March 2021 Summaries

The MongoDB SI Architect Certification Program is a free, self-paced certification designed to help System Integrator partners improve their expertise in modernizing applications to the cloud, enabling them to drive conversations with customers around data center exit plans and application qualification for assessing cloud data platforms. The program is customized for System Integrators, teaching them how to discuss the benefits of modernization with various customers on a cloud journey, including vertical-based stories, migration tools, best practices, and architecture guidelines. The certification program consists of six key sections, takes approximately 20 hours to complete, and includes access to MongoDB University courses, customer case studies, and a final certification exam.

Developers' underutilization and dissatisfaction lead to significant costs for organizations, which can be considered as a kind of "innovation tax" that the company has to pay. To avoid this, companies need to understand their development team's role and provide them with a business context. This includes setting strategic goals, providing technology debt repayment priority, understanding developers' actual work, removing OKR and hype metrics, adjusting goals, and establishing transparent relationships. If not managed correctly, these aspects can lead to significant costs and hinder the company's success.

The Innovation Tax: How much are unproductive and unhappy developers costing you?` discusses the importance of understanding and valuing the critical skills brought by developers to a company, as they drive innovation in the digital space. The author argues that companies pay an "Innovation Tax" when they fail to provide a safe and productive environment for their developers, leading to low morale, tech debt, and a lack of trust between leaders and teams. To reduce this tax, the article suggests giving developers business context, respecting tech debt, understanding what they do, removing OKRs and vanity metrics, and aligning goals. By addressing these issues, companies can foster a productive culture for developers and increase innovation, ultimately driving business success.

In 2016, Guillermo Gette, a technical lead at Expedia, realized that Slack's notepad-like feature didn't effectively organize his team. To solve this issue, he built a simple bot that put to-do lists inside Slack conversations and published it in the Slack Marketplace. This led to the creation of Workast, a full-featured project management system embedded in Slack that has been used by over 50,000 people across various companies, including Expedia, IBM, PayPal, and MongoDB. Guillermo faced challenges early on, such as users requesting new features and realizing he was in a "red ocean market" with many established players. To overcome these obstacles, he focused on product-led growth, introduced counters to limit feature usage, and built the app quickly based on user feedback. Workast's advantage lies in its integration with Slack, allowing seamless communication and collaboration. The company decided to build Workast on MongoDB due to its flexibility, scalability, and low cost of change. The schema-less database has enabled the team to evolve their product and database together, accelerating time-to-market and reducing downtime. MongoDB's Performance Advisor has helped identify performance issues, and the team uses it regularly to ensure scalability and reliability.

Think Big, Go Far with the MongoDB Customer Success Team` is a blog post that highlights the role of Customer Success Managers (CSMs) at MongoDB. The CSMs play a crucial part in helping customers get the most out of the MongoDB platform and drive business growth. The team is diverse, with employees from around the world and who collectively speak 10 languages. CSMs have the opportunity to innovate and develop creative solutions for their customers, often by sharing success stories and best practices. The blog post also touches on the importance of teamwork and collaboration within the Customer Success organization, as well as the company's efforts to provide a supportive onboarding process for new hires. Overall, the post aims to showcase the exciting opportunities available in this field and encourage readers to pursue a career with MongoDB.

Stoovo, an app that helps gig workers maximize their income by providing intelligence about how and when to use platforms such as Uber and DoorDash, uses MongoDB as its database platform. The company was founded by two former Google employees who met while attending college in New York, and has since raised a $2.4 million seed round from several investors. Stoovo aims to give gig workers financial stability through income boosting and income smoothing, and provides users with cash flow if needed. The app uses Node.js and MongoDB for its application side, and Python scripts on top of that, and has built its tech stack in a way that enables it to work with many different partners and geospatial data providers. Stoovo's founders believe that the gig economy will continue to grow and evolve, and that their app will play a key role in providing financial stability and context for workers in this sector.

Meet Some of MongoDB’s Influential Women Leaders in 2021` highlights the stories of four influential women leaders at MongoDB, each sharing their unique experiences, challenges, and lessons learned as they navigate their careers. Kathrin Schmitt, a manager in corporate sales, emphasizes the importance of embracing change, trust, and team empowerment. Lungowe Andala, a global payroll manager, stresses the value of effective leadership, team development, and empowering her team to succeed. Tammy Bailey, a lead engineer, champions a culture of inclusivity, diversity, and collaboration, while Jenny Liang, a lead product marketing manager, shares her experiences as a new manager, including the importance of being helpful in different ways and championing innovation and iteration. Through their stories, these women leaders demonstrate the impact that inclusive leadership can have on teams and organizations.

