Ortus Chats with Eran Kinsbruner, DevOps Chief Evangelist at Perforce

Listen on Spotify

Please give us a one-sentence description of your company.

Perforce is a DevOps industry leader providing solutions throughout the entire DevOps pipeline, including security planning, code management, and compliance, trying to solve the hardest challenges. Eran Kinsbruner

Can you describe the role of a DevOps Chief Evangelist in one word. Why?

Innovation. We are living in a digital landscape where everything changes as we speak — new platforms, browsers, and application types. You need to be prepared and understand how to properly develop, secure, analyse, test, and release to production. You need to be innovative, creative, and do a lot of research to stay on top of all these challenges.

What current business challenges you facing right now? Can you identify a solution?

The pace of innovation in our space is one of the biggest challenges. Today’s developers and DevOps leaders are using what they have right now, but as they develop the solutions, the industry around us continuously evolves. How do you keep up while you’re using your tools, trying to solve your problems and relate to and address what’s happening surrounding you? Staying on top of the market trends is also challenging. At the end of the day, we are not building software in a vacuum. We are building software to support our end-users, and solving this problem is a continuous effort. You need to do a lot of research and be innovative to understand what’s happening, what’s coming, and what are the biggest trends that are going to impact your own vertical. In addition, you need to invest in your people, so they’re always ready to address what’s ahead.

You have an impressive history in public speaking and are an Amazon best-selling author of 4 different software testing and development books. How do you explain the success you’ve had in your career?

I took a lot of risks. If someone in the audience knows me from my early stages, they would know that I wasn’t close to what I’m doing right now. I shifted a lot in my career. Opportunities came in front of me, and I just had to take them. With these books, I wasn’t born an author. I had to find the relation and importance of what I’m writing. Then, in less than five years, I found myself with four books. My guidance or advice is if you see an opportunity, even if it seems frightening, jump to it. What’s the worst that could happen? You’ll fail, learn, and move on. I take a lot of those chances, and I look at those opportunities. I’m not afraid of taking risks and learning from my mistakes.

What marketing or business trends are you taking advantage of right now?

I’m taking huge advantage of what we see today with social media and not taking the bad things that people might say about it. I think that digital marketing today has become one of the most powerful tools for any product marketer or product manager. You cannot just learn from the experience of others and share your own. You can collaborate with so many different practitioners and executives and be a better practitioner yourself. I’m making use of channels such as Slack, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other similar communities because they are giving me tools to collaborate with the market itself.

If you could share one piece of career advice, what would it be?

I build on taking risks and leveraging opportunities, even though they won’t seem like the right ones. You can learn from them or not. Definitely, you need to be comfortable in your environment. You need to be able to learn from everyone around you. In my mind, if you are somewhere that doesn’t nurture you to be a better practitioner, you might not be in the right place. Because I’m surrounded by so many executives, so many practitioners have sought so many different countries and practices. I’m always learning new things and making myself a better person, practitioner, and software developer. Learn from what you have around you. If you feel that you’re stuck, you might not be in the right place.