Why I Joined Transposit

After deciding to leave my role at Okta as Senior Director of Product Marketing, I met with and researched dozens of companies. I was excited to meet a wide variety of founders and CEOs and learn about their products, markets and approach to building companies. I started to zero in on companies with a no-nonsense, inclusive culture, a strong technical foundation, and a plan to attack a large market in a new way.

Okta had a lot of these elements during my seven years at the company. My team and I were empowered to take on big goals and amplify the company’s success. We originally rode the wave of SaaS in the enterprise, but in recent years Okta has latched onto the dev platform and DevOps trends. These emerging trends got me really excited. All the while, what I found is a growing divide between the trend of consumerization of IT and the rapidly growing trend that is basically developers taking over the world. It’s DevOps + Dev Platforms + Dev Productivity.

Transposit stood out by being at the intersection of all three of these areas. With a powerful integration engine, a dev platform for customization and a focus on human-in-the-loop automation, I felt like the possibilities were limitless for Transposit. This foundational technology fits perfectly into the shift in IT I see in the coming years.

Transposit’s Massive Market Opportunity#

On the one hand, there’s the force of simplification of IT. SaaS has turned cumbersome IT infrastructure into software that’s a pleasure for IT admins to use and for enterprise users to adopt. A lot of IT has been simplified and made more accessible by focusing on “80/20” use cases and making it easy to do common tasks. This has revolutionized IT for SMBs and eaten away at big swaths of IT for large enterprises.

On the other hand, where you must offer a powerful, differentiated digital experience for your customers, software has gone through an even more seismic shift. With cloud-native software, microservices, CI/CD, and containers, the entire chain of how software is developed looks almost nothing like it did 10 years ago. Developers and the emerging role of the SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) are driving the need to invent new technology to solve old problems that look very different in this new world. IT teams with software development skills are even catching on, adopting concepts like configuration as code.

The multi-billion-dollar question that could reshape the tech industry in the coming decade is: where do these two trends intersect? What trend wins in the vast gray area between SMB IT and the most advanced engineering teams?

How many use cases can be solved by consumer-grade tools that can be adopted by a savvy business analyst? How far can you get with more sophisticated configuration-based tools designed for an IT pro?

As developer tools become more powerful, and developers more productive, at what point are you better off building custom software? Or, at what point does it make sense to write code for configuration?

The thing is, the consumerization trend is older and more mature. Large organizations like Microsoft, ServiceNow, and Salesforce have pushed the limits, offering ever more sophisticated ways to get non-developers to build or customize apps.

However, we are only just scratching the surface with technology that developers can use to make their lives easier and more productive. Writing, deploying, and maintaining code is still an incredibly cumbersome process. Over the next 5-10 years, we will see a dramatic increase in developer productivity. More organizations will be able to use the power of code for more use cases. Developers’ lives will also get easier, with less on-call time and more time getting cool stuff done.

Workflow automation, and business process automation more broadly, is an interesting potential battleground for the intersection of consumerization of IT and developers taking over the world. It is particularly one-sided today. There has been a ton of investment in low-code or no-code workflow and orchestration tools. As you would expect, simpler use cases have been solved. But complex use cases involving complex systems and human intervention are not easy. You often need to hire an army of consultants at a cost of millions of dollars to build out these complex flows in proprietary systems from large vendors. This is where Transposit comes in.

The Strong Technology Foundation#

Transposit is taking a fresh look at this problem, starting 100% at the opposite end of the spectrum. The Transposit platform today is optimized for managing the full 360-degree picture of what happens around an operational incident for a DevOps team using human-in-the-loop automation. Solving this alone would save many sleepless nights for developers and SREs. But the really exciting thing is that today’s product is built on top of a powerhouse of a foundational platform. Transposit has re-invented API integration and built a robust dev platform for building API-based apps. With these elements in place, there is no limit to the use cases we can solve in this new developer-powered world.

The No-nonsense, Inclusive Culture#

Perhaps most importantly, Transposit is taking an innovative approach to building a company with a great culture. A big opportunity and powerful technology only get you so far. Transposit has realized that the product and customer success of a company are a direct output of the culture you build internally. To build a human-centered solution for incident response and solving DevOps automation more broadly, Transposit is building a human-centered culture. Transposit sums this up as valuing diversity of thought and experience, egoless collaboration, and pragmatism - all things that resonated really strongly with my approach to my work as a marketer and a leader within an organization.

I knew within 10 minutes of meeting Transposit’s CEO Divanny Lamas that there was something special going on here. And now, I’m excited to be a member of the team! I’m focused on growing our top-notch marketing team and reaching every organization out there trying to make the DevOps life a little easier!

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