There is a common practice to look at what “MVP” is. MVP works great when everyone believes in the concept. Selling infrastructure automation to leadership that doesn’t necessarily see the value is about selling the vision of what it can be. Would you rather hear about an end-to-end stack deployment in sub 2 minutes, or an MVP? The balance is how to sell the most realistic version of end-state without knowing if it is attainable. I’ll show you how to put your a$$ on the line and win every time…

Risk and automation go hand-in-hand and while there is a concept of a calculated risk, you can’t really calculate risk when you don’t know the equation. Success in selling a solution (and then delivering) is basically equal to “risk multiplied by (comfort / google)”. Okay, I might have just made that up. I have seen the scenario time and time again “lets just do the smallest amount to prove the concept”. This works great when the concepts are not abstract. IA has to be something that destroys the competition.

IA can save lives and rescue puppies from a burning building… Maybe it can, maybe it can’t, but if you show me a animal rescue dispatch I can show you how to ensure that servers are always up and how to build resiliency into the platform so when puppies need help, the system will be available. It’s not about the ugly aspect of getting API’s to talk to certain systems. It’s about vision for what something can be and knowing how to bring the right people, teams, languages, and systems together to make it happen.

I’m not a snake oil salesman and this isn’t just about pitching something that sells to the right audience. This is about not conforming to a specific technology. Driving requirements and expectations of success. This is about working your a$$ off and being afraid that you’re going to fail, because the fear that you might not succeed can be harnessed to motivate you to do something great. This talk is about knowing yourself and your potential. I’ll give you some tips to know your limitations better, and to know when to push them and when to really push them.