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IT STRATEGY

Illustration: Anna Kim, Photo: Adobe Stock

In 2018, Justin Goff, then a solutions architect at a medical equipment distributor, often sat at his desk working away on a SQL database, maybe with one standup call on the calendar.

When Goff learned that his company had hired a firm to redo the UX of its e-commerce site, he thought the planners had underestimated the project’s required data-migration tasks, including how back-end systems functioned in a revamped, multi-site context. And he saw an opportunity.

“I made this massive project plan draft and outlined the full end-to-end spectrum on how I thought it should go,” Goff told IT Brew of his phased strategy, which included cloning three legacy databases in a staging environment. “I presented it to my project manager and the director of marketing at the time in a meeting with the dev team there as well.”

Goff would end up presenting his plan to the CEO and other leaders, complete with printouts and language that he felt was tailored to the executives.

How to put yourself out there.—BH

☕ How data engineers can escape the silo