Learning a whole business by building it, at a growing telco
A growing telco needed systems for every part of the business, from the data centre to the regulators, and one consistent way to run them.
The problem
SpinTel, an Australian telco, bought Premium Gamer, a gaming site I'd built, to be its gaming portal, and brought me on with it. It was my first role, and over seven years I went from software engineer to head of development, growing with the business as it moved into new verticals.
A telco runs on more moving parts than it looks. Customers have to be signed up, verified, provisioned, billed and supported. Services depend on other carriers, and the whole operation answers to industry bodies and regulators. Every one of those needed a system, and the systems needed to work together.
Constraints
- Everything at once. There was no separate team for each part of the business. Customer management, ordering, invoicing and the infrastructure underneath all had to be built and kept running.
- Other people's systems. Ordering and provisioning meant integrating with the wider telco industry, and compliance meant integrating with government and regulatory systems and verification networks.
- A business that kept growing. New verticals brought new products, processes and integrations, and the systems had to grow with them.
What I did
I learnt how the business worked by building a solution for each part of it, and architected the systems it ran on: customer management, ordering, integrations with carriers, regulators and verification networks, invoicing, and internal workflow automation.
The work went all the way down the stack. I configured machines in data centres, connected operations to the network management layer, and ran the email servers and web hosting.
The piece that mattered most was a business process framework, similar to a state machine, that every operation in the business ran through. Each process was a defined set of states and transitions rather than a sequence of manual steps across systems.
Outcome
- A system for every part of the business, from the servers in the data centre to the invoice.
- The time staff needed to complete tasks dropped to a fraction of what it had been.
- Every action taken in the business was logged, giving a complete history of what happened and why.
What I learned
SpinTel is where I learnt to see a business as a whole: how a sale becomes an order, a service, an invoice and a support call, and how the technology underneath has to serve all of it. Most of how I work now started there.