AKA: That time I put my name on the line for a vendor — and learned how to support a Champion from the inside out.
We were running into issues at Vectorflow — issues that didn’t always trigger alerts, but were absolutely frustrating our end users. Pages were loading slowly. Sometimes the app froze without explanation. Support couldn’t always reproduce the problem, and when they could, the logs weren’t enough.
So I brought in Dynatrace.
I wasn’t evaluating Dynatrace to pitch it. I was fighting to keep it.
I knew what it could do: Real User Monitoring (RUM), waterfall charts, root cause analysis. It gave us actual visibility — not just into infrastructure, but into what users were doing before something broke.
“It’s not just uptime. It’s understanding what led to the downtime.”
Rolling out Dynatrace meant defending it. It cost money. It required agent install coordination. And it meant adding another dashboard to teams that already felt stretched.
So I did what every good Champion does — I gathered wins:
I escalated when needed. I backed the product when others doubted it. And every time we solved something faster because of Dynatrace, I used it as internal proof.
Dynatrace wasn’t just good for the org — it was good for me. If I could prove it solved real problems, that meant:
I wasn’t just deploying software — I was betting my internal reputation on a tool that I believed would make everyone better.
And I didn't just fight for Dynatrace. I used their own value messaging to frame the pitch — uptime, user journey insight, performance diagnostics. I was quoting them (tactfully) in meetings. I had basically deputized myself as their in-house Solutions Engineer.
Remember: your Champion isn’t just advocating for your product — they’re advocating for themselves.
If I hadn’t seen it from the inside, I might’ve missed that. Now, I design every enablement move with that lens.
Being a Champion made me a better SE. Because great Champions don’t happen by luck — they happen because someone made it easy for them to believe.