Hi, I’m Nick, one of the Geekypeeks.
My job at Peek is in the realm of that most eloquent acronym “OSS/BSS” (I’ve chosen for myself the title of “OSS BOSS”). This term has always been somewhat cloudy to me, as its definition can be expanded or shrunk so as to include anything, or nothing. While the term arose in a telecom context around billing, rate plans, and so on, it’s sturdy enough to absorb a bigger definition. What Dan always tells me is that it means I have dominion over “the systems that support the business”. Our “business” is our email/texting service and hardware, aka the Peek. The system that bills customers, manages inventory and SIM cards, serves up data to the finance team, tracks customer lifecycle, and so on, those are things that constitute a “support” role in the grander scheme of things. That’s me.
I haven’t been doing OSS/BSS for long, and am certainly not an expert in it, but the primary challenges of my job are not pure OSS/BSS problems. I do not often get to dwell in the rarefied air of enterprise product catalogs and real-time IP packet rating. Fledgling startups are a swamp of pragmatic concerns — making sure deadlines and budgets are met, managing expectations, communicating occasionally confusing operational procedures to other staff, firefighting, laborious integration projects with elephant-slow vendors, and so on. Thus, the challenge of startup OSS/BSS is to manage oneself in order to support others.
As a result I deal directly with almost everyone in the company. My role is to enable their individual mandates technologically, whatever it may be. In that sense I am a requirements bucket for the company, and my role in some ways resembles a kind of technical caregiver. By this standard, the only benchmark worth a damn is coworker satisfaction. Help me help you.
A setup like this could lead to intra-departmental conflicts and territorial behaviour over limited resources. The basis for business decisions are often built on shifting soil, and it is difficult for organizations to avoid this problem, especially the “flat” organizational structures that startups tend to favour. As Dávila said, “Every non-hierarchical society is divided in two.”
But it turns out that Peek has a fantastic office culture, the best I’ve ever worked in by a country mile, and as a result of everyone’s shared understanding of company goals and general respect level for each other, this has not ended up a problem at all. It’s rather creepy, actually. Could it be that coworker chemistry matters? There’s something to it, anyway.
Anyway, I’ve read Dan’s unhinged screeds with some interest over the past year and I hope to use this space to flesh out some of my loftier ideas, not only about OSS/BSS but about tech, engineering, and life.
