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SailPoint Engineers: Being Proactive, Not Reactive

Being proactive means anticipating problems, seeking new solutions and doing your best by acting before a situation turns into a source of confrontation or crisis. It means taking responsibility for our product rather than just watching how things happen. In this area of customer service, responding to clients or events after a problem arises is a reactive approach that might satisfy the customer, but it won’t surprise or delight them. It’s imperative to address an issue with the customer before it occurs. This will build a positive relationship with the business.

At SailPoint, proactiveness is the key to success. We focus on a proactive approach rather than a reactive approach. On the connectivity engineering team, we are responsible for integrating our products with many managed systems, and if the behavior of those system changes, and we are not aware of that, then it will cause failure in connectivity. When the managed system vendor changes API endpoints or makes some behavior change, we are well prepared with the resolution and able to inform our customers within an appropriate time. This ensures everything works smoothly without any escalation. This is a part of our commitment to customer success.

There are many such incidents in many managed systems where our proactiveness makes everyone’s life easier. Keeping a close eye on what is changing and how we should adapt to handle those changes is a continuous process that is part of our everyday activity. We also monitor undocumented and unpublished changes in the managed systems. Our relationship with vendor partner programs also helps us to understand the change and incorporate the change in our products with beta or early releases (before general availability in production environments).

Being active in the vendor partner program communities also allows us to be aware of upcoming managed system features that might require enhancements to our integrations. This allows our product management team to effectively plan our product roadmaps. New managed system versions also drive scheduling of validation efforts of our integrations.

In the integrations we have with SaaS products where the changes occur rapidly; proactive monitoring, alerting and resolving the issues with zero downtime is very important. Our automation end-to-end testing helps us to achieve our goal with a minimum duration of time. We act before a small difficulty turns into a larger issue or problem which helps us to identify and resolve any difficulty that a customer would face. With this, the business impact is removed or remains low as we have already taken care of any issues before they turn out to be a problem which in turn avoids the high severity issues from being seen in a customer environment.

As a process of bringing proactiveness, we believe there is a solution to every issue even before they arise. Our self-initiated tasks and tasks for which we take up responsibility, in return saving a lot of our time so that we are focusing on other tasks and concentrate on increasing the breadth and depth of our integrations. It also allows our customers to access the value that our business is offering that much quicker. With our approach, the work environment is always filled with enthusiasm as being proactive lowers mental pressure, because all the tasks are already taken care of and the workload is balanced. If any concern or query is raised by our customers, we provide solutions to problems within the given time frame. This makes our customers happy and creates a positive effect on our work environment.

Acting before an issue not only builds confidence in customers but also within one’s self and benefits in every task. It does not matter what our roles at SailPoint, we always follow a proactive approach. It makes the most impact.


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