Who Does What
Who's who at the Octopus zoo. How we're structured and how we think about management.
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
- Sales & Customer Success
- Trust, Security, and Operations
- Marketing
- Commercial Platform
- People
- 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.
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 in other areas, this is a deliberate choice, and we expect we'll remain a very R&D-heavy company.
We use a system called Hibob to manage People-related stuff, 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 in Hibob.
Three departments - Engineering, Product, and Design, make up our Research & Development group. The R&D is currently in Australia and New Zealand only, to keep everyone with lots of time zone overlap.
- Engineering 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.
R&D works with a bit of a matrix model. For example, engineers report to engineering managers to engineering directors, and ultimately to Mike, while product managers report ultimately to Colin, and designers report to Jessica. However, shipping any feature requires all of those groups working together.
So, R&D is organized into groups:
- A Product Team will typically be something like a product manager, a designer or two, and a handful of engineers with an engineering manager. The product team is led by a "Product Leadership Team" (PLT) - who drive the mission of the team. The PLT will typically be the engineering manager, product manager, and designer.
- A Group consists of a number of Product Teams, and they have their own Group Leadership Teams - typically an engineering director, product director, and design director. There are two groups at Octopus: Deploy group, who own the mission of helping people deploy software, and Scale group, who help enterprises do so at scale.
Most day-to-day work happens inside product teams, where designers, product managers, and engineers collaborate to build software. Direction and career feedback comes from the department.
The support department is led by Alex Rolley. They help 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.
Our sales department provides outstanding customer service to help customers with anything related to sales or product adoption. While Octopus is usually adopted & championed by technical folks within a company, there are 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.
Within the sales group are:
- Account executives who manage high-level commercial relationships with customers
- Customer success managers who ensure DevOps engineers are getting value from Octopus
- Sales engineers and technical account managers who support sales from a technical point of view
- Professional services
- Sales development representitives
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 led by Anna Michniewska and helps our customers to learn about us, understand what our product does, and why it might be helpful to them. Marketing has team members in the US, UK and Australia.
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.
Last modified 6mo ago