Hackolade is a MongoDB certified technology partner that provides a data modeling tool designed specifically for MongoDB, enabling developers to quickly enhance applications and satisfy rapid customer needs. The tool enhances the flexibility of JSON document format by accommodating the representation of nested objects and arrays in Entity-Relationship Diagrams (ERDs). Hackolade allows users to visualize data models, create and enforce schema with MongoDB's JSON Schema Validator, and iteratively change schema as applications evolve. It also provides a forward-engineering approach to increase data agility, automates JSON Schema validation, ensures data quality and compliance through reverse-engineering, facilitates application modernization by denormalizing legacy data structures, and implements continuous evolution and data management for successful application modernization on MongoDB Atlas.

Built With MongoDB: Journey Foods` is a machine learning-powered software platform that uses `MongoDB` as its database. The company, founded by serial entrepreneur Riana Lynn, aims to provide food companies with data and insights to optimize their supply chain, pricing, and nutrition. With over 130 customers, including `Ingredion` and `Unilever`, Journey Foods has raised `$2.5 million` in funding and partnered with global consortiums such as the `Future Food Network`. The company's vision is to be a leader in integrations for the food industry, providing services that help customers scale and improve their portfolios faster. Riana Lynn chose `MongoDB` due to its scalability, ease of use, and stellar recommendations from other companies, which align with her design-heavy firm's focus on user experience and collaboration.

I sat down with Idriss Ouazzani, a Solutions Architect based in France, who rose from being a Customer Success Manager to his current role in less than two years. Born and raised in Morocco, Idriss has a passion for new technologies and learning. He joined MongoDB as an Enterprise Account Executive and then moved into the Customer Success Management role after more than two years at Atos. Idriss was initially drawn to MongoDB's growth rate, innovation, and developer feedback. He gained technical knowledge through MongoDB University and eventually became a Solutions Architect, with support from his managers throughout his career path. As an SA, he is excited about understanding customers' needs, becoming a MongoDB expert, and working on the cutting edge of technology. Idriss advises potential candidates to be themselves, take risks, and have full support from their managers, as this was a key value at MongoDB that he experienced firsthand.

The evolution of data has dramatically changed over the past two decades, with an explosion in volume, variety, and strategic importance. Data is no longer just a tool for informing business strategy but often drives it. The shift towards software-driven innovation relies on efficient and effective management of data at speed. Despite this, many enterprises continue to use legacy relational databases, which are too rigid and don't scale well enough to handle modern application development demands. A convergence of data requirements is emerging, forcing a fresh look at how data is worked with, with systems of record, engagement, and insight converging into a unified platform that can process, store, secure, and analyze data in real-time.

The evolution of data has been marked by significant changes over the past few decades, with data now being much larger and more diverse than in the past. The role of data within companies is also changing, with many now considering data to be a key part of their business strategy rather than just an information source. This shift has led to the development of new technologies such as NoSQL databases like MongoDB, which are better suited to handling large amounts of unstructured and semi-structured data. The need for faster and more efficient data management systems is becoming increasingly important as companies seek to gain insights from their data and drive innovation through digital transformation. With many organizations already investing in cloud-based infrastructure and software development, the current moment presents a unique opportunity for companies to rethink their approach to data management and develop "data platforms" that can handle real-time processing, storage, protection, and analysis of all related data sets.

As a Senior Industry Solutions Consultant for MongoDB's Industry Solutions Team, Gabriela Preiss has transitioned from her background in education and teaching to leveraging her diverse experience in web development, coding school curriculum development, and lead tech support roles. With a strong emphasis on innovation, curiosity, and autonomy, she notes that anyone ambitious, independent, and curious will succeed in this role. The IST team generates content for large enterprises to modernize and innovate, with Gabriela creating engaging pieces such as blog posts, whitepapers, and webinars on topics like data science, fintech, and digital transformation. Despite the challenges of starting a new role during the pandemic, she feels included and supported by her team, which is dispersed across multiple countries, and values the positive, inclusive, and ambitious culture that encourages creativity, autonomy, and teamwork. With MongoDB's vast learning resources and support, Gabriela continues to grow professionally, taking ownership of her work and staying connected with her team through regular communication and collaboration.