Situation #
I joined Woolpert in January 2019 as Cloud Solutions Director. At the time, Woolpert was a pure Google Maps reseller—they sold Google Maps API licenses but had limited technical capability around those licenses. No consulting practice, no customer engineering, no customer success engineering. The sales team could close a deal, but there was a single customer engineer to help the customer understand what they were buying beforehand, and extremely sparse technical support after the sale. The company needed to evolve from reselling to providing actual technical value to customers.
Behavior #
I founded three distinct technical functions from scratch, each serving a different stage of the customer lifecycle:
- Customer Engineering (CE): pre-sale technical advisory. Helping customers understand what’s possible before they buy. These folks need deep curiosity and the ability to say “here’s what I’d do” without a statement of work.
- Customer Success Engineering (CSE): post-sale technical support. Helping customers succeed after they buy. Different incentive structure—measured on retention and satisfaction, not pipeline.
- Consulting: billable engineering delivery. Building solutions for customers under contract. This is where the revenue lives.
I defined net-new roles, wrote job descriptions, and hired 12 engineers in both team leader and IC roles. I established remote-first ways of working within a traditional corporate environment, and built a repeatable hiring process with core and technical skill components.
One of the early bets was what I called the “every answer is a URL” philosophy. I designed and shipped a scalable customer support system with published SLAs. Every support response lives at a permanent, shareable link so the team scales without re-answering the same question twice. The next time a customer asks the same thing, you send a URL instead of writing a new email.
The biggest proof point came from winning and delivering a $450K Google engagement. I wrote the proposal, led agile delivery, and shipped the official reference application for Google’s brand-new logistics API—built from scratch, with Google as the client.
Impact #
- Internal pull, not mandate. The practice’s reputation spread beyond its charter. Another Woolpert division serving a US Federal government department invited us to help close and service a $1M+ net-new business deal. They weren’t told to involve us; they asked.
- First SaaS product. Built and shipped the organization’s first SaaS product, STREAM Raster: I defined features, pricing, SLOs, and SLAs, directed engineering daily, and landed the first paying customer.
- Knowledge that compounds. The support system scaled without re-answering. The “every answer is a URL” principle meant knowledge compounded over time rather than evaporating in inboxes.
- Google-grade delivery. The $450K engagement proved the team could perform at Google’s own standards—the first engagement of its kind for the practice.
- Zero to practice in under two years. From zero technical capability to a fully staffed, revenue-generating practice with three distinct functions and 12 engineers.