My Summer as a Splunktern
When Covid-19 hit and internships were getting cancelled, I couldn’t help but feel nervous. But, the leadership at Splunk did not believe in cancelling the internship. It never was a question of, “Will we have a summer internship program?” The only question was, “How will we do it? How can we make it impactful and memorable?”
And with that I began my three month journey as a splunktern from the beautiful view of my bedroom. But, wait you might be wondering what is a splunktern?
Splunk + Intern = Splunktern
I didn’t know at the time but being a splunktern would indeed bring me more joy and delight that I anticipated.
Working on Projects with Real Impact & Challenges
As a Program Manager (PMO) Intern, I hit the ground running day one. I was assigned to the new Customer Managed Platform (CMP) area previously known as Sustaining — teams in this area focus on features to improve Splunk Enterprise.
My core projects for the summer revolved around two primary projects:
- Driving a go-to-market (GTM) release for an enterprise feature amidst a large cross functional group
- Defining and rolling out a process to measure and improve CMP’s participation in engineering code reviews for the area’s OKR.
Conquering my Challenges
Each of these projects came with their own set of challenges and by facing them I continued to grow.
1) Navigating and bringing clarity to open conversations and lack of clear, defined requirements.
- Working with a cross-functional group of 15+ stakeholders came with challenges as there are various open threads amidst different stakeholder circles. This brought upon new information that added scope to our field readiness requirements and flagged potential risks.
- Although there is a template of requirements to meet for a go-to-market release, field readiness requirements are just a starting point. This is not something you can treat as a set checklist. It is an evolving checklist as our group makes progress and discovers new information.
- This is where I as a PMO intern come in.
- I learned how to read between the lines and ask highly targeted questions to understand where the gaps are and translate the information to validate the release status.
- I learned how crucial it is to set proper expectations and clear outcomes by sending an agenda before meeting, setting the context at the beginning of a meeting, and following up with next steps.
- These learning allowed me to align our cross-functional group and ensure that they are accountable for their scope of work which is a core PMO responsibility.
2) Dealing with constrained resources and acquiring new technical skills.
- I spent time interviewing key leads and subject matter experts to define metrics and understand the resources at my disposal to create a process for the area’s KR.
- It is extremely easy to get lost in process and think everything would be easier if everyone just followed one straightforward system or used [x] software. But, the reality is that different teams may have different needs and preferences. As PMO, we streamline processes as much as we can but there will be constraints and limitations to the extent.
- When designing a process to track CMP participation, I created two options. There is the “in an ideal world” option and the feasible option given what we had. By creating these two, I was able to understand the level of effort required to roll out each process.
- This informed me the tradeoff costs and I realized that the ends did not justify the means enough to go with an “ideal world” option. This process was short term and rolling out the feasible option became practical even though it was not “ideal”.
- As I expanded my knowledge and understanding of the domain, I ramped up my technical literacy in Splunk’s Search Processing Language (SPL) and identified domain experts.
- I learned how to navigate with those constraints means focusing on “what we have” instead of “what we don’t”.
- From a drawing board with two names, I was redirected to different leads and experts. As I defined the process, I built relationships with Splunkers in different teams to leverage our in-house tools for this process. I was easily able to make iterative improvements and deliver quicker results because I knew which lead to reach out for [X] information.
Working as a PMO intern taught me the importance to constantly adapt to my surroundings by asking questions and building strong stakeholder relationships to reach desired outcomes.
Making a Difference with Splunk
During my tenure, I participated in our annual Splunk for Splunkterns competition — “teams were tasked to use Splunk and data for social good, focusing on Covid-19 and social justice issues”.
My team, Pwny Pollers used Splunk to ingest data on voter accessibility and racial demographics to:
- Analyze voter accessibility within each state during the Presidential Elections.
- Make visualizations to correlate race and voter suppression.
- Find data-driven insights to help increase voter accessibility in underrepresented communities.
- Inform which areas are underperforming and how they can improve.
Why is this important?
Data drives valuable decisions for businesses to generate revenue, so why can’t we use data to inspire change?
The current climate fueled our team’s passion to increase transparency on racial inequality from the lens of voter restriction and disenfranchisement.
Reflection
While we had a vision in mind for what visualizations we wanted to create, retrieving data to gain granularity at the state and county level was more difficult than we thought.
Despite that in the six weeks we were allocated, we presented an overview on trends and did a deep dive on Texas as a sample case study because it was one of the very few states where we found sufficient information.
While we did not have enough information to confidently claim a direct correlation, we found concerns for weaker voter turnouts in minority communities. Given more time to gather data, we would look to provide more context on these initial findings and duplicate efforts for other states.
While we received third place in the competition, a fellow Splunker found our work extremely valuable and proposed to share our work with New Mexico’s Secretary of State!
Our efforts were well-received and I felt grateful that we were making a difference in our community. I expected to make some sort of impact at my internship this summer, I just didn’t think it would be socially.
I’m thankful that as splunktern I not only expanded my growth in my career, but in understanding our world.
Leaving with Valuable Connections
A remote internship meant no hallway chats or observe what the other person is doing at their desk. I was worried that I wouldn’t get to know people and learn about different teams.
By the end of my internship, I had over 30 coffee chats with splunkers across different areas and teams and that showed me how open and welcoming this community is.
Splunktern Events
From workshops on finance and building a board of directors to the amazing E-staff Speaker Series, interns got to hear from the executive leaders and even ask questions on screen.
This allowed me to step out of my comfort zone and learn more about Splunk and what its leaders believe in. I felt inspired by Doug Merritt (CEO) and even wrote a whole post about it.
The Early Career Talent team truly created a summer full of opportunities despite the challenges of a virtual environment. In particular, Robinne and Daniel were pivotal in my success as a splunktern — whether it gaining advice on networking, finding people to talk to, or learning more about my thinking style via the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HDBI) assessment.
PMO Organization
The PMO organization invited me to speak with them one-on-one and hosted weekly coffee chats — where I and my fellow two PMO interns got to meet various Program Managers to learn about them and ask questions.
This is where I broke common misconceptions about PMO and learned more about the true role of a program manager.
I’m thankful for Lan, my manager, for always sharing life lessons and refreshing conversations around anime and travel.
I’m even more grateful for my mentor, Smita for pushing me into the deep end on my projects and throwing challenges my way. When I expressed my interest in Product, she supported me and introduced me to Product leaders to network with. As a mentor, she answered all my questions and encouraged me to continue asking them especially as an intern so I can maximize the opportunities I had at my disposal.
The people at Splunk across the board care about your personal career growth no matter what current path you’re on and that is what is truly what made my internship worthwhile.
As I leave, I take with me valuable lessons, fun swag, and meaningful connections and that is priceless. Thank you for amazing summer Splunk!
Original article published on LinkedIn.
Here are some additional learnings I wrote about my splunktern experience on LinkedIn:
