The Director Who Leads the Team and the Client Conversation

Amber Meakin: Welcome to Vouched, where we're flipping the script on the job search because people are more than a resume. If you're new here, the idea is simple. A personal recommendation should count for more than a resume lost in a stack of a thousand. In a market where AI and applicant tracking systems screen good people out before a human ever sees them, this show puts one real person in front of you, vouched for by someone who's actually worked with them. Here's how the format works so you can listen the way that fits you. The first few minutes are the vouch itself, the referral, the honest case for why this person is worth hiring. If you're a hiring manager or recruiter and that's what you came for, you've got it in the first five to seven minutes. After that, we hear from the guest directly about their expertise and exactly what they're looking for. So stick around if you want the fuller picture. I'm Amber Meakin, this is vouched. Let's get into it. Welcome to the show. Today I'm vouching for someone I worked with directly for years, Greg Hughes. Greg is an IT operations and infrastructure leader with more than 20 years in the field. For a long stretch of that, Greg ran the platforms the rest of us were making promises to clients about. He led a global operations team across two data centers and the cloud, Held uptime at ninety nine point nine five percent year after year and built a disaster recovery program that beat every commitment we had on paper. He led the SOC two remediation that kept us audit ready, along with the security work on our clients infrastructure. What I'd tell any hiring manager is simpler than all of that. Greg is customer first. When we had an implementation or an upgrade Or something broke on the client's side, his team is who I called. And he could talk to the client in the room while he fixed it, Which is rare for someone this deep in infrastructure. When something was on fire, Greg is who you wanted there. What I remember most is Greg made the hard stuff look routine, and he was generous with his team and with the rest of us who leaned on him. Greg, welcome to the show.

Greg Hughes: Thank you for having me.

Amber Meakin: Absolutely. So, Greg, we worked together for years, me on the client side, you and your team kept the whole thing running underneath us. After two decades in IT operations, what kind of work lights you up most these days?

Greg Hughes: I'm still at heart a problem solver. So it's sort of anything, when I think about it, one of the reasons I ended up on the escalation management side of things too is I like to solve the problem, And I do like to lead that charge. but I also like to do it in in anything. Anytime you've had implementation, you're engineering something. You're just solving a problem. So that's really what lights me up. It's really just that.

Amber Meakin: Yeah. That's that's one of my favorite things to do too. I think that's part of the reason I even started the podcast was trying to solve a problem. But yeah, I would agree. I know I mentioned this a lot during my intro of you and recommendation of you, but I could really see that when we did hop on calls with clients and we had issues. And sometimes it would even be that the issue was on the client side or another third party. where they had changed something or IP address or something on the firewall and it broke connectivity to our infrastructure. And rather than pointing the finger and saying, it's their fault, that's over there, you genuinely would hop on the call and say, let's let's partner on this together and work through it and get them on the call, get the customer on the call to find out what was going on. And I really appreciated that about your work style because I've also had experiences with teams are like, Well, not my fault. It's not it's working over here. And then they don't really dig in and be a true client partner. I always appreciated that about you and your team and the way you led them to to handle things that way as well.

Greg Hughes: Thank you. I I I appreciate that. And it never mattered to me where the problem was. We're just trying to solve the problem. Regardless if it's internal, external, client, everybody just wants to to right the ship. So I I'm sort of with you. I have, enough experience with people like, hey, that's not my problem, it's not my area. to be honest with you, it's all of our we are a team. Like when you have a client, you you are you're a team member or your teammates with that client too. That that stuff matters to me. You are a team.

Amber Meakin: Yes. Yes. And I think even just having the skill set and the experience, especially as long as you've been in the field, you likely have seen that same issue somewhere before. And so your expertise is going to help solve that problem faster for the customer.

Greg Hughes: Yes, I agree. I've been around enough and seen a lot of different things that sometimes right off the bat I know the area to look. As soon as you say this is going on, I'm like, uh-huh, And then it may be contact my SRE, contact the database engineer, the network engineer, Or usually I already have them on the call, Or maybe it's outside of, my team members just like, hey, this is a batch services issue, this is the blah. Or I may know that this is more than likely a client-side issue, Or possibly one of their vendors, And that does help in getting closer to, you know, root cause and righting the ship and solving it as quickly as you can.

