trust me a pattern here let's talk to Andy Andy didn't become a tme I hired Wes I quit it's a good pattern nobody call me one thing I didn't mention was that at the end of that conversation Wes opened up his role next to me and said here are five people their name and numbers that you should go talk to Mike Bouchon was one of them and he hired me and gave me the the dream job of my life that I'm in now so um it was a very selfless generous thing to you know to help pretty much a total Twitter stranger the only other thing I was thinking of did you guys have a hard time learning the business right like going from Tech to like product and Pipeline and SCA and sa and like there's a lot of business stuff that I've learned the past 11 months that I didn't know anything about and I didn't really have a background in business so you know if you want to be able to have a hard time learning it did I yeah it was just so it was foreign I didn't know what they were talking about the terms the acronyms like anything if you don't know right like going in a vendor learning about business it's like the first half of the CCNA we were like what the fuck is the MAC address yeah yeah like you're it like it's not hard you just it's so foreign and so like to Lexi's question like what is pipeline like like I was a tme I was in the role and I kept being in these I was literally in a sales call or like an internal sales um I can't remember what they call them like the weekly review of sales deals uh with the CEO weekly I hear a lot of sirens is everything else no it's okay that's that's the weekly root canal I want to make sure you're okay yeah yeah it's like the weekly sales review and I literally asked him I was like what is the pipeline yeah like in front of a whole room of sales people who like live and breathe it'd be like standing up in in the middle of an engineering being like what's an app what's an IP I I like I felt very dumb in retrospect but at the moment I was like I have to ask that question right two I'm too dumb to know how dumb this is that's part of the process it's not a prereq yeah yeah right yeah I think it was like you could totally do this job and not understand pipeline it's just but you have to be Technical and you have to be able to talk to people technical-ish yeah so I you you have to have one so I I will say uh wait a minute Pete wait wait wait you hire tmes what do I need dude I'm a guy listening to the show I want to go to a vendor make money help customers be technical how do I impress Pete lumbus tme manager guy like how do I get the job what do I need I love dark chocolate and peanut butter he also likes Echo Chambers yes see also Wes um how do they get the job you know what I mean I I think Jordan the champ puts it well like it's easy it's easy to teach Tech like it's hard science it's hard to teach song skills um I think that's part of it but I think more than that I think coming back to you know Andy your struggles is um a lot of it's what does the team need um so I thought a lot about the balance of our team so Wes has a storage background Wes Wes and I when we first talked he's like I don't know anything about networking it's like yeah I am a ccie I have a CCA of the team we got acquired like our whole company's Network Engineers I don't know what a hard drive is brother I need storage and compute and virtualization like I need a different skill set in this team right now and the networking stuff you're smart enough to figure out to the point where you can ask somebody on the team a question and vice versa like I can go hammer on a storage problem and then ask West to like kind of get you over get me over the hump so that's number one is what does the team need and I think number two on that right that's that's the technology space I think number two on that is the hard versus soft skill space where I was able to pull somebody from engineering into technical marketing um she had done some technical marketing what I would qualify as technical marketing work she made some videos written some blogs and I was like I think you would be phenomenal at this role this might not be a forever job for you but you have enough you have to have some you can't have zero Tech and you can't have zero soft skills what were you basing that on I missed this setup that you have a blog or something she had done a number of blogs for she was an inside engineering at cumulus she had done blogs she had done some videos like she had been very proactive and some of her kind of you know marketing stuff on the features yeah yeah she'd created some content and that's I mean this comes back to like the whole portfolio like if you have a portfolio it's way easier to hire than your uh potential to build a portfolio um but I also knew that between Wes and the other tme on our team we had the customer facing stuff down 400 percent Wes is outstanding in front of customers the other person on the team Justin was outstanding in front of customers like it did not matter what honorata could bring to the table like that she'd never been in a sales call that she'd only ever been an engineer her entire career because I knew we could figure that out like you kind of do a training wheels process to get that person there but her technical depth was so amazing for our team that Gap and be like I I don't want to hear you complain about your skill set you are going to boost our team to a greater degree than you can possibly imagine and because everything that she takes for granted are all of the huge massive gaps in the minds of myself of Wes of Justin the other team the other team who come from the user side and so you know to make you feel good about yourself Andy I think you I feel like you're gonna be a tme oh good good all right then never mind uh you know I think it has a lot not in the realm of a tme but it has a lot more to do with what is what does our team what did that team need what does our team need at that time and so um I've never interviewed you I don't know your resume but I can tell you that when I was hiring the last time we really need a deep deep technical knowledge on the