In today’s Meet the Chronosphere Team profile, we get to know Alex Miljanić, a Senior Sales Development Representative (SDR) who works out of Chronosphere’s New York office. In her role as an SDR, Alex is the first line of contact for many of Chronosphere’s new customers. In this interview with Chris Ward, Alex indulges us with her day-to-day life as a Sales Rep in the observability space, why she joined Chronosphere, and she talks fondly about her brief stint as an English teacher abroad.
As a Senior Sales Development Representative (SDR) my day-to-day job includes sourcing, tiering new accounts, identifying champions and main point of contacts – I do a lot of the original engagements when we’re trying to break in and identify a good use case fit for our observability platform.
Yes, I’m the first line of contact for many of the relationships we have/will have with incoming customers. My team will tier out accounts, collect information on their tools and challenges, and plan a strategy for use case tie-ins so we can have introductory conversations and make sure our relationship would be mutually beneficial.
I came from a competitor. That was my first experience in sales. I really enjoyed observability and open source projects – and how those projects worked from the perspective of the engineers. I always wanted to stay in tech, but I found that my niche was in observability. Understanding how Chronosphere works, how scalable it is, how novel some of our control plane abilities are alongside the aggregation rights – ultimately, it was a decision about how advanced the technology is within the current day market, that’s what drew me in.
I worked in sales at another tech company and I wanted to stay within that space because I found that when you’re talking to engineers, observability is something always being prioritized or on the roadmap for future prioritizations – it’s a stabilizing front for teams understanding how their systems are behaving. If I’m talking to people in big banks, or talking to startups that are just getting their products off the ground – everybody is moving towards microservices, which are complex in nature and especially at scale. To handle microservices architectures, teams need to employ a seamless integration with reliable monitoring tools to track their metrics.
Observability sounds like a buzzword, but whenever I speak to engineers, it doesn’t matter if I’m talking to a VP of engineering or an SRE – when you say observability, describe Chronosphere with one or two sentences, it resonates with everybody. Whether or not it’s a current challenge that the company is facing is another story. But when you bring up the product, it’s something that everybody’s familiar with as being something of critical value
The scalability of microservices and resolving their associated pains. What I’m referring to can present itself in the form of outages and cardinality spikes in the same systems SRE and DevOps teams are actively managing. Chronosphere is particularly positioned in the market to handle these things.
We have the transparency and the visibility into your data which, now with these microservices becoming popularized and a de facto standard in the market – you’re noticing when you’re having these conversations with engineers, that they are all starting to see issues with the scale. They’re starting to understand that open source projects may not be able to handle the massive volume that they’re managing. So, they either have to hire a ton of engineers to build homegrown systems that can scale better – which costs a lot of money, or defer to SaaS vendors.
So, the answer to your question is scalability, through and through, which Martin talks about in his blogs and podcasts and Rob writes about in blogs as well.
At the moment, the team is working around strategically reframing not only what kinds of customers/teams we’re actively targeting, but also planning for the changing secondary and tertiary questions that they’re asking us given their wider experience in resolving the variable issues with their observability stack. OS technologies are fantastic – they’re amongst the most exciting pieces of the tech space for me. Engineers love them, and they love to adopt and configure them. The intersection point is creating a managed system that avoids vendor lock-in by being compatible with Graphite and Prometheus to maintain comfort/familiarity, but can successfully scale and store those metric stacks and reduce management overhead.
This is actually on my LinkedIn. I worked at a Czech University in Prague as an English teacher for a year with students that were ages 16 to 28. I was 23, but I think they all imagined me as being older just because I was making the decisions in the classroom. A lot of incredibly intelligent exchange students who all had an impressive level of grit leaving their families to live in a different country.
I’ll say what other people call me – a llama. I have a friend at Chronosphere that always calls me a llama. I’m a little goofy and I have a really long neck.
