For our third installment, you’ll hear thoughts from Drew Aschman, Senior Manager, Software Engineering. As I’ve stated before, we are in the “teenage” years of our startup growth. Drew has been a critical member of our team as we continue to scale Visible. I hope you enjoy his thoughts on being a valuable #TeamVisible member.
Here are my favorite highlights from our conversation:
What did you know you’d find at Visible?
I joined Visible during the transition from build to scale, and being a part of molding the long term culture has been an amazing opportunity. For being an essential communications service, we’ve got spunk. Visible’s brand identity and our audaciously inclusive mission drive us to think members first and to do things differently. Industry veterans and diverse perspectives from far and wide bring deep expertise and innovation to our product development and operations. These are the connections that make work fun even when it’s hard. Above all, doing good and being a part of initiatives larger than myself like Visible Connect make me proud to be associated with Visible and Verizon.
What did you find that was unexpected?
A team of rock stars who spun up a cloud-based mobile network in a matter of months, shares a closet full of skeletons with a generations-old industry. You can’t do this kind of thing on your own, and in most cases you wouldn’t want to anyway. But Holy Batman! Let’s just say there has been no shortage of opportunities to slow down in order to speed up.
Scaling a business doesn’t exactly cater to redoing things “the right way.” The rule of 3 and 10, reevaluating what’s completely broken with growth, sounded like a luxury at times. Through our failures and learnings, we have come to appreciate where core platform investment pays dividends in the long run. Combining that with the scale at which our parent company, Verizon, operates offers best practices, processes and off the shelf solutions that directly apply to our business, and in a more controlled way than with many third party or open source solutions.
What have you learned?
I’m constantly iterating on my abilities to effectively serve the needs of Visible’s business with technology that will power short and long term growth. That takes a lot of work from a lot of great people, backed by a strong strategic vision, all supporting each other to get better every day.
Industry-wise, telecom is a shared ecosystem where first principles are in some ways humbled by the need to play nice with other providers. This commoditization could be an excuse for lack of innovation, but at Visible we’ve made this challenge into an opportunity to bring a fresh perspective to the not so simple or accessible phone service that many of us take for granted every hour of every day.
Himanshu’s #HonestHour #Telecommunications #Innovation #TeamVisible