Amber Meakin: Yes, absolutely. All right, you're open to what's next. So let's make it easy for anyone listening. What are you looking for?

Greg Hughes: What I've defined for myself is its leadership position, manager, director, or it's SRE, site reliability engineer. I did grow up as a site reliability engineer. and the other thing is a solutions engineer. As you sort of mentioned, I'm I'm client focused and I'm sort of that breed of a technical and a sort of maybe I don't know how you you would define it, an external person, a public person, I'm a mix of that, So I also find that I slot very well into being a solutions engineer. And I did a fair amount of that work as, you know, within my job as director, when I was doing it.

Amber Meakin: Yeah, I think you do have and we've we've already talked about it a bit on the the client facing experience and being able to navigate the cross functional team inside the organization and the client. And I I think you would be great as as a leader in in a role like that. Speaking of being a leader You've led operations teams through on call incidents and high pressure moments for years. How would you describe your leadership style and what do you think your teams would say it's like to work for you?

Greg Hughes: I would say that I like to empower. When you have a team, it's to me, you know, when I look at when I would look at my people, it's like y you guys are the subject matter experts in what you do. And I am I am relying upon you and I'm looking at you for your expertise in what you do. and what you say or the advice you may be giving me when I'm solving my own problems, it matters to me. I'm really listening to what you're saying. I'm not a micromanager. Everybody has a job to do. I expect them to do their job just like they expect me to do mine. And yeah, I'm looking for you to do that. I think that the people that work for me would say that they knew that I cared about them. I protected them. how they were doing mattered to me, mattered to me quite a bit.

Amber Meakin: Yeah. I could see that in your team. As long as we work together, I think you had the same team the whole time. there was little to no attrition on your team, if I'm if I'm not mistaken.

Greg Hughes: That's correct. Yeah. You're right.

Amber Meakin: Okay, yeah, and I liked working with your team, like I said.

Greg Hughes: They were good people. They are good people.

Amber Meakin: Yes, absolutely. When it comes to being client facing, how did you get comfortable bridging the technical side and the client side?

Greg Hughes: Everybody's trying solve a problem. And sometimes when you're on a phone call or maybe you're on a bridge and everything's on fire, everybody that is there just wants to solve a problem. And and that's what I think of first. And I I s would see sometimes where people would be afraid to say something. Maybe I'm gonna say the wrong thing, so I don't want to communicate. And I'm not that person. I can easily tell you and have no problem telling you, I don't know something, I need clarification, I need communication back and forth. And I understand you're in the same boat I'm in. You've got external pressure on you to solve this problem. And I've I'm here to help you out to do it, So I'm an open book to you. It would just sort of naturally occur, I would get in there, I would communicate, I would encourage others to communicate. we're all just people.

Amber Meakin: Yes, I think that's that is very valid and it comes with a level of transparency that if you are doing the right thing, there's nothing wrong with being transparent.

Greg Hughes: Yeah. Totally agree.

Amber Meakin: You held 99.95% uptime for years across data centers and the cloud. For people who don't live in operations, what does it actually take to keep something that reliable?

Greg Hughes: There's a number of things that I always look at when it comes to that. So there's protection of data, data resiliency. Uptime, speed, all of those things are the things that I'm looking at when you when you're in operations. And there's a lot that goes to that, whether it be disaster recovery, high availability, something, you know, if a problem occurs, that problem easily gets taken out, and there's something in there that takes its place. It's it's almost hard to discuss all of the points that you have to do to make that. including in that are the the touch points, Even from an internal perspective that you have to monitor, keep track of, audit, get notified on, make sure stakeholders are involved. There's a lot to it. It's that's almost a 15-minute answer for me to give. And even as I'm thinking through it myself, I just I I'm probably missing five other things I could say about it. There really is just a lot to it. it's like keeping a building up and running, Always.

Amber Meakin: Yeah. So when we work together, I recall my crash course and New Relic. what tools do you use to keep the measurements on that uptime and alerting that worked well for for your team?