My Dad got a PhD in computer science from Rutgers University. That’s why both of my parents relocated from Serbia to America. Then war broke out over there and they ended up staying in America. I would say my Dad influenced me both from an academic and professional standpoint. He’s just incredibly hard working, so I’ve had those ideas instilled in me from a very young age. Growing up, becoming an adult – I’ve realized having parents who aren’t just solid parents but are also good people is a real gift. My dad always used to say that when you start speaking too loudly in a discussion, your content becomes less and less relevant. That’s a pretty important point in life; I think you should always be clear. If you operate with distracting behaviors, people will get distracted.
It’s kind of corny, but it’s one of Chronosphere’s pillars: “Win together, lose together.” When you’re a part of a cohort, everybody shares the same objective and the responsibility when things are going badly and when things are going well. You just have to stay aligned and share the emotional ups and downs that happen. I think in sales, they happen rather frequently.
Listen in to hear Alex and Chris’ entire conversation here:
The world is a heavy place right now. It’s impossible to look away from the escalating crisis in Ukraine, as we grapple with ways to assist from near and far. With one of Chronosphere’s three hubs located in the neighboring Republic of Lithuania, and because some of our team members are Ukrainian, we stand especially strong with the people of Ukraine. Chronosphere is rallying as a company to offer support in whatever way we can, ranging from organizing company-matched donations (raising more than $18K between our ~140 employees and company match) to listening to advice from Ukrainian teammates about trusted news sources.
At times like these we draw strength from past struggles to make the world a better place. In that spirit, this year’s International Women’s Day (IWD) was especially empowering. This year’s IWD “Break the Bias” theme was centered around raising awareness against bias that enables one gender to dominate over the other. Gender bias is especially challenging in the tech space, where women strive for equal pay, opportunities, development, and mentorship in roles – from technical to sales to marketing and beyond – historically held by men.
In the gender-equal world envisioned by IWD organizers, the world is “free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination” and differences are valued and celebrated.
At Chronosphere, we couldn’t agree more! Creating a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is a priority that we work towards every day – which we were thrilled to discuss at a special IWD event held this week for a group of women in tech and allies. In honor of IWD’s Break the Bias theme, we gathered together to share a meal, meet new people, and talk about workplace experiences and challenges. Below I walk through the details and share some fun photos from the day.
Our International Women’s Day event took place Monday March 7 and was our first of what will be many community-based events to come. More than 50 people joined in on the conversation, including our co-founders, Martin Mao (CEO) and Rob Skillington (CTO), as well as leaders and team members from across the company – from engineering to marketing to sales.
There were two sessions for our attendees to choose from: one track focused on tech and one focused on marketing. During these sessions, guest speakers from Chronosphere weighed in on how they became the leaders and contributors in tech that they are today. They walked through personal and professional stories that were illustrated with photos and provided a deep sense of “who” makes up Chronosphere’s workforce.
In addition to providing guests with good food and dialogue, they were also given the opportunity to vote on one of two organizations – Voices of Children and Girls Who Code – geared toward helping others and advancing women in tech. The winner would receive a $5K donation from Chronosphere. Scroll on down to find out which organization won the vote (spoiler – both!)
Kicking things off, Chronosphere’s Technical Recruiting Manager, Natalie Pau, (Chronosphere’s first recruiter) touched on the variety of backgrounds that make up our vibrant team, and introduced the speakers of this event:
“One of the reasons I decided to join Chronosphere was seeing the clear mission to build a diverse team. I remember reading a TechCrunch article when Chronosphere first raised its Series B funding. Martin said DEI was a key focal point here and wanted to make sure they were building a diverse, inclusive foundational team – from the ground up. Now, we want to make sure we’re supporting the next wave of female engineers out there.”
In an effort to cultivate a safe and supportive environment for women in tech, Natalie mentioned our #chronogals Slack channel – an inclusive space for our teammates to engage in open dialogue.
Following Natalie’s intro, Martin painted a picture of Chronosphere, sharing the journey of how the company came to be.
