Tag: BookofRedgate

I’ve covered the values in a number of previous posts on the Book of Redgate. Those values came from our founders, Simon Galbraith and Neil Davidson. I am lucky enough, and honored to have known these gentlemen for many years and had the chance to sit and chat with them throughout my time at Redgate. Simon and I still get together periodically even today after 25 years.

In the Book of Redgate, there’s a section about prehistory. In it, there’s this picture and text. Neil and Simon have known each other since they were sixteen, starting a business together after they spent time at university.

Neil stepped away from the company many years ago, for a variety of reasons, and he remained on the board for many years. Simon continued as CEO for a long time and stepped down right after the pandemic. He remains on the board today.

The thing that caught my eye is that they worked together from their 20s until their 40s. I still remember their joint 40th birthday party at the old Redgate office. How many people have you worked with for 20 years?

How many of you have worked for an organization for 20 years?

I guess I’ve worked for SQL Server Central for 25 years, but only some of those were me working for myself. I’ve been with Redgate almost 20 years as a contractor and employee, but I haven’t spent 20 years with anyone outside of my family and Andy Warren.

He and I still talk most weeks, even though we’re not in business together anymore.

Redgate has remained a strong brand and presence in my life and that of many others. Part of that is the longevity of so many employees. We’ve had some ups and downs, but relatively few turnover over the years. More recently, especially in sales, but there are a lot of people who have worked there for more than 10 years.

That’s still amazing to me.

I have a copy of the Book of Redgate from 2010. This was a book we produced internally about the company after 10 years in existence. At that time, I’d been there for about 3 years, and it was interesting to learn a some things about the company. This series of posts looks back at the Book of Redgate 15 years later.

I have said and written this many times: Redgate Software is the type of company I’d want to build if I founded another company. It’s a great place, and one of the things I appreciate is that we value outcomes.

One of our values is:

.

The text on the next page continues the sentence:

What you achieve is more important than how long it takes.

Building software is challenging, and building software that can be sold is difficult. We’ve had lots of successes and some not-successes. However, we work towards building the software and celebrate the achievements.

However.

If you’ve built software, you know it usually takes longer than expected and people want it sooner. Many teams know me as the “do it faster” guy. I know software takes time, but I also know that in the business of selling software, we need focus on things that are useful and valued by customers.

I don’t complain that it takes too long to build everything, but I do press on the focus to get the important things done first, which aren’t always the fun or easy things.

Ultimately we as a company appreciate when we have something done and working for customers. We don’t go back and lessen the importance of the effort because of the time it took. We do look to see if we can do better in the future, which is something I’d hope most software engineers would do.

I have a copy of the Book of Redgate from 2010. This was a book we produced internally about the company after 10 years in existence. At that time, I’d been there for about 3 years, and it was interesting to learn a some things about the company. This series of posts looks back at the Book of Redgate 15 years later.

We aren’t the only company that does this, but Redgate Software does try to be data driven. Across my 18 years, I’ve had plenty of people use evidence from customers, from usage data, from market research, and more to justify a decision.

I think Google and quite a few other companies have called this being “data-driven.”

The text on the next page continues the sentence:

not on people’s opinions, the volume of their voices or who they are. When the evidence changes, we are prepared to change our minds. We will thank, and never shoot, the messenger.

I will say that this has skewed a bit over time, as I find that evidence is subject to interpretation and I’ve certainly seen some people cherry picking evidence to support their decision. Sometimes by asking for certain evidence.

However, we did realize there were issues and have tried to correct. I was part of a yearlong project last year that impacted marketing, product, and engineering where we focused on getting more information from more customers, and especially being careful to get evidence from multiple sources, including different geographies. We had a bias to the UK, so we tried to correct for that, and I think we made some strides.

That being said, I haven’t seen us shoot or blame the messenger for bad news, though sometimes thanks are sometimes not as sincere as they could be. I understand, because contrary news tends to dampen enthusiasm.

I have a copy of the Book of Redgate from 2010. This was a book we produced internally about the company after 10 years in existence. At that time, I’d been there for about 3 years, and it was interesting to learn a some things about the company. This series of posts looks back at the Book of Redgate 15 years later.

We are product focused at Redgate Software. Here is another of our values that focused on this:

The text on the next page is:

Shipping something amazing is better than creating something average and to budget and on time. We cannot market, sell, manage or account our way to success.

We have tried to do that. I’ve used many of our products before coming to work for Redgate. My former partners at SQL Server Central used them extensively as well. Since I have been an employee, I’ve worked with a lot of customers who constantly find value in our products.

I think we’ve succeeded, and I think that us trying to build useful software is what has helped. My fellow advocates and I constantly try to bring the voice of the customer to Redgate so that our engineers better understand your challenges. This helps them build things that are useful.

I have a copy of the Book of Redgate from 2010. This was a book we produced internally about the company after 10 years in existence. At that time, I’d been there for about 3 years, and it was interesting to learn a some things about the company. This series of posts looks back at the Book of Redgate 15 years later.