Greg Hughes: That yeah, that falls under observability, So New Relic is is an example of an application performance monitor. There's there's logging, things there's a lot of things that go around, and touch those things. APMs are a big deal to me. Observability is huge, When I first started, we didn't have great observability. So when an issue would occur, it sometimes finding root cause is a big problem because you spent times, running through logs, developers looking through logs trying to find that. So an application, an APM is is fantastic, Not not only does it give you insight into when a problem may occur, it gives you insight to when a problem could occur in the future. Your ability to look at your own application, your own program or infrastructure is is massive to identify things. And those were things. So we would use an APM, we would use logging, aggregate logging is huge. And then on the outside, we would use an application to basically tie everything together to alert the correct people and send the notifications out. And that was massive, That really changed our ability to do business and to provide the type of constant uptime that a client would expect.

Amber Meakin: Okay. Yeah, I I recall we we had monthly reports we had to send out to clients on on their uptime and availability, and there was a lot of detail in that. how do you see AI is evolving. your area of expertise.

Greg Hughes: That's a difficult question because it's evolving and it's evolving quickly. I use AI a lot myself and have tried out different versions along the way. I'm quite impressed with it and I like it quite a bit. But I think currently it is best suited in the hands of the knowledgeable, experienced person, And to use it as his assistant or to help him to his own problem solving. It's not something that's going to solve a problem for you when when you're not already adept at the subject to whatever degree. Does that make sense?

Amber Meakin: Yes. Yes, it absolutely makes sense. And we've I've had this conversation with several people that if you have the expertise, it really helps you increase productivity because you know what you're looking at and what you what the answers are and when it's right and when it's wrong. But for people that don't have that expertise, I I think there was even recently a an article, maybe a research study on how in some areas AI is causing problems within organizations because let's say me as a customer success person, I want to challenge you on what you've told me. I go and I'm question it in AI, and AI gives me a completely different answer than what you've said, even though you're the expert in it, We are having a conversation, a difficult conversation, and you're like, Amber, that's not accurate. And here's why. And then we're wasting time with something AI said when really you're the expert and you do know what you're talking about, and AI may have gotten it wrong. I recently saw, I think there's an article about that it's causing some friction from that perspective, and that's where it really is. You need to leverage it. To be able to do your job better and faster. I need to leverage it to do my job faster, but we still as humans and experts in our fields need to rely and trust on one another versus relying on AI to tell me something I really should be trusting you to tell me.

Greg Hughes: Yeah, a couple of things on that. One is everybody's gonna prompt difference, When you ask the question, you're going to ask the question differently than I will, And so AI will interpret that differently. And it still hallucinates, a decent amount. And you if you have experience behind you, you can challenge that, we've all seen the thing, the joke when somebody says, Hey, AI, is this is this mushroom poisonous? No, that's not poisonous. Guy eats the mushroom, dies. No, you were right. You know, we you know, but things like that do occur, So when you have the experience behind you, you know where to challenge it, And then along the way, the more you use it, you figure out how to prompt yourself better to get the, the better answer. I think when most people AI, we talk about generative AI, We're talking about asking questions back and forth. I I think the biggest power of it is the agentic AI, When you're saying, hey, I go do this thing for me. be my be my autonomous person that will go and do this work for me. But that's also where the trouble could be too, Because if it's autonomous, yeah, it's sort of making decisions for you along the way. And I think that's where companies have really run into problems. I think it will figure out. I think it's very powerful, I think we'll get there with it. I don't think we're there yet to say, hey AI, you're my problem.

Amber Meakin: Yeah. It it's definitely I I agree the agentic direction is is optimal. I still haven't gotten comfortable enough with it yet to completely hand off it viewing my emails and telling me, what I need to focus on email wise, but I have gotten comfortable setting up some skills and letting it run those skills for, preparing for these conversations for some of the website updates and understanding my brand personally and how I talk. I have been able to leverage it more efficiently now that it's learning how I work And whereas I could run out of credits within a couple of hours during a day even three or four months ago, I haven't run out of credits in probably the last month just because it's understanding. And I'm actually putting more than I was then. but it's just seems like it's understanding me better and I'm prompting it better. and so I think that really is helping move it in the right direction for for using it.

Greg Hughes: Yeah, I agree with you.

Amber Meakin: we had disaster recovery requirements for each client. But where there Different types of requirements for each one, or was there a canned set of requirements for our customers?