Martin went on to underscore Chronosphere’s ground-up plan to build a culture of DEI.
Martin captured Chronosphere’s guiding values when he said: “We founded this company with a principal that we have continued to stick by – and that’s building a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion. In building a diverse workforce, we have a component of awareness and intent to solve a problem.”
Martin also noted, “When we look at the low numbers of women entering this industry, the numbers drop further in leadership roles. That’s why we’re looking to implement awareness programs throughout the company.” Martin mentions that this will take shape in a few ways:
After intros from Natalie and Martin, we all went into one of two breakout rooms where guest speakers from Chronosphere’s marketing and tech teams shared their experiences as women in tech.
Our engineering team is growing rapidly, and women are increasingly powering that growth – and challenging the status-quo of a normally male dominated industry. Elenore kicked off the tech track breakout session, highlighting how to use networking to get more opportunities: “I used my social time to network with my peers. And, I actually became really good at ping pong.”
Elenore also mentioned how many women today have to work around the “Prove-It Again” bias: “A lot of times, women find themselves having to prove themselves on skill sets, while men are assumed to be capable. Men are given the benefit of the doubt, and women are judged strictly by what they’ve accomplished.”
Elenore brought up the importance of receiving stretch assignments – which are projects that are generally outside of one’s skill set: “So, how do you get those stretch assignments? Through networking and sponsorship. We naturally socialize and network with people like us. This just means we have to take deliberate action to Break the Bias. She offered a few tips:
Claire touched on her past experience in a less diverse workplace and her experience as a mom in the tech world:
“I started my career in advertising, which wasn’t exactly like Mad Men, but it had similar characteristics. I realized that bias mainly comes from lack of knowledge and experience. Once I moved into tech and became a mom, I battled between wanting to be a super-mom, and feeling guilty that I wasn’t doing enough. But part of success is learning how to communicate what you need and want. You don’t have to do it all.”
Claire then shared with us a fragment of an empowering article: Why Being A Mom is Enough.
Gibbs gave attendees an overview of her unlikely transition from being an art history major, to a Product Manager at AWS (Amazon Web Services).
“After the five-year mark (with Amazon), I started to think about other opportunities outside of the company. When a recruiter from Chronosphere reached out, I was really excited. I joined as a Developer Advocate, which is a role that we built based off of my strengths. Recently, I moved into my new position as a Product Marketing Manager. I think it’s very cool and exciting that Chronosphere offers the opportunity to try different avenues.”
Gibbs shared three key pieces of wisdom that she’s learned during her career in tech:
Gibbs handed it over to Rachel, who coincidentally also studied art history and also double majored in computer science. Rachel dove into the timeline of her career in tech – from the old boys club of being a Principal Analyst at Forrester to her current role as Chronosphere’s Head of Product and Technical Marketing – and what she learned while overcoming obstacles (both personally and professionally) throughout her career:
“The first thing that I always come back to as a leader, manager, peer and employee – is that we are humans first, and we are people first. I never want to work for an organization that loses sight of that. The well-being of the person that works with me is the single most important thing.”
Attendees were able to vote on the organization that would receive our IWD event’s $5K donation. Voices of Children, a far-reaching organization that will assist children in Ukraine, won the vote – but we didn’t stop there. As a surprise, Chronosphere pledged to additionally donate $5K to Girls Who Code. Also, Martin and Rob each personally matched Chronosphere’s donation, bringing the total to $10K for each organization.
Other ways Chronosphere contributes:
We ended our International Women’s Day event with a few minutes of Q&A from guests that joined us. We enjoyed thoughtful dialogue from different backgrounds, found renewed commitment and inspiration from one another, and came together to learn more about each other’s experiences. Breaking the bias is not a one-day feat accomplished in celebration of women, but rather something that we, as a company, strive for on a regular basis – within our teams, within our personal lives, and more importantly, within our community.
Want to keep up with the latest at Chronosphere, and stay tuned for more events? Follow us on Twitter @chronosphereio and check out our blogs on our site.
