Professional and Personal Update, July 2024

I was going to do this as a post, but LinkedIn says it's too long, so I'll put the full version here and the TL;DR in the timeline.

I try to keep 80+% of my posts focused on information that you, the reader, can take and apply to creating the outcomes you are looking for in your life and your business. I assume that the details of my life are not generally useful to you. That said, I've gotten a lot of questions lately about changes in my role at work. I've let my profile get out of date (I missed an entire position!), so this post is a brief summary of interesting changes -- professional and personal.

First, a quick look back to the position that I omitted from the profile. As many of you know, Sitecore made several strategic acquisitions in early 2022. In order to get partners up to speed on all the new products in the portfolio, we combined sales enablement and partner enablement into a single organization, with me leading partner enablement. We did two particularly significant things. First, we created of temporary learning programs for the acquired products to get something in partners' hands while the learning team built out the permanent formal learning and certification. Second, we created a team of coaches called partner technical advisors to guide partners on their early implementations. By the end of FY24, we had assisted in over 400 implementations. In the process we established a set of core experienced partners for every product, in every geography.

With that mission accomplished, it was time to pivot the team. Most of the team moved to the services organization and will continue to provide a very similar service to both partners and customers as part of the improved Sitecore 360 offering. Two of the team are coming along on my new adventure. Sadly, a couple of great resources were lost in the recent reorganization. If you are looking to make a great hire for a Sitecore practice in the United States or in the Nordics, please let me know. I'll be happy to make an introduction.

So, what's my new adventure? I'm joining Heather Polen's pre-sales team as the Global Head of Solutions Architecture. We support the account executives and sales engineers on deals that require exceptionally deep technical definition or technical proof. I already knew many members of the team from deals that the PTAs helped with. As I've gotten to know the rest of the team, I can attest that they are truly remarkable people - smart, hardworking, committed to teamwork, and committed to making their prospects and customers successful. If you've followed me for any amount of time, you know that I genuinely love working with sales people. It's going to be great to have the opportunity to do that more intensely, especially alongside a great group of professionals like this.

The other big professional news from the first half of this year is that I've come on as a limited partner with Stage 2 Capital. Sean Po had become familiar with me through my LinkedIn content and reached out to describe the investment opportunity. There are several things I love about the Stage 2 approach. 1) They have great people on the team. For instance, Mark Roberge of Hubspot fame, is the cofounder. 2) They take what I describe as a blue collar approach to investments - no speculation. They're looking for quality operators who can create profitable growth early on. 3)They are selective about who they invite to invest in the fund and then engage with them intensively. If you look at the public list of LPs, you'll see a ton of deep experience in B2B GTM. There are plenty of opportunities for LPs to get involved in due diligence and in coaching key folks at portfolio companies. If that's interesting to you, and you'd like an introduction to Sean, let me know.

There are a couple of important personal updates as well. Last year, Shannon and I stopped bouncing back and forth between Raleigh and Atlanta. The kids moved in with us full time, and Atlanta became our permanent home. That triggered starting a remodel earlier than we had planned. Murphy's Law hit hard on the remodel, so it's good that we had planned a decent margin of safety. As of about three weeks ago, we're back in the house. If you're one of my Atlanta connections, we'd love to have you over some time. Secondly, child #3 graduated. She'll be heading off to Georgia College in about three more weeks.

Now let's talk about what hasn't changed. A big one is that I'm still very committed to growing the Sitecore community and coaching folks who want to contribute to it. Being in Atlanta is a real help to that since we have a thriving local community. If you are a #sitecore #mvp (or aspire to become one) and there's anything I can do to help you find / create opportunities to share your knowledge with the world, let me know!

Secondly, I'm still focused on writing more and presenting more. So far, the most popular writing has come as a result of trying to provide advice for some of my friends and colleagues who are looking for work. It's been well received, and several folks have called me up to say how much it helped. Here's a link to the first installment, What to Do First when You've Been Let Go. I'll update each one with a link to the subsequent article shortly. Hopefully, I'll get to number four in the series soon. You'll find some other things that I have written over at https://thoughtinaction.co.