Happy Friday, I hope you have a great weekend.
Here's a little anecdote to send you off.
One time at my first company I was tasked with designing an artifact and CI/CD architecture. This must have been nearly 10 years ago. I was evaluating about 5-6 different vendor solutions. I was a senior web apps specialist at the time – today you'd say DevOps. (NEWSFLASH: I was a buying decision evaluator!).
Anyway, we had this one vendor offer to send their Solutions Engineer in. I kid you not, he was the epitome of a "bro" engineer. He came in with his Whole Foods bag every day and he had a rockin' bod. I mean – I'm a little jealous, he clearly worked out.
Honestly, he was a nice enough guy. We liked him. We could tell he wasn't super technical but he wasn't condescending, he treated us respectfully, and he was always eager to help or jump in.
BUT... the product itself was a different story.
As we continued to throw more complex scenarios we'd need to support, the product kept failing to meet expectations. (It looked like the UI was made in the 90s, just thinking about the UX makes me want to puke.)
Rockin Bod Boi would try to help us figure it out and would sometimes need to call HQ and... yeah, it wasn't... great.
The workarounds were complex. It was obvious that automation may not solve the problem and we were dealing with hundreds of internal sites needing to be managed. My teammate and I kept giving each other sidelong glances. If this product makes these scenarios complex, I don't think our teams will fare very well (and then they'd ask us and create more Remedy tickets, and ahhhhhgh that was the last thing we needed).
The marketing had succeeded. The sales cycle had started well. We liked what we initially saw. But then – a crack formed in the foundation. Trust in the product as a solution was... broken.
From the Little Red Book of Selling, Gitomer's mantra is:
"If people like you, and they trust you, they may buy from you."
The moral of the story is, even though we liked him, and we liked the vendor demo enough to create a prototype, the trust in the product was lost.
So that's why we didn't buy it.
(Anyway, I hope you're doing well, Rockin' Bod Boi – you did the best you could with what was given and we salute you.)
Have a lovely weekend,
Kamran
PS. We went with Jenkins + Artifactory, which worked out well for us at the time.