Last fall, the e-commerce company where I had been SVP of people ops and talent for nearly four years, had been bought by a behemoth, and I arrived at one of those career crossroads with a big decision to make: Where should I go next? Working for a large company gave me pause – I thrive in the scrappy startup environment where I can make an impact by creating structure in the midst of chaos. It was an optimal time to think about the next level of career challenges to go after.
This forced the reflection of what was important to me in my next move: strong leadership, mission, market opportunity. Chronosphere came out of nowhere – a dark horse in the running that quickly became my number one.
My first encounter with Chronosphere leadership was a meeting with its co-founder and CEO, Martin Mao. I hesitated in taking the meeting because Chronosphere was earlier-stage than I was after, but I was intrigued with Martin’s background (so grateful that I decided to take the call). As he shared about Chronosphere’s history and path for the future, I think I took six pages of notes. I listened, mesmerized by his obvious mix of high IQ and EQ- I was wowed. As someone that loves to surround myself with smart and kind people, these are key qualities that I am drawn to.
Then I met the rest of the leadership team: There was not one person I spoke with that I wasn’t absolutely excited to work with.
And it didn’t stop there. Co-founder and CTO, Rob Skillington, made the drive up from New York to Boston just to meet me face-to-face. Words cannot describe how strongly that action resonated with me. I haven’t even mentioned the thoughtful surprise that showed up on my porch after my intro with Martin. Soccer is huge in my family (Vamos Argentina!) which came up in passing during an interview with Martin … Voilà, out of the blue I received an Argentina soccer jersey. It wasn’t the jersey that bowled me over, but instead the level of intentionality and thoughtfulness that went into this.
This whole blog could probably be about how big a role leadership was in my decision to join Chronosphere.
But there is more!
Having just been through the excitement of a mega exit, I was primed to do it again! Looking at Chronosphere and where this company was going, I could see it was theirs to lose.
Here are some quick facts that show how joining Chronosphere was a no-brainer:
I also wanted to join a company with a strong mission, and while Chronosphere doesn’t beat its chest re: its mission, what I saw (and continue to see) is a level of authentic care for the people that build this company. For a company that is only 2+ years old, the benefits they had in place were demonstrative of how equitability and inclusion are not just buzzwords, but an authentic part of the culture. I knew I wanted to be part of the team to shape this mission and who we want to be in the observability space.
Recently, Chronosphere’s swift and compassionate reaction to war breaking out in Ukraine is a perfect example of who we are. We’ve been setting aside time as a company to talk about how we can contribute – both as individuals and as an organization at large. We are also encouraged to set aside time for ourselves to process what’s happening, and most inspiring has been the way we have embraced our EU team.
This is less tangible than the proof points I listed above, but I could see Chronosphere was going to be an amazing ride and I was going to learn new things … if I joined. I have worked in the SaaS space before, but infrastructure was new to me and let’s be honest – the cloud-native space is white hot right now and that is exciting! In the end I found myself debating between what I thought I wanted and the opportunity in front of me – bottom line, I just imagined my life a year in the future, and when I imagined not taking the Chronosphere role, I was filled with a deep regret, and that is when I knew.
I’ve been with Chronosphere for five months now and am reminded constantly why I made the right decision in joining the team. Each day here has demonstrated that you cannot go wrong if you listen to your gut. The commitment to humans, to what we are building and in service of our customers is unmatched.
Chronosphere is growing fast, and we are looking for exceptional people to join in helping us continue building an exciting company in an exciting space. Check out our careers page to see if there’s a role for you!
What do you get when you cross a former science teacher with an eternally happy person who loves a hard technical challenge? Meet Audrey. In today’s Meet the Chronosphere Team profile, we get to know Audrey Bastian, a UX designer who is helping Chronosphere give our customers – huge and not-as-huge alike – an excellent observability-team experience. Audrey has been with Chronosphere since March this year. In her interview below with Chris Ward, she talks about why she joined Chronosphere, exciting things she’s working on, what it’s like to be 5’3” and win an all-city fitness challenge, and more.
