Innovation From the Engineering Floor

Nobody asked for either of these.

The situation

Two things were true about the product portfolio at the same time, and neither was anybody’s assignment.

The management suite was four independent products — monitoring, logs, provisioning, and cost — each with its own interface, each acquired or built separately. A customer trying to run their environment had to learn four tools to answer questions that were obviously related. And within our own product, capability had outrun usability: it could do a great deal, and doing any of it required knowing a great deal.

Separately, the industry was moving. Containers were becoming how developers thought about deploying things, and the hyperscalers were winning the developer market with managed services that took minutes to start. We were still largely in the VM era, and the question of what a developer actually wanted from a VMware environment was not one anyone was systematically asking.

What made it hard

Strategically. Seeing either shift was not the difficult part. Acting on them without a mandate was. There was no budget, no sponsor and no customer asking, which meant this work competed against work that had all three.

Technically. A convincing demonstration had to be buildable in the time available around actual responsibilities. For the developer idea, that meant packaging had to do the work — nothing to read, nothing to configure, a running environment in minutes.

Organizationally. An idea with no owner needs visibility to survive, and it has no protection. Anyone can decline it and nobody has to explain why.

The decisions

Stay on the roadmap, or spend the time

The fork. The disciplined choice was to stay focused on my actual responsibilities, which were substantial.

The call. Spend the time.

The cost. Attention taken from committed work, on bets with no guaranteed payoff and no formal credit if they went nowhere. It came out of discretionary effort, not the organization’s. That is the honest accounting: a bet with my own time against work I was accountable for.

Propose the idea, or build the experience

The fork. A written proposal would have been faster and cheaper. A working prototype meant a VP could see the thing rather than imagine it.

The call. Build it.

The cost. My time, and an intern’s. I was mentoring him, and I spent a meaningful part of his time with us on a project that might never become work. Spending someone else’s development period on a speculative bet is a real cost, and it was not mine to spend lightly — it happened to come good, and that is not the same as it having been safe.

What I did

The workflow prototype. The company’s design organization had begun developing an open-source design language, then at an early stage. I took those principles and applied them to one of the workflows that made the product hard to use, and built it into something you could operate rather than read about. The intern and I built it together; I mentored and guided it and owned the outcome. I demonstrated it to the VP of Product, and it entered the roadmap.

That work is also why I later went and studied usability formally and took the Certified Usability Analyst credential. The project came first and gave me the questions; the vocabulary came after.

Separately, I took the single-pane-of-glass idea to the company’s R&D Innovation Offsite — one interface across all four management products, so a customer could answer a question without learning which tool owned it. The Offsite accepted approximately 3% of submissions. This one was selected.

The developer prototype. For the second problem I packaged application stacks so a developer could launch a complete environment in minutes on the private cloud rather than assembling one. I built it at an internal hackathon, where it won an award. The point was never the packaging format. It was demonstrating what getting started felt like when it took minutes, and letting people react to the difference rather than to a proposal. It got attention, including from product leadership and the general managers.

VMware acquired Bitnami some years later, by which time I had moved to CloudHealth. I originated a concept and built a prototype; what the company went on to do in its developer and cloud-native work involved many people over several years, and I am not in a position to claim a line between the two.

What changed

The workflow prototype went into the product roadmap. The single-pane concept was selected at the Offsite. The developer prototype won its hackathon and was seen by the people who set direction.

There is no metric on this page. Attaching one would mean borrowing scale from work I did not do.

What these are evidence of is narrower and more specific. I noticed two shifts before either was anyone’s assignment, spent my own discretionary time making them tangible rather than proposing them, and got them in front of people who could act. What happened afterward was not mine to own.