Who Does What
It shouldn't be hard to figure out who to ask about something at Octopus. This section gives a high-level overview of each of the departments at Octopus, how they're organized, and who's leading each one.
At a high level, Octopus is organized into a handful of departments, in no particular order:
Engineering
Design
Product
Support
Solutions
Sales & Customer Success
Trust, Security, and Operations
Marketing
Commercial Platform
Finance
From the names, you can probably guess what each one does, though we've included some notes further down. Each of these departments has a leader - a VP or Director (explanation below) - who reports to Paul Stovell, the CEO. There are also usually a couple of people who don't fit clearly into any of these categories, who also report to Paul.
As you read, you'll notice that Octopus is very R&D heavy - a huge number of people have a technical background or work in a technical role. While we're slowly growing other areas, this is a deliberate choice, and we expect we'll remain a very R&D heavy company.
We use a system called Small Improvements to manage 1:1's and other types of feedback, and it also maintains an up-to-date organization chart. If you want to find out who somebody's manager is, what pronouns they use, or their title, you'll find it on the Directory page.
The Engineering team is led by Mike Noonan, and it's the largest team at Octopus. It comprises all of the software engineers who write the code for Octopus Deploy, and our quality coaches & test automation engineers. The engineering department is currently in Australia and New Zealand only, to keep everyone with lots of time zone overlap.
The engineering group is split into engineering teams of about 7-10 people each, which is typically too many to work on any one thing. So they tend to be split up a bit further, typically into teams of 3 or so, with each one having a team leader.
Our User Experience and Design team is led by Jessica Ross. The team looks after the design and user experience of the brand, product, and website as well as supporting Marketing and Sales with design work needed to attract new business and keep our existing users up-to-date.
The team of Product Designers work closely with Product Managers and Engineers to have an in-depth understanding of use cases and the product to shape user experiences specific for our users.
The support group is led by Alex Rolley. Within support, Tina Bamford manages the US and UK teams. All up, they're the second-largest group at Octopus.
The Support side of the team helps our customers when they have problems - by responding to tickets and helping customers to get un-stuck. They are experts on Octopus and the kinds of issues customers can experience with it. The team is split between the US, UK, and Australia, giving us "follow-the-sun" availability and fast response times.
The Octopus Solutions team is made up of folks who are experts on CI/CD. They don't just know Octopus, but many of the other tools in our ecosystem, and all of the issues that can crop up with DevOps automation and software delivery in general. They are split between the US and the UK and are led by Bob Walker.
This team does a bit of everything, but in general:
They build close relationships with some of our largest customers, checking in frequently and helping them with long-running challenges or projects. In this capacity, they act as advocates for our customers internally.
They run webinars and workshops, speak at events, write blog posts, and educate our customers on what's coming up or how to make better use of Octopus.
Our sales team provides outstanding customer service to help customers with anything sales-related. While Octopus is usually adopted & championed by technical folks within a company, there's still a number of hurdles a company faces when it comes to deciding to buy or renew a license, and the sales team is here to help.
Our motto is to be there when customers need us, but not to bother them if they're "just browsing". While we don't believe in top-down sales, we've learned that our customers still like to talk to a human. Like everyone at Octopus, our sales team is salaried only; there are no commissions.
The sales team is split between the US and Australia and is led by Diana Ortiz.
We've learned the hard way that a product is more than a hodge-podge of features and good ideas. The product team has the difficult job of listening to just about everybody - support tickets, customer conversations, observations from Advisory, opportunities from sales and marketing - and somehow distilling everything into a cohesive product roadmap that actually makes sense.
The product team is led by Michael Richardson and is based in Australia.
This group is led by Jim Burger. They look after Octopus Cloud and all of our internal infrastructure, as well as handling security and compliance. Ultimately, they're responsible for ensuring we are worthy of our customer's trust.
The People team is led by Betania Passos and handles hiring and onboarding, as well as working with people across the organization to help make Octopus a great place to work.
Marketing is split into three parts, each reporting to Paul. We're currently looking for a VP of Marketing to bring it all together.
Product marketing is led by Rob Pearson. This group explains to customers what problems we solve and why Octopus might be useful, as well as what's in the latest release.
Content marketing is led by Lee Carlon and manages our blog, SEO, communications, and gives us a consistent voice.
Growth marketing is led by Jeremy Cade and is focused on how customers discover us and ensuring customers are initially successful with Octopus.
This group is led by Andrew Katsivas and looks after all the business systems and custom integrations we've built to enable our sales and support teams. These include Octofront, a system we've built for managing licenses and telemetry, along with our public website and all the things it integrates with.
The finance team is a small team that does an incredible amount of things. Their responsibilities include budgeting and forecasting, compliance, tax, payroll, expenses, vendor management, benefits administration, and more. They run our payroll across three countries, file payroll taxes and worker insurance in a dozen US states and Australian states, and make sure Octopus is a solvent, above-board company.
Finance is based in Australia and is led by Sonia Stovell, our CFO.
