Startups will teach you many things. But one lesson I have carried through every role is this:
If I solve a problem today, I should solve it in a way that the next SE after me never has to solve it again.
At Vectorflow and AlphaPoint, I was not handed clean processes or templated PoCs. I was dropped into a sea of scrappy clients, well-meaning chaos, and a few too many Slack channels. Which is to say, I loved it.
Over time, I stopped seeing issues as one-offs. A support ticket was not a problem, it was a signal. A PoC that went long was not a delay, it was a chance to build a better playbook.
Story 1: The Printer That Broke My Inbox (And How I Fought Back)
This one begins with a badge printer. During a rollout for a healthcare client, I kept seeing the same Jira tickets pop up. Misconfig this. Template not loading that. The kind of tickets that quietly fill support queues and slowly drain morale.
I pulled a few weeks of logs. Badge design and printing issues were a top support burden. But it was not just the volume, it was the repeat questions that killed us.
So I did what any SE with a grudge against ticket volume would do: I made a doc. A beautiful, painfully detailed doc. It walked users through printer setup, template logic, and image uploads. I paired it with a Loom video, dropped it into onboarding kits, and made sure both Support and the client had it bookmarked.
Result: 52% drop in support tickets. The doc was quietly adopted by Product as official onboarding. First-time enablement without support intervention.
I did not just solve a setup issue. I built a bridge.
Story 2: Templating Intelligence (Without Losing the Soul)
I was juggling PoCs for Delta, BU, and Atrium. Different industries. Different buyers. Same questions. Instead of reinventing the wheel every week, I started crafting a reusable scaffold: the UI logic, the demo flows, the questions I knew would come, the answers that Sales would need.
Delta used it to verify security clearance in real time. Atrium used it to eliminate duplicate badge identities. The bones were identical, the skin changed depending on the audience.
- ⚙️Cut PoC cycles from 5 weeks to 4, saving 3 to 4 days per client
- 💬Sales and Product fielded fewer one-off questions
- ♻️Template became internal tool for both upsell and training
The Takeaway: Do Not Just Demo. Design the Function.
I am not here to just show up and demo. I design the playbooks. I build the bridges. I solve a problem once so five teams do not have to solve it again.
MEDDIC in action: I chase pain, build toward metrics, and elevate champions, even when no one is using that language out loud.
More from the SE Blog