How to break up with your vendor

@amyngyn, @gphat Velocity NYC 2018
How to Break Up With
Your Vendor
Amy Nguyen (@amyngyn)
Cory Watson (@gphat)
Velocity NYC
October 2, 2018

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Our background
● Combined, we've done four SaaS migrations and managed ~10 contracts
with SaaS vendors
● Stripe Observability team: 9 engineers during our most recent migration
● Migration scale:
○ Led migrations alone and in large teams
○ Hundreds of GBs of data or millions of metrics
○ Hundreds of dashboards and queries
○ > 1,000 employees

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Evaluation
Negotiation
Migration
Velocity NYC 2018

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● Security questionnaire
● SSO and account management
● Audit logs
● Access controls
● GDPR
● API tokens
● Mutual NDAs
● Sensitive data scrubbing
Work with security and legal ASAP.

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Identify your most important users.
● Who has the most critical workflows
and/or the largest scale?
● What questions are they trying to answer?
● How do they want to consume this information?
(API, dashboards, TV, alerts?)

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Gather informed feedback.
● "Seems fine" is not sufficient.
● Pair with someone for an hour to see how
much they really use the tool
● Turn off your old tool and see what happens
● Look at audit logs to see total usage

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Test as many different
workflows / data types as
you can during the trial.

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Collect feedback from
their customers.
● How was the contract renewal process?
● What features do they use the most?
● Any surprises or unexpected behavior?
● How responsive is customer support?
● How quickly do bug reports get fixed?
Feature requests?
● How have they handled outages and
contract violations?
● How long have they had a contract?
● How much data are they sending?
● Which teams use the tool?

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Understand how data
usage, outages, sudden
spikes, and quota limits
are handled.

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Be realistic about
shiny new features.

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Evaluation
● Work with security and legal as soon as possible.
● Identify your most important users.
● Gather informed feedback.
● Test as many different workflows / data types as you can during the trial.
● Collect feedback from their customers.
● Understand how outages, sudden spikes, and quota limits are handled.
● Be realistic about shiny new features.

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Negotiation
From the latin “neg” (no) and “otsia” (leisure).
Yay.

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Negotiation: Resources
● Training?
● Do you have a procurement team?
● Any help in finance?
● Is there teammate that’s done this you can ask?
● Friends from other companies?
● Know any other customers?

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Negotiation: Advice
● Build or Buy: capex, opex, core competencies, staffing
● Understand the money: cost of capital, alignment of fiscal year
● Sales folks are probably not your friends.
● Really, really learn the billing

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Negotiation: Advice
● What’s it worth to you?
● Talk to finance/stakeholders first: What’s the goal?
● Pro/Con list
● Being the user and the negotiator is hard, need to separate.

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● Month to month flexibility
● Prepaid / annual savings
● Training freebies
● Guaranteed features
● Support timeliness
● Advisory boards
Negotiation: Cost Creativity
● A la carte features
● Brand / logo usage
● Term (months, years, etc)
● Blog posts, case studies,
conference talks, etc
● Conversion help
Velocity NYC 2018

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Negotiation: Teeth
● SLAs: Match? Good returns? (3 9s = 8.77H)
● Overage costs: Where can they stick you?
● Automatic renewal / timelines: Acceptable?
● Termination of contract: Terms ok?
● Requirements: Getting done?

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Negotiation
● Check for resources: class, finance, coworkers, friends, customers
● Establish value, work with stakeholders
● Build v Buy: capex, opex, core competency, staffing
● Pro Con / Plus Minus lists
● Get creative with cost
● Match up terms with value and need

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Migration

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Migration: How much
are you going to do?
● You can and should automate the
process.
● Collect metrics for how often people
use each object.
● Write scripts to parse and transform
based off each tool's API.
○ Grammar: Parslet.
API for creating resources: Terraform
provider.
● Get fancy: Chrome extensions.
● Document everything.

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Migration: What's your plan?
● Have a migration schedule before
you sign the contract.
● Add an extra month. Just kidding,
I meant two months.
● Set an end date for shutting off
the old tool.

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Migration: Point of No Return
● Like the “climax” of a movie
● Prepare for this phase!
● Save up some fun stuff (order cupcakes, have a dance party)
● Start a “nice things” thread where people send positive things they hear
● Reach out to leadership to invigorate the team
● Get creative!

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Migration: Some Managerial Tips
● Use this opportunity to empower others
● Be very clear with assignments and expectations
● Give clear updates to Leadership
● Engage dissent early and often
● Follow up with tips, guidance, and information

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Migration: Socializing
● Have a message
● Repeat the message
● Set a cadence for updates, keep em realistic
● Have a bit of fun with your updates (gifs, comic sans, jokes, etc)
● Prompt writers, share responsibility
● Measure / speak to the message

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Migration
● Plan your effort and data
● Automate
● Set a real end date
● Share the load, empower others
● Communicate with customers and leadership
● Plan for the low points

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Evaluation
Negotiation
Migration

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Thanks!
amynguyen.net
onemogin.com
stripe.com/jobs
Come chat tomorrow at the Observability lunch table!

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How to break up with your vendor

How to break up with your vendor

Amy Nguyen

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