Meet the Chronosphere Team: Elenore Bastian, Engineering Manager

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: