My Pivotal and Tanzu Labs Journey

It started in Sydney for me.

I had been in product roles at scrappy startups, one of which was a company I co-founded and subsequently shut down.

Closing a company I had invested so much time and money into was an incredibly challenging and painful experience. My scrappy startup ways only got me so far, so I wanted the opportunity to work alongside a more seasoned team.

I heard about this company called Pivotal Labs. It was headquartered in San Francesco and was scaling up. I had never heard of Pivotal Labs but I soon realised it was the company behind Pivotal Tracker , a tool I had been using at Freelancer.com . Pivotal happened to be setting up an office in Sydney, so I submitted an application.

After an initial phone screen, I found myself at Tank Stream Labs interviewing for a product manager role. There were multiple back-to-back interviews in a single day. It was intense and fun. At this point, the majority of the team was made up of "Seed Pivots". They came out from San Francisco, NYC and Toronto to set up the Sydney office.

I got an offer in December 2015, right before a family trip to Europe. My first day was 13th January 2016. The team had a Happiness Director. This concept was completely foreign to me but I loved it. Here's a snippet from the calendar invite I got from her on Day One.

"Over by the TV area in the office, there will be a welcome package with your name on it. For breakfast, I have ordered a bunch of food for everyone so have a look and eat what you would like. I also got some of the snacks you asked for and it's over in the snack area."

I had the privilege of starting alongside an incredibly talented Product Designer and Software Engineer. We were the first local practitioners hired into the team. Pivotal was barely known in the Sydney market at this stage. 思特沃克软件技术（中国）有限公司 was our closest competitor and they had been around for much longer. I had been part of the Thoughtworks - LevelUp initiative and knew their team was top notch. We had to get creative to get the Pivotal name out there. We didn't have a marketing budget but our happiness director had a P-Card for the office, and that's what we used to build awareness. We started by hosting tech meetups. We breathed life back into the Lean Startup Meetup . The Sydney office felt like a scrappy startup BUT we had an incredibly experienced team.

When we weren't on client engagements, we were on the "beach" – a playful term for the bench. While we were building up business, the Seed Pivots facilitated a beach project for us. Remember when we used to work in the office every day? We'd get together for lunch and would need to decide where to go. We'd be looking at our options on Google Maps and would be back and forth until someone made a decision. This is the problem we set out to solve. After running a Discovery and Framing, we decided to build a Slackbot called Lunchfinder. Team members would add their favourite lunch spots and each workday, it would select somewhere for us to go.

My first client engagement was a total disaster. I felt out of my depth. Working with such a talented team, imposter syndrome snuck in. Together, we made it through the other side. I got a lot of constructive feedback. Getting such direct feedback was new to me and it took me a while to get used to it. There were times I got defensive. I remember having conversations as a result of this. Soon enough, I was able to recognise feedback as a gift and use it as an opportunity to learn. My first manager in Sydney has been my best manager to date. She was an incredible coach and put me on an steep growth trajectory.

While in Sydney, we were looking for other interesting problems to solve between client engagements. One that stood out was the challenge of facilitating retros for teams that weren't in the same room. This was back in 2016, before the major shift to remote work. We started building a retro app to solve this problem. By the end of week 1, we had a working product that we used to run our own team retro. By week 2, we had our first client team use the app. By week 10, we launched Postfacto to the entire company. While the Postfacto web app has been decommissioned and the open-source project is no longer maintained, there are many forks. There's also Refacto – a complete from scratch re-write of Postfacto, with a focus on simplified code, development, and deployment.

Fast forward to December 2016 and I'm on a plane to the London office for what was meant to be 1-year. I am incredibly grateful for the Sydney and London leadership teams that were able to make this happen. I hit the ground running, just in time for a Christmas dinner with the client team I would be working with. It was a big bank. The engagement had already been running for many months. I had a few weeks to ramp up. The product manager that I was taking over from had a lot more experience than me. I had big shoes to fill. Imposter syndrome was sneaking back in.

Pivotal Software filed for an initial public offering in March 2018. The company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange on 20th April 2018. I vividly remember that day in the London office. We had an IPO party while viewing the live broadcast. There was plenty of cheering and champagne flowing when the PVTL ticker was listed on the NYSE.

A people manager role opened up and I applied. I got rejected. Another opportunity opened up. I applied again, and got rejected. Third time around, I got the role. This was the start of a whole new growth journey. I have had some amazing people managers at Pivotal Labs. These were the leaders I wanted to be like. That sneaky imposter syndrome crept back in.

Pivotal was acquired by VMware at the end of 2019. Navigating a major acquisition was a whole new learning experience. Little did I realise, there was a BIGGER acquisition on the horizon. Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in November 2023. This was another tumultuous period to navigate.

Looking back, imposter syndrome has been a signal for growth. I like to relate it to the growth zone model that divides the experience of learning into three main zones: The Comfort Zone, The Growth Zone and The Panic Zone. I've traversed all three of these zones and the one I'm most grateful for is the one that drove growth.

To sum it all up, the last 8 years with Labs has been like a rocket ship for my personal and professional growth. I had the opportunity to move from Sydney to London, where I saw Pivotal Software float on the New York Stock Exchange, and navigate 2x major acquisitions. I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to work with such a talented team that has a culture of shared values. I am a better human as a result.

Pivotal's mission was to transform how the world builds software. While this has evolved from one acquisition to the next, people still remember it. Alumni all over the world remember this mission, alongside the Pivotal values.

Do the right thing. Do what works. Be kind.

For the rest of this year, I am running an experiment. I am going all in as a Fractional Product Leader and Co-Active Coach. I am committed to helping mission-driven innovators achieve their highest potential and make a lasting impact.

Pivotal and Tanzu Labs is where I really learned how to be a product manager, a consultant, a people manager, a leader and a coach.

If you're interested in collaborating, please reach out!

My Labs journey in review.

• First local product manager in Sydney
• Visited 8 offices and worked in 7 countries
• Impacted 15+ client teams and executives across 10+ sectors
• Managed 17 product, design and engineering reports across 5 countries
• Spoke, facilitated or contributed to 10+ product conferences across 5 countries
• Completed 5 coaching courses with Co-Active Training Institute
• Completed 8 other professional development courses
• Completed 1 executive programme with 欧洲工商管理学院 (INSEAD)
• Joined 2 executive communities
• Gained 1 new citizenship

Evolution of the company.

• 1x IPO and 2x acquisitions
• Pivotal raised $555 million in the April 2018 IPO
• VMware completed the acquisition of Pivotal for $2.7 billion in December 2019
• Broadcom completed the acquisition of VMware for $69 billion in November 2023

I am eager to see what comes next ??