How project management applies to solutions engineering (presales)

I have been working as a Solution Engineer for almost 6 years, first at VMware and now at Cloudflare. Like any other job, solutions engineering can be different depending on the company. As I am learning more about project management, I have been reflecting back on the different opportunities I worked on these past few years.

To help you better understand, this article I will briefly explain what a solution engineer is, what my role was at VMware, what my current role is at Cloudflare and how project management fit into all of this.

The role of a solution engineer

During the sales cycle of a technical solution, solutions engineer pair up with account manager to:

• qualify the needs of the customer
• understand the customer’s pain points
• ensure the solution can solve the pain points
• demonstrate the value of the solution through demos or PoC
• eventually respond to RFPs if needed

My time as an account solution engineer at VMware

Certain companies have a wide portfolio of solutions. Thus, it is impossible for a single solution engineer to master all of them. It was the case for VMware. The solutions ranged from network security to endpoint management to cloud automation. Solutions engineering was divided based on these products, creating teams of solutions engineers specialists who dig deeper into a given set of products and an account solution engineers team to oversee opportunities as a whole. I was part of the later.

My current role as a Solution Engineer at Cloudflare

Cloudflare is a cybersecurity company focusing on making the internet safer by helping companies/organisations/individuals to secure access to their websites and other assets accessed via internet.

The portfolio is focused account application security, network security, zero trust and a developer platform. Unlike VMware, the portfolio is smaller and focus on security which enables solutions engineer to be able to dig deeper into the products and we have the help of solution architects who are specialised into one of these 4 domains.

When I join I started running my own PoC and being the sole technical expert from the point of view of my customers.

I was doing project management without realising

What is a project? A project is a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. An initiative is seen as project if it you can define the following :

• Time: temporary initiative
• Goal: a product, a service or a result
• Scope: defined features and functions of a product, or the scope of work needed to finish a project
• Cost: resources (money, people) required to achieve the goal

By this definition, opportunities are similar to projects. We work on it temporarily. A concrete example is a customer looking for a new solution (network, storage, ITSM, etc) and need to decide before the renewal of the current one because it no longer fit their needs. Another common one is a customer who needs new software to enable, to secure new services, new products or a new platform in a year or two.
The goal is to solve the customer pain points. Can we secure their new services? Can we host their new services? Can we provide the stability the the current solution does not provide?
The scope is defined once we have understand these pain points and we are sure we can tackle them. Do we need a PoC for the solutions that we identified? Do we need to do workshops? Which teams from the customer side need to be involve?
The cost is the internal team we are going to involve. Which team of solutions engineers specialist need to be involved? Which solution architects need to be involved? Who is the partner we’re working with?

What is a project manager? A project manager role is to ensure the project is successful. They are accountable for the success or failure of the project. They need to deliver within the time, scope and cost constraints. A project manager is the face of the project, the point of contact and manages the experts to ensure they deliver as per expectations.

An account solution engineer needs to ensure the value of the solution(s) is proven in the given time via demonstration, presentation or PoC. However these demonstration, presentation or PoC are not necessarily all done by them. They are the technical point of contact for the customer and is accountable for that opportunity. They need to orchestrate the whole process by gathering the requirements on the customer side, agree with SE specialists or other teams involved on the different steps they need to take. They plan all the activities and set up milestones to check the progress. They schedule customer interactions and set up calls, send emails to follow up. They feed back information to the SE specialist teams to make sure the plan is on track by keeping a diary of all the tasks perfomed and by whom.

Other aspects of project management. Another side of project management found in solutions engineering is risk management. Things never go as we plan. For instance, you were supposed to be at a conference at 3pm so you booked a taxi for 2pm but you end up stuck in traffic and late to your conference. It is unfortunate but the consequences are small. In project management or solutions engineering, an unexpected event could mean the failure of the entire project, delay resulting in revenue loss or financial penalty to pay or a loss of a $1M opportunity.

Risk management is the practice of identifying all the risks. How bad can it get if the event happens? How likely is it to happen? You need to look at what you can change in advance to eliminate or lessen the risk or create a plan B instead. As a solution engineer, the risk can be an unstable demo platform or a long process to get approval for a PoC that could be rejected. It can be human related like a coworker going through a rough time and not able to perform correctly, maybe you should prepare for a backup just in case.

In brief

Project management and solutions engineering are two different fields but with a few similarities like delivering a result during a given time frame, leading a process involving multiple teams and being accountable for it. It is sometimes difficult to identify all soft skills we use in our day to day job but it is important to sit back and appreciate all that we are doing and learning. It could be your next step to furthering you career.