hardware we needed somebody that understand it at a level deeper than a user because we had three users on the team three of three people had been users at some point in their life so it depends right it's just going to depend on the team You're Building Indonesia absolutely and that is that is actually the biggest challenge with becoming a tme and I would say to anybody listening like don't be discouraged like I said I got rejected from three different tme roles before I eventually stumbled into one like five years later um because like you're just it's a it's a time and a place and a fit right you might be the most technical person and they're like look we just need like we've got four nerds on the team for the love of God we just need somebody to go to a conference like if we miss another nanog my VP is gonna kill me see that's the TMA role I was looking for I could do my hair and smile at a conference and talk some some smack you know what I mean but they're like no we need you know you got to be able to see the Matrix I mean God damn it and that's the flip side it's like I don't I can't see the Matrix like I can I'm like what's that I think no maybe right and so when we hired when I hired honorada onto the team that former engineering person that like what I could have hired a lot of different people for that role but like there could not have been a person more perfect than somebody who had a deep understanding of hardware and a an a proven ability to communicate it and she is very very good at that and you know we're all good at different things at different levels and you know I would put Wes on stage a keynote depending on the conference before her maybe but it depends but like she's also one of the smartest people I've ever worked with my entire life so like I'm not I'm not disparaging her it's a strengths and weaknesses and trade-offs and just thinking about strengths we just talked to bashang about that last week you know you got to know your strengths and her strengths are different than West ranks maybe put them together and they're a perfect you know Dream Team uh last question because I I know we're at the end here um why did you leave Pete you said you were recovering tme did you get burnt out and you just wanted out or just different opportunities leaving my people was the hardest thing that I've ever done I'll say that no doubt I think that um Wes honorado I just talked about Justin where um I I felt so goddamn lucky to have gotten those three people together on a single team and I saw some of the work they were doing and were able to do like it blew me away and I knew our potential um as we talked about earlier like I have no chill and post acquisition uh when you're in a place that requires a lot of patience and chill like what startup me was used to doing in like six months now takes like 18. 24 maybe never um that was really really hard for me to just slow down and I think for me as a director it's very like I couldn't just like rest invest like I have these people who want to be able to deliver they are relying on me I have these external organizations that are relying on my function my performance directly impacts like the political capital of my team and their ability to function and I was like I I don't believe we can function I do not like this video which we're moving I do not feel I can satisfy the people that work for me this is no longer my home that that was mainly it acquisition so yeah prompted all that some kind of yeah I mean I I was I mean the I I've been going too hard too fast for a while um acquisition kind of made it worse and I I personally tried a couple of different Avenues to make it better for myself um but it was just it was a new organization like we were we were the little fish in a small pond and now you know I'm sorry the big fish in a small pond and now we're we like it downgraded from fish to like uh algae the minnows into the ocean like we were just Plankton at that point and you're like we're gonna change the ties and you're like brother plankton um and that that was just really hard for me it was a hard transition I mean I put sixty percent on me sixty percent upon me the other four percent again buy me a beer and I'll talk to you about it but um yeah I mean I just got crispy fried burnt out and now I'm an individual contributor writing docs and you know I even to talk about the big umbrella of tme as the Director of Team me at cumulus I took on the docs team and I started making my docs people to do tme work like you're gonna do a video you're gonna do some stuff that's more Marketing in the docs but like it's all about like how much flexibility is there in that material if it's in the docs it can't be flexible it has to be factual and accurate and true but it doesn't mean that there isn't space to start to bring marketing into that right hey you're looking at the evpn chapter did you check out our evpn webinar this evpn book right those kinds of things and so you know for me I was like I like docs this is a deep passion of mine I've done it before I'll go not have to make any decisions and learning Technologies along the way so I want to leave the audience with a couple things um so and I I I also wanted to cut Pete off on his last two words because all the time justice so I one of the one of the cool things that happens as a result of being a tme is you have a body of work that is largely public you have a lot of public deliverables that happen and you can then put those on your resume or you can very easily point to them when you're in a job search or you're looking for something interesting um you know when I was talking to Pete and I'm not sure if he looked at him or if he even cared but like I had and still do Phoenix test drive uh redo of the nutanix Bible and a YouTube channel that we built and like all of those things were public that I can reference and say this is material I've built I can reference talks that I've given at shows I can point out a product and say I I helped build this or you know I delivered this webinar or whatever it is right so you get to build this body of work that is