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Brenda's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brenda-contreras-9649a47/
In this episode, Scott interviewed Brenda Contreras, VP of Engineering and Architecture at Self Financial.
Some key takeaways/thoughts from Brenda's point of view:
Brenda started with a little about her history, mostly on the app development and software engineering side before moving to Self where she's added data/analytics to her architectural focus. She learned a lot working in the office of the CTO at Charles Schwab about how to decompose a monolith and not become overly rigid around the philosophy of microservices at the same time - how do you still have shared services? How do split into product domains? How do you make sure everything plays nicely together internally and for the customer?
That learning about how to share data well on the operational plane is serving Brenda well in general at Self. When she first arrived, creating an inventory of what already existed and how it worked together was crucial to start decomposing appropriately. What were the systems yes but especially how they powered the actual business. What really matters and why? What are the key strategic initiatives and how can you positively impact them by improving systems? A 99% improvement in latency on something that drives no change to how people use systems is wasted if impressive work. It's okay for things to live in a "sustain bucket" as you focus on key business drivers. And you can only really find those key drivers by listening to your business partners.
When Brenda started to consider where to start with decomposing the operational systems at Self, she first looked to where they might "run out of runway". What were the systems that were likely to cause trouble driven by growth? Because you don't want to have to tell your business partners they have to stop growth 😅
A key aspect of decomposing a monolith is getting buy-in. Brenda had a lot of success with showing people the benefits of smaller systems that are easier to manage. Deploys are easier. Maintaining a smaller database is easier. It's easier to figure out who owns what - if someone needs information, they know who to go to. Etc. And extracting the information and then explaining your plan for change should be done in the language of the business. They don't care if you are switching your backend to Cassandra, they care about what impact changes will have on the business and what changes for them.
Brenda recommends that when you start to look at decomposing a monolith into microservices - so on the application side - you should start by breaking into domains first. Without clear owners and sets of microservices, you start to split things off without a clear forward path. Once you have the domains identified, you can start to move necessary capabilities into your microservices.
Differentiating baby and bathwater - what should get tossed out and what should be kept - is crucial in Brenda's mind when you are doing any kind of transformation. There are existing solutions that you don't need to migrate immediately because they're fine as is. Again, don't look to make changes for the sake of changing something. Look to net new use cases as you start to decompose and eventually those legacy use cases will get reimagined and replaced.
It's very easy to focus on the wrong things in Brenda's experience - instead, focus on the conversations with business partners and work backwards towards what really matters. Then the work follows from that. E.g. in an acquisition, integrating systems and/or migrating the acquired company to your systems seems to be a major focus instead of integrating what will drive value and keeping things again in that "sustain bucket".
Brenda's secret sauce to aligning with business partners comes back again to communication and understanding the big picture of the organization, how their part of the organization fits in, and what are their priorities. Essentially, it's taking the vision for where we want to go and breaking that into manageable projects to move forward on. Always be communicating priorities and timelines and working with people to realign at the small and large scale vision level. And, a biggie is to _really_ listen to your business partners and C-level execs when they talk challenges.
"We need to be … able to experiment more, we need to be more flexible," Brenda said relative to figuring out how to drive more business value around data. The fast fail approach in software is crucial to getting to business value fast - how can we adopt that in data? Partly, it's again going back to communicating well with your business leaders through good storytelling. She said, "iterate small and sell … your solutions on a practical level."
In wrapping up, Brenda again emphasized the importance of good communication and collaboration with your business partners. It's so easy in data and tech in general to let that drop to focus elsewhere. But when you are all at least reading from the same book, even if there is some disagreement in strategy, people can at least make informed decisions. Don't try to skip the communication with your business partners!
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