Introduction

I worked at edX1 for about 6 years before it was acquired by 2U in a deal worth $800mm2. After the deal was complete, my primary focuses were continuity of operations as we started to plan for integration work and making sure that my team was seen, heard, and supported during the challenging cultural process of a company of 250 being subsumed by a company of 5000. I spent the next year integrating edX into 2U systems and services, taking on management of new teams, and trying to bring the best of edX culture and processes to a much larger company.

🔗 My previous company, edX, was acquired by 2U. You can find more about my pre-acquisition projects here.

Team

I continued to manage my existing IT Operations and Business Systems teams after the deal closed. I early January I was asked to take on management of an additional 2U team that had been without a manager for months. Over the following year, I was proud that the Sr. Manager of Business Systems was able to interview and move into a Director-level role within 2U and our Business Systems responsibilities were transitioned to other teams. Mid-year I took on another existing team and combined it with the members of the IT Operations Team to create a new SaaS Operations team, which would be responsible for centrally managed SaaS services across the company.

Major Accomplishments

Here are some of my major accomplishments while at edX. Please reach out if you’d like to talk about any of them in more detail.

Team Agile Transformation

  • When: 2022
  • Context: At the time of acquisition in 2021, 2U was nearly 5000 people and edX was just 250. One of our goals was to combine the best of both 2U and edX.
  • What I did: I spent several months observing and listening with my new teams to better understand what was working well and where there were opportunities for change and growth. I validated and corrected my observations by talking with individual team members one on one as well as full teams. I introduced collaborative planning and facilitation tools like Miro; opportunity maps to introduce outcome-oriented, customer-focused strategic planning; work in progress limits and Kanban for managing work; and rotating responsibilities for triaging new escalations.
  • Impact:
    • ⬆️ Increased collaboration and inclusivity of meetings
    • ⬆️ Increased accountability for connecting engineering solutions to customer problems and impact
    • ⬆️ Increased conversations between engineers and their customers
    • ⬆️ Increased the throughput of each engineer
    • ⬇️ Decreased low-value time planning work
    • ⬇️ Decreased time to value

Slack Roll-Out

  • When: 2022
  • Context: 2U used Slack for its technology team and Google Chat for the rest of the company. As part of the decision to close many of its offices and embrace remote work, leadership decided to unite the entire company on Slack. Due to some departures on my team, I ended up doing the majority of the work to prepare this service and roll it out to the company.
  • What I Did: I worked with my Manager of IT Operations and the Internal Comms team to plan the roll-out on an accelerated schedule. I created a framework for defining the minimum viable implementation against customer requirements and then worked with the Internal Communications team to agree on a minimally viable scope. I also built Slack Bot that allowed users to self-service many requests that would have previously required a ticket by policy.
  • Impact:
    • ⬆️ Increased ability for employees to collaborate in near real-time.
    • ⬆️ Increased ability for employees to build and maintain community while partially or fully remote
    • ⬇️ Decreased time to create, rename, and archive channels and manage user groups
    • ⬇️ Decreased admin time spent on previously manual requests (saved 2 weeks of person time in the first week after launch)
    • ⬇️ Decreased time to resolve Slack-oriented customer requests.

IdPaaS Migration

  • When: 2022
  • Context: Both edX and 2U used the same IdPaaS provider and maintaining both was both costly and detrimental to user experience.
  • What I Did: I worked with the Director of Project Management and my teams to identify business owners for each covered service. I developed a discovery document that engineers used to plan migrations with their business counterparts and technology partners on other teams, served as a technical expert when needed, and served a point of escalation when we ran into coordination and alignment problems with service owners.
  • Impact:
    • ⬆️ Improved the end user experience by aligning on a single platform for SSO
    • ⬇️ Decreased IT costs by eliminating a duplicate service

Google Workspace Migration

  • When: 2021-2022
  • Context: Both edX and 2U used Google Workspace for email and other productivity needs. This project included migrating data from the edX instance to the 2U instance, reconciling configuration between the two instances, and guiding users through the change
  • What I did: I provided subject-matter expertise on the edX instance of Google Workspace and feedback to leadership on the tradeoffs between different approaches, balancing user impact with the time to completion and unification of systems. I also contributed to the deep and extensive discovery efforts that helped us understand the impact of the migration on Google ecosystem services (e.g., Analytics, GCP, OAuth).
  • Impact:
    • ⬆️ Increased ease of collaboration between employees who joined via edX acquisition and existing 2U employees
    • ⬇️ Decreased IT costs through retirement of duplicative service

Footnotes

  1. edX was a non-profit, open source platform before being acquired. ↩

  2. https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/29/2u-set-to-acquire-non-profit-edx-for-deal-north-of-600m ↩