very public and gets marketed like the company puts real marketing dollars behind something that has your face on it so like if you're talking about building a standing in the Tech Community a lot of times those Tech marketing engineers get to build that personal brand and it's funded by the companies they work for which is pretty damn cool I'll say I recently listened to West talk on a um another podcast that for anonymity sake will call akit ushers foreign not cheap yeah that was it a sponsored episode yeah oh Deep Pockets yeah yeah yeah but so that you know I get to go in front of those audiences right and um you know it helps I I know Ethan so when we were like oh hey we have some extra marketing dollars to spend maybe we could throw them this way right like it's like yeah let's hop on there and we can talk about our product or whatever it is um but it's cool to be able to build that body of work and have it published for you because you get your name out there and you know the opportunities start flowing in too right and what I found is the deeper I get into tme the less shitty my LinkedIn recruiter responses are because I'm getting like inbound direct to me rather than them doing a LinkedIn search of people that meet this criteria right um so it's it's a it's definitely an interesting inverse that I've seen but it's also like it's a really interesting gig because it changes so much throughout the week throughout the year um I think like Pete said um you know if you get burnt out super deep technical stuff switch gears and go write a talk right or you know um go build write a white paper or edit a blog or you know do it like there's so many places that you can infect in in fact inflict change on a product or on a market in this role that you can really vary what you want to work on um even if it touches just a few pieces of your skill set or if you get really dull or you want to enhance a part of your skill set you can go spend more time on that it's pretty cool you know I'll say is like three three concrete pieces of thing like collateral that I had produced as a team to give you that that perspective um one I helped create some um configuration knobs inside of cumulus to make configuring evpn easier called like Auto bgp so you're literally routed bgp Auto spine Auto Leaf like I don't care what the ASN just do it right that requires understanding technology and the protocol the design and like working with engineering and like not a marketing thing I did a super deep dive on I mean see what he dive but like a user level Deep dive on Asics that I delivered at nanog I did on packet pushers and a lot of that came out of both my tack knowledge but also like doing competitive analysis and saying like what's a deep buffered switch versus shallow buffer versus a chassis what does this mean why are customers complaining about it and then I think the third one is like I said just like hey take this existing eight hour training Chop it into two hours and just Mark the hell out of it like so we're we're not even really creating anything new it's very big M marketing to try to like just drive that sales Pipeline and so it super depends on the organization it super depends on who your boss is um it depends on your reporting structure like are you in engineering are you in marketing are you in sales are you in something else like as a vertical um but it is a super huge tent on what can be delivered very cool thanks so much guys you got anything else Lex no this was an awesome dive into tme roll thank you guys so much for being here and talking with us thanks for coming on for sure um where can folks find you two on the interwebs uh just west dot today be my website I've uh since the muskification of Twitter I've mostly logged off foreign like at the end of uh Doctor Strange Love I'm riding that bomb directly into the ground swimming my cowboy hat around yeah uh you can find me at Pete ccde well it's still valid maybe but uh look let's push on the stick and just drive it straight in the mountain I we all know where it's going just let it happen shotgun and you can find Lexi where you at Lex I am I'm on like five billion different platforms since the muskification happened so not only am I on Twitter as track at Pacer I'm on Twitch YouTube the email everything Mastodon all the stuff is everywhere and you Andy where do we find you soon to be in space Oh I don't know I'm quitting everything I'll just be on this podcast just call me I'm just gonna give you my number just call me you just you just open a window and just screams I mean it shows up exactly well that's where you can find all these lovely folks you can find our show on Twitter uh you know as long as Twitter's around at um art of netenge Instagram also an art of net Edge Facebook uh we have a thing on LinkedIn um you can also support us via patreon if you like and we just updated our March store which is at Art of netenge.com forward slash store and as always we have about 5 500 members in our Discord what I call study group that is at Art of netenge.com forward slash iaatj which stands for it's all about the journey AJ started it two and a half years ago um during the pandemic and uh that's how we all met and that's how we're here and it's an awesome community so uh all of you looking to bail on awful Twitter time our Discord is also another great place to come check out so um thanks so much for coming on guys awesome talking about the tme great to see you Lex and we will catch you next time on the art of network engineering hey y'all this is Lexi if you Vibe with what you heard us talking about today we'd love for you to subscribe to our podcast in your favorite podcatcher also go ahead and hit that Bell icon to make sure you're notified of all our future episodes right when they come out if you want to hear what we're talking about when we're not on the podcast you can totally follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Art of netenge that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find a bunch more info about us and the podcast at artofnetworkengineering.com thanks for listening foreign