The Incremental Approach: Go To Market in Less Than Half the Time - Part 2
Everyone's Tryin' to Get It Right, Get It Right
Where We Left Off: My rock out session to Working for the Weekend by Loverboy was interrupted when a major client's website went down right before they were to deploy a big press release. Someone leaked the release and the website couldn't handle the subsequent traffic. So much for my smooth Friday.
I called everyone into the boardroom. As folks shuffled in, I started writing on the whiteboard. I wrote down the name of the website, the customer’s name, the number of retweets on Twitter, and the status. WEBSITE DOWN. I went from annoyed to determined.
“Any ideas on what we can do to get this site back online?” I asked the room.
“Not without putting a CDN in front of it,” said, Tom, my lead developer, opening the lid of his laptop. “Which is what we’ve got planned for the new site,” he continued. “But that’s a ways off, yet.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “At least 3 months.”
Everyone nodded. We were all clear on the timelines. As far as we were concerned, this wasn’t their problem.
It was ours.
“I need ideas we can implement today,” I said. “What can we do right now to get this thing back online.”
“We could turn on their CDN right now,” said Ben, who specialized in DevOps and release management, among other things. He was typing away furiously on his own laptop. In fact, I already had one setup so we could start testing. Look,” and he held up his screen so everyone could see. The customer’s website was loading just fine on his screen.
“Only problem is the URL is pointing to the default CDN domain,” Tom pointed out.
“I know that,” said Ben. “We’d have to get the customer to update their DNS.”
“Good luck with that,” said Terri, another developer on the team. “That can take DAYS.”
I started dialing my contact’s office number. He picked up after one ring.
To be continued in Part 3: Everyone Wants You to Come Through
About the Author
Joel is CTO at Agility. His first job, though, is as a father to 2 amazing humans.
Joining Agility in 2005, he has over 20 years of experience in software development and product management. He embraced cloud technology as a groundbreaking concept over a decade ago, and he continues to help customers adopt new technology with hybrid frameworks and the Jamstack. He holds a degree from The University of Guelph in English and Computer Science. He's led Agility CMS to many awards and accolades during his tenure such as being named the Best Cloud CMS by CMS Critic, as a leader on G2.com for Headless CMS, and a leader in Customer Experience on Gartner Peer Insights.
As CTO, Joel oversees the Product team, as well as working closely with the Growth and Customer Success teams. When he's not kicking butt with Agility, Joel coaches high-school football and directs musical theatre. Learn more about Joel HERE.
