Andrei Panait

Customer Success

Becoming a manager at Brillio changed my perspective. I learned over the past few years that, while sometimes it’s good to be a one-man-show, but in the long run it’s not sustainable. As someone who enjoys freedom, I can wholeheartedly say that teamwork is paramount.

When working with multiple clients, projects, technologies, and stakeholders, there will never be a shortage of challenges.

One of the most noteworthy examples that come to mind is a project that I originally started from a data architect position, but I had to go beyond my role and become much more than that for the client. I stepped into every role possible, from business analyst to developer, solution architect, data architect, etc.

One major challenge I faced was convincing the stakeholders to change the technology they were planning to use and trust us with choosing the tech stack.

When we were first assigned the project, the client already had a specific tool it wanted for the implementation. The solution was a platform for data ingestion, ETL, data cataloging, data governance, all in one. On paper, it was a comprehensive platform with everything the client needed. In reality, it didn't excel at anything. After carefully assessing all avenues, we concluded it's not a good fit for the client, and it would not provide the best results.

The client gave us two weeks to put forward an alternative variant for that tool. I got 100% involved in the project, I did a deep-dive as a developer, and in two weeks, I presented a platform tailored specifically for the client's needs. We built on top of native Azure and Microsoft tools exactly what the customer wanted and designed the newly developed platform to be everything they needed. Despite the initial organizational resistance, the client accepted the solution we proposed.

Brillio’s platform proved to be much better than what they had originally proposed. In addition to much better performance, we also achieved significant cost savings, both with licensing fees and hosting costs.

Another example where we overcame organizational resistance for the benefit of the customer would be when we pushed for new-age technologies, such as cloud, over legacy ones – but more comfortable for the client’s internal teams.

The data science team of one customer was not very familiar with the cloud, and they were reluctant when we decided to implement the new technologies. They were comfortable and familiar with the on-premise infrastructure, but it had scalability issues, and it was much more difficult to maintain and develop.

At first, we had to build trust with the client’s internal teams, who wanted to have control over the implementations. After we got approvals and started implementing the proposed solutions, we had to sync closely with the client and work alongside them to ensure the new developments are properly executed and are not underperforming. We provided assistance and training and scaled the platform at the highest level. Not only do they now trust our team and Brillio, but now they specifically ask for me whenever there are new implementations in their pipeline.

At another project I was working on, the client was thorough with what it wanted, with extremely explicit reporting. They had highly-specific, special charts used internally, which they understood from a design point of view. They wanted identical graphs created in Tableau, although there were no such options in the tool. We had to create all the logic behind it, design a plan to arrange the data, and generate the data structure. We managed to build the graph and deliver exactly what the client requested.

I currently manage a team of people who have either been trained by me or by the people I personally trained. I have a lot of confidence in my team and in the work they’re doing. I can focus on more high-level endeavors, such as data architecture or management, rarely getting directly involved in the development stages.

I joined Brillio in 2020, following the Cognetik acquisition. I originally joined Cognetik in 2017 as a Business Intelligence Analyst. In 2019, I took the role of a data architect.

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