Sidney Tribiana: 7 Years Taller

Little Taller: How has your role evolved over the past year, and what new skills or responsibilities have you taken on?

Sidney Tribiana:  Over the past year, my role has transitioned from Production Manager to Technical Lead. My previous role responsibilities focused on the time and resource management of our production team, but my current role focuses on documentation, advocacy, and consultation on the technical aspects of our projects. 

As a Production Manager, most of my time was juggling between UAT, setting task priority for developers, and making sure production had their questions or concerns answered. Nowadays, most of my time is spent reviewing infrastructure for our web applications with developers, creating user and data workflows, and collaborating with our DevOps team to ensure that we’re building on secure, fast, and efficient platforms based on our compliance policies.

I still have touch points with pretty much everyone on the team, but my new role fosters technical-focused conversations on how we best store, manage, and build projects to hit the goals that our clients are needing to meet.

Little Taller: What project or client engagement from the past year stands out as your favorite, and why did it resonate with you?

Sidney Tribiana: This past year we worked with Gainsight on concepting, developing and integrating their demo app, EmailMonkey, with their current products. We based the name of the demo app on a familiar platform to give a sense of familiarity but also to allow us to be flexible with the way we tell the story of the app and its relationship with Gainsight’s products.

The branding is quite cute, since their mascot is a monkey, and the client has enjoyed using it in their demos. We have also had more opportunities to learn about Gainsight’s products and how they work together, specifically integrating them with the demo app via API, json imports, and even building a custom mobile and desktop version of the app as we have not had many clients needing functioning apps for either of those devices.

Little Taller: Share a challenge you faced this year and how you overcame it. What did you learn from that experience?

Sidney Tribiana: One challenge that I have faced this year (and quite frankly still facing) is learning how to step away from conversations or task threads that don’t need my input so that the team can learn and solve it on their own. As a Production Manager, one of my responsibilities was to make sure that the team had their questions or blockers cleared on their tasks, which required me to keep track of ongoing threads or multiple tasks at one time. Now that that is no longer a main responsibility, I still catch myself watching threads where developers have questions that I can help answer. 

Little Taller: Little Taller places a big emphasis on ownership and orchestration. How have you seen this reflected in your daily work and how has it impacted your work output this year?

Sidney Tribiana: Ownership is a big part of what we do at Little Taller, and it’s at the core of how we establish our processes. WIth my new role, I’ve had more opportunities to develop department-wide documentation that everyone can access and follow consistently. I’ve been able to help close the gap between project management and developers when it comes to the technical aspects of our projects, since I can use my skills and collected knowledge over the years to make sure everyone is on the same page. Over the past few months I have also been able to present recommendations and provide input on how we do things tactically, like providing examples on features we built for past clients, or show a compare vs contrast on the most logical way to implement something to meet the client’s expectations.

Little Taller: Looking ahead, what aspects of your professional life are you most excited about developing further in the coming year?

Sidney Tribiana: In the next coming year, I would like to focus on being more involved with sales and architecting our technology to better help clients with their business goals. I love listening to client stories and hearing them elaborate on their technical and overall business needs to see how we can better help them. 

Additionally, I am excited to learn more about data handling and infrastructure management, specifically diving deeper into the use of APIs between systems and understanding the best practices that are utilized to monitor disk, ram, and any other backend infrastructure.