Greg Hughes: So that really is contractual and that boils down to RTO RPO, So there's real-time objective and then there's recovery point objective. So with real-time objective, it's like how quickly can you get this back up and running? And there used to be sort of standards on this, but I wouldn't say there is any more, So we would we would offer in some instances, we would offer what we would call a fifteen one. We'll get your disaster, you know, we'll get the other site up and running in fifteen minutes, and you could lose up to one hour of data, Because if I'm restoring a backup, on an hourly basis, I may restore that backup and you you maybe have some lost calls in there, So your recovery point objective is one hour, and we're giving you a fifteen minute RTO. again, we were very good, particularly at the RTO point. So we we were sub A lot of times sub sub-second RTO. You wouldn't even know that it occurred. And you wouldn't know on on the RPO RPO side either, because we were always synchronizing the back end database in real time, So the secondary DR database was always up to date with primary. So when we flipped you over, we didn't lose your data. But there could be a lot of different things that can change that. If you have multiple data centers, if you have a lot of data flow. You know, that that's why it's contractual, That's when we say, hey, we agree to fifteen one hour, but what we'd really like to give you is instantaneous. And oftentimes we did, But a lot of that is contractual.

Amber Meakin: Okay. Makes sense. I I recall reading several contracts and they all they all they all were several pages.

Greg Hughes: Yeah, Sometimes you get the contract and you look at the RTO and RPO and you're like, how are we gonna achieve this? And then you go about achieving it, But that's just the way the way the world works.

Amber Meakin: yes. I we've both I I think been through in several organizations really that you've got the contractual commitments that come out from the the sales and the leadership team and then we get to figure out how to make it happen. And we did.

Greg Hughes: Yes, we both do and I have a lot of experience in that along the way.

Amber Meakin: All right. You led the SOC2 remediation and the security work on client infrastructure. what do people outside IT misunderstand about keeping a company audit ready?

Greg Hughes: I think a lot of people probably if you if you don't work within the area or it doesn't touch you in some way, a lot of people think this is an IT thing, this is a technical thing, And it's and it's really not, So with with SOC2 compliance, there's there's criteria that you're given, It's security, availability, confidentiality, processing integrity, and privacy. And you're writing your own rules on that. It's not that they're giving you a book and saying, this is what you need to do to achieve these different things, You're taking that and you're and you're saying, this is what we as a company need to do to achieve these things. And it touches a lot of areas. HR gets touched a lot in that onboarding, offboarding, all of those type of things. There's a lot of touch points to it and a lot of different departments within a company that are involved. You it's like you're writing your questions, you're writing the answers to your questions, and then an auditor is coming in typically every twelve months, sometimes less, and they're challenging you, And what you are saying you're going to do to achieve these six different areas, Security, availability, whatnot, You're saying how you're gonna handle it, and they're coming in, they're like, Okay, you said you're gonna do this, we're gonna try and break.

Amber Meakin: We're gonna test it.

Greg Hughes: I wanted to make one other point on that just to jump in, is that it never stops, You're you're never achieving, there's never a you're at a hundred percent. That never occurs, It's in every year you're getting better and better and better. That's been my experience. Even if somebody doesn't say, you're just trying to get better, that's how I've seen it work, You are definitely passing the audit, but there's never a hundred percent great because it's always something that you can do better. And there's typically always something that's going to change within the next year, So it's just a continual process on top two.

Amber Meakin: Yes. in general, certifications always get more stringent as people try to find or hackers probably try to find some way to break things. And that's another area where it's evolving by the minute, it seems like with AI. so it's it's a very valid point to call out that it's it's nonstop. Twenty-four seven, gotta be ready. So and improving Makes sense. Good call out. is there a quote that you live by or something that you think about daily as your motivational reminder?

Greg Hughes: there's always an idea of responsibility for self, responsibility to others, and the integrity of your commitments. And I think about those things a lot. I think that's the best way to answer that, and what I think about. You owe self, you owe others, and your word is your word. And that's that's huge to me. And those are that's probably the thing that impinges upon me, self-impinged, more than anything else.

Amber Meakin: Mm. That's those are good words to live by, and I I agree. what do you like to do for fun?

