The Operations Hero Myth

Every company has its share of issues as its built by humans who are not perfect. There will be crisis and problems, and we have to admit just like in the movies: it feels good to swoop in and be the hero of the day. We want to solve the problem and save those in distress, then get the gratitude. However this is not a career, you will not learn new skills or promote by focusing only on these kinds of issues.

The real heroes of operations are the ones who swoop in to save the day, figure out the root cause, and permanently fix. The fix is the hard part and where the true hero resides.

Where the "Hero" Lives

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To be an operational hero, you need to have an expert level knowledge of the systems and processes. It should be fairly easy to navigate through existing products and support problems. This hero shows off their talent by doing things such as:

• Quickly fixing any outage every time it occurs, then waiting for the next problem.

• Proudly declaring how they prevented any issues in the system today by doing certain tasks.

• Saying how its necessary to watch certain system to ensure they remain stable.

If you were to parallel this to a movie, it would be as though the superhero banished the supervillain, only to see the villain come back and wreak havoc the very next day. This is not a very good plot and people might start to thing you are a bad hero after a while.

The True Hero

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A true hero will make it seem as though there were never any problems to begin with. This may get you less recognition in the long run, but the goal is to not keep saving the day. When you ask a true hero what they did today, their response should be along the lines of:

1. We detected a problem, it was quickly resolved before customers noticed.

2. I have added some monitoring around this issue to ensure we are proactively notified of it next time. We now know how big the problem is and can quantify it.

3. An issue has been raised with architecture and development, I am meeting with them to determine next steps on how we can come up with a robust solution to prevent this from happening in the future.