I’m a UX designer – one of two currently, but our team is growing rapidly. That means I’m designing the product to make it as usable as possible for everyone, whether you are a team member, a manager, or an executive.
My past experience was mostly working on stuff that wasn’t as technically challenging. When I was looking for my next role, I was looking for something that was super technical and kind of hard. Stuff that’s challenging just makes the day go faster, and I’m constantly – like every day – learning something new here, and it’s really fun to make those connections. I get so much pride and joy when I realize, “This connects to this” and I’m able to piece it all together. That’s a lot of fun. And then also my sister works here! Elenore is the engineering manager, and I feel like we’ve both been in tech for so long, and always thought it would be cool if we worked at the same company. So this has been a really great opportunity and a lot of fun for us … the Chrono-sisters, that’s what we call ourselves. {We recently did a Meet the Team profile on Audrey’s sister, Elenore Bastian, which you can read here.}
I’ve had a couple of different positions. The one most recently was working in media. I was designing how someone might program different TV shows to go on the air. It was cool. I worked in healthcare for a little bit, designing different products for health applications. I also worked at Microsoft. Prior to all of that, I taught eighth grade science on the South Side of Chicago. I made a big career switch.
The most interesting technical challenge I face is: How do you scale a product to fit so many different companies? We have customers that are massive, and have thousands of employees, and some that are much smaller. How do you create a product that’s intuitive for all of these different users? And make sure everyone understands all the things that the product does? And make sure they are all able to turn on the features that they need, or ignore the features that they don’t? How do we make a product that works for all groups? That’s definitely been a big challenge.
I’m part of the new Info Model team. It’s very small right now – there are just a couple of us. The Info Model team is essentially restructuring the product to better match users’ environments. Our users tend to think of themselves as teams, so how do we make our product more team-friendly? When you log into the product, how do you only see the things that are pertinent to you? That’s the new challenge I’m tackling. It’s very much like architecture, where you’re figuring out where everything fits in and how permissions work. We’re still very much in the early stages, and narrowing down exactly how we want it to look and feel, and what pieces need to be included.
Before the Info Model team, I was on the Foundations team and was working on a project that leads into this – users and teams, which is how users access the system, how do you set up a team, and now we’re getting into, what the team sees once it’s set up.
I think I’m oddly strong for how small I am. I’m not very tall, but I recently won an all-city fitness competition, which I’m very proud of. Another fun fact is I’ve gotten to wear the Clippy suit. It’s in the Microsoft archives and I got to wear it once.
I actually don’t have any. I used to when I was a teacher. I was obsessed with stickers, and I had them all over my water bottle. One time my student dropped my water bottle and it bent in a way that I couldn’t use it anymore. I was devastated because I had taken so much time to collect and stick each one in a nice way. So now I can’t do it again. I get too attached, so no more stickers.
This seems so basic, but I feel like I’d be a dog. I’m easily excited about stuff. I’m pretty much always in a good mood and pretty happy. I like being around people, which I think is true for most dogs. So maybe a dog, or a puppy – something that likes to play.
Definitely my parents. From an early age, they taught my sister and me about perseverance and how to be confident and work hard and grit. They also exposed us to so many opportunities at a young age that I’m really appreciative of. More recently, I also think of my sister as a role model. It’s been so interesting working with her, and seeing this new perspective where she’s not just my younger sister anymore. She has a career and is respected by her peers, and it’s fun to see her really own her job and do so well.
It’s one that my mom said ever since my sister (Elenore) and I were so young and it’s from Eleanor Roosevelt: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” As a young kid, it definitely was true. Like when you aren’t wearing the coolest clothes, or you just don’t feel as cool – as long as I’m confident in myself, nothing else matters. And now, as I’ve grown older, it’s also true. I did this big career change, and so sometimes I don’t necessarily feel like I’m the best UX designer, or that I know the most. But as long as I’m confident in myself, and as long as I put in my best effort, I can always do the best job.
