Our world is shifting, once again. Macrotrends that impact software at a massive scale, like AI's proliferation, the growth of devops as a practice and profession, containerization, and the continued decentralization of applications in favor of more flexible, SLA-backed, specialized cloud providers has introduced a whole new world of complexity—a tangled, often brittle web of hundreds or thousands of microservices, infrastructure providers, state management, rigid orchestration, team-specific processes and preferences, compliance requirements, and security practices.
Complexity like this requires a new way to think about the fundamentals of how applications get built—our engineering principles have to shift, too.
I'm thrilled to be joining Temporal to help the brand and our community usher in a new engineering paradigm that simplifies this complexity for developers, reduces their toil, and shores up the brittle nature of our applications.
I want to start my first public communication to the Temporal community by sharing a few simple beliefs:
I am a die-hard open-source religious believer. I am a flag-waving supporter of the expanded access to tools that things like "free forever" plans have brought to the world. And I believe that the communities of builders that convene around technologies are just as important as the technology itself.
I'm super privileged to have spent most of my career supporting tools that deliver those things to people building software. And by becoming a Temporalite, I get to live all these beliefs every day.
Beyond that, I believe all software should also be:
Simple and intuitive.
Innovatively integrated into my daily life.
Bug-free and performant.
These are the principles my leadership roles at InVision, Twilio, and most recently at Sauce Labs, have taught me.
And now, I'm adding "durable and failure-proof" to the list. Software should be reliable as gravity, as my new teammates like to say. And I agree!
I'm thrilled to have been offered the opportunity to join Temporal as CMO. I know that marketing can be a swear word with developers, and I'm sure the announcement of a leader focusing on this function entirely might raise your eyebrows. My job is not to "market" to you. It's to 1) make a market, 2) build communities, and 3) drive revenue for the business.
Temporal as a brand, OSS project, and cloud company needs to make a new market for all of us to succeed. We need to expand our community exponentially to bring reliability to the world's applications. And, as a business, we need revenue to continuously invest in Temporal's OSS and hosted products and the new engineering paradigm we believe in and all share.
- Make a market: drive the evolution of how developers build applications by designing, documenting, championing, and proving the value of the tenets of durable execution and durability engineering globally to build a category. Identify areas within the SDLC to shift spending from existing IT budgets to projects that deliver durable execution programs. Create new kinds of engineering roles, teams, functions, budgets, and processes for Temporal and other players in our space to address.
- Build communities: inspire, educate, equip, and enable practitioners around the world with hard-to-get skills, access to information, and opportunities to convene around things that matter to them. Support the ecosystem already in place for application developers, augment with programs that deepen relationships and build bridges between people.
- Drive revenue: identify and surface opportunities within the market where a deeper commercial relationship makes sense and is deeply mutually beneficial. Make our customers and the people with hands on keyboard wildly successful. Clearly understand Temporal's place in the market and what makes us unique, and drive programs around those qualities.
I wanted to close by sharing publicly and transparently that my marketing mantra is, quite literally, "don't be gross." What that means in practice is this:
- We will not spam you
- Our work will enhance your experience and not detract from it
- The things we make will be based on stuff you’ve asked for
- We will not unnecessarily limit access to things to force conversion
- We will strive to live up to the standard you set. Our community creates incredible things every day — if we’re not meeting that standard, we’re failing.
I am stoked to be joining a company with such strong alignment to my personal beliefs and core values, as well as a thriving community of builders who seem to mirror those beliefs on a journey to usher in a new way to make applications invincible. I encourage you to get in touch with me at any time to share your feedback, ideas, or comments with me—and if I ever don't live up to my commitments above, feel free to call me out! You can find me in the Temporal Slack community or on Twitter!