Homebound

My very last day is rapidly approaching its end, as I'm typing away at this looking at my gate. Unbelievable! While sitting in Bangalore traffic sure felt endless, I can’t fathom how quickly this month has passed by. I look back on four very intense weeks with immense joy and gratitude. Besides long days at our customer’s site, Vibhati Aggarwal and I were also given the opportunity to meet and greet amazing people within Cisco.?It's impossible to do all the insights gained over the final two weeks justice in one post, so buckle up.

Every single person, ranging from Principal Architects, CSAPers and CX leaders to VP’s has been so curious about our experience and takeaways from this rotation. I’m glad we got to speak on behalf of the CGEM (Country Global Enterprise Model) organisation, our managers which are backing us and of course, the head of the CGEM organisation, Mick Routledge . It is due to their vision of working in a truly global fashion that this rotation became reality.?

The goal is to not only meet our global customers where they are, regardless of their location but to also build true cross-cultural understanding of how global enterprises operate and the culture that drives them. While learning and adapting to the culture of our customers is crucial to be on the same page, I find equally as important to understand the people that I work with.?

Unsurprisingly due to the size of the Indian subcontinent, Indian enterprise accounts can easily take the scale of global accounts. Speaking to Neelesh Balani , Systems Architect, whom is responsible for some of the largest enterprise accounts shared some wisdom which I was thus far, unsuccessfully searching for in my own organisation. His method and structure of leveraging the right people at the right time to support his customer’s feature request for technical solutions struck a chord with me. For accounts of a certain scale and projects of a certain business impact, creativity is the deal maker.?

This was also confirmed when speaking to Vijay Tandon , Systems Engineering Manager for Enterprise India. The scale, complexity and impact of the deals which his team manage is beyond comprehension. Vibhati and I will most certainly stay in touch in order to learn from their deals which have been so successful that they are now Cisco wide case studies (think ACI and SDA integration).?

Additionally, we also got the opportunity to speak to Anand Patil , Technical Director of India and Raymond Janse van Rensburg , VP for Systems Engineering APJC. From my first impression, I was delighted to see that our leaders within Cisco seem to share similar good qualities - open mindedness, curiosity, creating joy and energy in seeing others, the business and technology excel. These meetings have been invaluable to Vibhati and myself. Not just to share stories about our learnings but to also hopefully inspire more of these global rotations. At the same time, I am glad that we got the opportunity to voice not only our customer’s feedback to our leaders in such a direct manner but also share insights from our day-to-day business.?

From a professional and especially Systems Engineering perspective this first half of the rotation has given me three major insights:

1. How to step up my game when it comes to leveraging which people from my internal network

Given the size of our global customers and the complexity of their ongoing digitisation of business and IT operations, it is only sensible to draw from internal resources which each deliver their puzzle piece to completing the picture. I found it immensely encouraging to hear from both sales facing principal architects as well as leaders and engineers from our business units to please involve them when they can deliver value. One of the Systems Architects we spoke to explained his strategy: pitting customer's highest level technical decision makers "against" our Engineering leaders while still owning the conversation as the SE. Going forward this will support our account team in tackling architectural questions and driving adoption by positioning key feature requests to the correct stakeholders. Additionally it gives clarity to our customers in a dualistic manner:?better clarity to our customers on who owns what within Cisco and utilising use cases and references from similarly sized customers by pulling in architects that have seen large scale projecst. This yields better expectation management as well as improved customer relations. We arrived at this conclusion simply by being able to exchange thoughts with my own coworkers on how they tackle complex projects.?

2. Technical account management vs systems engineering

Joining the Field Sales team as a Systems Engineer (SE) out of our Cisco Graduate Program CSAP, my initial perception was that I would be building kit lists, explaining SD-WAN on the packet walk level and fending off competitors with sweat dripping from my forehead. Being the Headquarter SE for this global account I spend more time being up to speed on all ongoing projects, detecting potential cross-sells and finding new potential projects which fortify our relevance to the customer. Speaking to my local counterpart I do realise that while we work towards the same vision (our medium term account plan), my responsibilities lean more towards understanding the technical and business foundation of Cisco and the customer, giving clarity to internal and external stakeholders, orchestrating stakeholders and resources while being able to keep pace with technical conversations and enablers. Especially, with customers making decisions in one location and executing them in another, it’s essential to keep track of a lot of different red lines.?

3. The Cisco culture makes me thrive

The incredible open-mindedness, approachability and camaraderie in getting across the finish line together is so energising. As a professional and as a person I’m a problem solver, community builder and go-getter. The freedom to own the SE role within Cisco was very daunting at first. What is the benchmark for a good or excellent SE? It will highly depend on the LoB you focus on, your customers’ mindset as well as what I, as an SE want to leave behind as a legacy. While it might sound a little over the top, the big projects which propel our customers forward, do eventually leave a mark on the industry. When experienced SE’s introduce themselves, most often they will gladly share about their biggest successes and failures. Thus trying to find my niche, best value-add to the team and the business is a saga to be continued.?

Besides visiting numerous Cisco offices, I also got to share wonderful experiences with colleagues and new friends. The warm hospitality of everyone that I reached out to, was introduced to or simply ran into has touched me and left a long-lasting impression on me. From coworkers hosting me in their homes for home-cooked meals, taking me to a tailor to find the appropriate dress for my first Indian wedding, inviting me to lunch on campus, to hosting me in Delhi and showing me around the city. It’s heartwarming to see with how much joy and pride people were sharing their favourite places, dishes and music with me. Everyone went above and beyond to make my visit as rich as it could be. For that you will all have my deep gratitude and a spot in my home in Amsterdam!?

Lastly, I want to thank and highlight the support of Cisco and its leaders to make this possible. The vision of creating a truly global SE community and collaboration across all Geo’s in our teams strikes a chord with me. Thank you Mick, Hwee Feng, André, Thierry, Wendy, Edwin, Niklas and everyone else behind the scenes keeping an eye on us!?

PS. Try the fried garlic paneer at Café Leopold in Mumbai

???Cisco ?????