ABOUT ME
Since 2002, I have been leading Technical Operations teams with some of the most respected companies in streaming media, finance, and security technology. Currently, I serve as Product Manager at Harness for their Incident Response product (formerly Transposit, which was licensed by Harness). In this role, I provide thought leadership and strategy to build a product that fulfills the needs of our customers, employees, partners and rewards our stakeholders.
I am an Ex-Hulugan, Director of Production Operations. My teams maximized uptime/availability for our Live and Video on Demand products leveraging operators, a talented engineering team, and the analytical tools built by those teams.
I am a frequent speaker, consultant, and colleague to those in the technical operations field. As a leader, my goals focus on the opportunity to improve people, products, processes, and partnerships. In my experience, communication and shared goals have lowered the drawbridges of impenetrable castles. The resulting relationships and experiences have led my teams to create and operate some of the most efficient tech platforms.
PHILOSOPHY
Leadership & Culture
- Transformational leadership philosophy to change, elevate, unify, and inspire others to pursue challenging and shared objectives
- Team members should serve as mentors, coaches, role models, and leaders
- Everyone has the ability to lead
- Operations is not a team, it's a cultural value
- Operations are present at every stage of the product life cycle
Engineering Excellence
- Buy for industry standards. Build for the gaps. (Matt Dome)
- Identify, plan, and then buy or build to enable reliability across engineering
- Enable feedback processes and observability across engineering
- ITIL is still valid for modern infrastructure and microservices
- The Operations Center concept is still valid but with a focus on SRE
Data-Driven Partnerships
- Data is the language of partnerships
- Product, Customer Care, and Engineering KPIs have their language
- Combine Operational KPIs with external data to tell the story
- Cross-functional collaboration drives success
Continuous Improvement
- Reactive actions are candidates for proactive and automated improvement
- Incident response is the catalyst for greater resiliency and quicker recovery
- Every failure is an opportunity to improve
- Modern operations require both ITIL and SRE principles
SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS
Watch my talks on technical operations, incident response, and leadership in the tech industry. These presentations share insights from my 20+ years of experience and discuss current trends in DevOps and SRE.
TESTIMONIALS
Kalyani Narayanan
Ryan was key in helping me learn and navigate the social and political ecosystem at Hulu. Without having him as a guide, I do not think I would have the recognition as Hulu's Problem Manager, the visibility to leadership that I have today, or the growth and promotion I've recently achieved after 15 months at Hulu.
Steve Stevens
Ryan is a capable and compassionate leader with a clear vision for how Operations can and should run. He has studied incident response throughout many industries to distill the most effective, efficient, and expeditious approaches.
John Martin
Ryan tirelessly pursues data-driven and highly automated solutions. But, I think the most important thing is that Ryan cares about his team like family. He takes the time to get to know and, in many cases, mentor his folks.
WORK EXPERIENCE
