The Power of the Pivot

Docker’s iconic approach to containerization changed that industry. Here’s a look at how learning strategies are helping it serve app developers around the world.

Making strategic shifts in the direction of a business is a gut-churning proposition. In the long term, risks may outweigh the rewards of the move or enable them to exceed their expectations for viability. Once in a very great while, radical change moves an entire industry forward. That’s the case with Docker, Inc., creators of the No. 1 developer productivity tool in the world.

Since 2013 Docker has focused on container technology designed to help developers build, share, and run container applications, now with integral AI features. The private firm boasted a valuation of $2.1 billion as of 2022.

Container software packages up code and all its dependencies so an application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another, regardless of the infrastructure. In 2015, Docker helped establish the Open Container Initiative (OCI) industry standard for containers, so they could be portable anywhere.

“This methodology allows developers to scale their software much more efficiently. It’s much safer. It’s much faster. It’s much more reproducible, it’s much less error prone, and Docker is the de facto name when it comes to containerization,” said the company’s Director of Information Technology and Workplace Operations, Jeffrey Strauss.

Strauss has led teams at Snapchat, Netflix, Twitter, and Tinder and has advised Nike, Adidas, Cisco, Verizon, the U.S. Department of Energy, and others. He is the founder of Leadership Bootcamp, a program designed to transform the results of traditional training into measurable behavior change. He’s also the host of the Leadership Bootcamp podcast.

Currently working on his Ed.D in organizational leadership at the USC Rossier School of Education, Strauss has developed a leadership philosophy of creating a learning ecosystem that underscores everything he does. “Regardless of what tools we implement or what projects we’re working on, the core focus is obviously business enablement,” he said, noting that in the right ecosystem people feel safer to experiment, innovate, and fail without blame or consequences.

The Palo Alto-based company is fully remote. His five-person team manages and supports hundreds remote workers across six continents, and that count is growing. A bold leadership strategy helps to keep the team lean as they provide world-class service, and his passion for maximizing performance through employee well-being informs everything they do. Together, the team develops competencies that contribute to success while also enhancing their wellness.

“We’re always learning more about the tools we have,” he said. In his view, rewarding judgment over outcome is also essential. “We could have the best laid plans and then COVID happens and all of those plans get derailed. Those outcomes are all failures.”

He approaches these challenges methodically. “Did we use good strategies? When did we use good decision-making frameworks? If we did all those things well, we used good judgment. So I can reward the judgment over the outcome because sometimes the outcome is uncontrollable.”

Strauss values sustainability. “Before I place an additional burden on my team, I’m going to learn a brand-new thing to solve a problem,” he revealed. “Let’s leverage our skill sets internally both tool-wise and personal-wise. Let’s strengthen where we’re weak in each other and up-level together as a team so that we can accomplish these goals without adding a burden and maximize the efficacy of the tools we already have.”

AI tools are part of the team as well, answering questions about the efficacy of ideas. For example, if a project requires a programming language that they have proficiency in as well as another that they don’t, the team writes the code in the language they know and asks AI to port that to the other programming language, test it, and then deploy.

“That saves us weeks of effort, and hours and hours of work. It enables the business very quickly,” he stressed. “What could have taken us 20 hours of labor took us 20 minutes to port and test.”

More joy. Less friction.

“The No. 1 priority when it comes to my team onboarding our staff is a stellar, world-class second-to-none user experience. We want it to be a joyful, frictionless experience.”

Docker partners with Remota, whose services are designed to solve the logistical puzzle of remote staffing, including full life-cycle IT logistics from onboarding, offboarding, end-of-life, and everything in between. “There are so many different things that could happen with a supply chain, it could be very volatile,” he mused. “Outcome is still important, but judgment is really important.

“To strengthen Docker’s supply chain resilience, Remota diversified their portfolio of supply chain partners so we have backups. Remota has never failed us.”

They’ve also been able to automate much of Docker’s procurement process, which forms part of the team’s responsibility. “That’s a huge win because there are other companies that I have worked at that have procurement teams that spend their days responding to people, asking what’s the tracking number for this, what’s the shipping status of this?”

Prior to working on Docker’s supply chain automation, Strauss faced the same reality. “But Remota has been huge in developing their back-end infrastructure where we can integrate our tools with their tools.”

Oomnitza, an enterprise technology management platform that delivers key business process automation for IT professionals and organizations is central to their workflow. Oomnitza’s asset-centric approach unifies data into a single source of truth to ensure technology assets drive value instead of complexity.

“We built procurement intelligence using that platform for our inventory management because it has robust integration and automation capabilities. It’s what we use to automate a lot of our tangential processes,” he said. “They’re a great company to work with. They’re super responsive. They listen to our feature requests. When things aren’t working quite right, engineers get on the phone with us and help us figure things out. They’ve been great.”

Oomnitza’s SaaS intelligence platforms, such as software asset management, enable Docker to categorize and inventory all of the SaaS platforms they use. “From a procurement intelligence perspective, Oomnitza is core to that as well.”

Pivots are perilous, but their success can change the world. “Docker created this technology and we continue to develop, iterate, and innovate on that technology today.”