Listen in to hear Audrey’s and Chris’ full conversation:
Meet the Chronosphere team: Mary Fesenko, software engineer
Meet the Chronosphere team: Shreyas Srivatsan, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Team: Alec Holmes, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Elenore Bastian, Engineering Manager
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Nate Broyles, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Ting Chen, Member of Technical Staff
In today’s Meet the Chronosphere Team profile, we hand the microphone to Elenore who manages the Platform team … and who unflinchingly responded with “people” and “learning opportunity” when asked why she joined Chronosphere. Culture-building is a key component of Chronosphere’s values and we’re thrilled to have a people-person like Elenore on our engineering team. During her 10 months at Chronosphere, Elenore has gotten ramped up on the world of monitoring, observability, and metrics! Elenore joins our interview from her location on the West Coast and shares fun insights about life at Chronosphere.
I’m the manager for the Platform team, and the Platform team is everything to do with how users interact with the product. It’s the UI (user interface) – the front end – as well as behind the scenes stuff like the API and the CLI and all the components we integrate with.
The people, one hundred percent. I could tell the team was committed to ramping everybody up, to investing in each other – I’m brand new to monitors, observability, metrics, and that whole world and Chronosphere felt like a safe space to learn.
I was at a company called Pivotal for a long time, and Pivotal got acquired by VMware. So I was at VMware for a little bit and I just wasn’t into it – so I hopped over to Chronosphere.
I think a big challenge we’re facing right now – which isn’t super technical but it’s something I think about a lot – is thinking about our product as a whole across all the touch points. How do we present Chronosphere’s ✨vibe✨ to our customers? How are they interacting with the UI and the CLI, and how do we make those interactions seamless and consistent?
I’ve just collected a bunch of peer feedback for all of my reports and I’m really excited to write that up and share it out – it was all really positive and I’m really excited to start building feedback as a habit and not as a chore. I’m hoping to show peer feedback is beneficial, productive, easy – not scary, or an overhead of process. I want the engineers to be giving feedback to each other all the time, but one thing that makes that really hard is being remote, and the pandemic, and not all knowing each other, and not all being in the office. It just comes less naturally, so I’m trying to think of better ways for us to have those organic conversations.
Sometimes it’s hard to hear feedback, so I wanted people to come up with ideas or growth goals for themselves. Like, “I want to be a better leader on my team by making sure I share the right amount of context and information.” I’m asking very pointed questions around specific goals, and that’s been helpful in that people are picking out what they want feedback on – essentially taking ownership over their growth.
When I was 18 and a senior in high school, I won a pageant. It had all the pageant things like a big dress and a tiara. It’s a very small town thing.
I have a Pacific Northwest Native American totem pole. And I have a sticker of my cat, Owen.
I would be an alien. Or Sasquatch. I love conspiracy theories, so I would pick something like that.
My parents. Both my parents are in positions of leadership – they’re both judges. For my mom, as a female judge, I think you just get more flack, more scrutiny, than your male counterparts – like you can get as a woman in tech. You can bottle up some of that frustration and anger and have that control your life. But you can also just let it go. I’ve been learning how to do that over the years. My dad’s also a judge, and he is very thoughtful. Being thoughtful and empathetic is helpful as a manager, and in software in general!
At work, every problem is a communication problem – pretty much always. So if people are having problems, I ask, “How can we communicate better? Where are the gaps in communication?”
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Stay tuned for more profiles on Chronospherians and check out our open roles here. You can listen in on Elenore’s and Chris Ward’s full conversation by watching the video below:
Meet the Chronosphere team: Mary Fesenko, software engineer
Meet the Chronosphere team: Shreyas Srivatsan, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Team: Alec Holmes, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Nate Broyles, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Audrey Bastian, UX Designer
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Ting Chen, Member of Technical Staff