Greg Hughes: I'm an avid scuba diver. It's been a couple of years, but I've for the longest time of yearly trips, sometimes twice a year. and something I was interested in the teen years, So I knew when I was a teenager I was gonna be a scuba diver. And it's gotta be those videos, Of people going underwater. I would watch old replays of the Jacques Cousteau videos and I knew that I was gonna do this thing. So I love scuba diving. I also like golfing quite a bit, because What I do like in life is a challenge, I'm not very good at mundane things or constant repetition. And golf is really sort of the only thing I can think of that is a constant challenge and 80% mental, It truly is an 80% to me, 80% mental challenge. So it constantly is challenging. And as soon as I think I've figured it out, it it thoroughly disabuses me of that idea the next time I do it. so I love golf for that. I'm a bit of a guitar dabbler. I pick up the guitar here and there, I like to play around. Certainly not gonna do a concert for you, but I enjoy the

Amber Meakin: Nice. Where's your favorite place that you've done scuba diving?

Greg Hughes: That for the longest time and it still will always be one of my favorites is Cozumel. it's probably because there's not many places in the world that have the type of coral structure that that Cozumel has and and with coral structure means a lot of fish life. And I've been in dives there where there have been spires of coral that are probably 60 feet, And 20 feet around, And you're swimming through them on it's just a it's a beautiful experience. And it's close, It's it's sort of it's it's close and easy to get to. Bahamas I diving in the Bahamas in the Exumas that is sort of post-card water And absolutely beautiful. And you get to see a lot of sharks there. You get to see a ton of sharks, which is something I enjoy doing. Because I'm afraid of sharks. Every almost every scuba diver wants to see a shark, And it's actually rare to come across them, so you're usually pretty excited what you see.

Amber Meakin: Nice. This summer I went to Florida with some some friends and we did snuba and it's not for me. I freaked out because of the weights that they put on the belt and everything. They were so heavy. And then even the for listeners who don't know what snuba is, you you basically you have a A scuba diving mask on, but you have your oxygen is connected to a floating device, and you can only go so far down, but they still put on the weights like you're doing a full scuba dive. And it was kind of murky because their hurricane had just come through. So part of it was it's cloudy, and I think that's part of the reason I freaked out a little bit, is I couldn't see. Plus, I was getting, I feel like was getting tangled with other people. And then the weights I felt like I wasn't gonna be able to come back up 'cause I felt like they were too heavy. But I'm envious. It's something I really want to be able to do some someday. But we'll we'll see if I get there. That's really cool that you've been able to go to so many places.

Greg Hughes: Yeah. You'd probably feel a more free experience scuba diving than snuba because you know, you lack the control when some when you're you're tethered in, like you said, you're tethered in, That type of thing. I I don't think I would like that either. But yeah, it's it's it's it's a worthwhile thing. If you ever get a chance to do it, I would encourage you to do it. It's probably more freeing and easier than you think, But you have to experience it.

Amber Meakin: Yeah. Yeah. Well I'm all about being out of my comfort zone and giving things a try. Okay, Greg. So on to our favorite part of the show, which is paying it forward. do you have someone that you would recommend and work with again that is willing to be on the show and that you would vouch for them?

Greg Hughes: Yes, Kyle Berger. I worked with him for some years, different departments, He was client side, but I was always very impressed with him. he was always very professional, very present, And I could his care factor for the company's clients were was to me was significant. I could see it. He was always on top of things and he was always there, and and I would I would readily work with him again. was always very impressive.

Amber Meakin: Kyle and I were on the same team, but we didn't work on the same client. So I don't have the experience of how he, is as a as a as a cross functional team player, but he's always been a great partner whenever I did have conversations with him specifically related to customer success items. So awesome.

Greg Hughes: Yeah, always good communication with him. Very he was again, he was always very present, always there on top of things.

Amber Meakin: Okay, awesome. Well, thank you very much for taking some time to be on the show and for a referral. Kyle has agreed to be on the show, so he is gonna be a guest in the future, which is awesome. But yes, thank you again. And we will get this posted and online and wish you the best in your job search.

Greg Hughes: Thank you, and thank you for doing this.

Amber Meakin: Absolutely. My pleasure, as they say.

Greg Hughes: And Amber, I would vouch for you too, you know, if you haven't been vouched for yeah, but it was always a pleasure working with you. You're one you know I count you as one of those people that was amazingly reliable and on top of things and you're always a pleasure to work with you.

Amber Meakin: Awesome. Thank you, Greg. Of course, as I said, I've I really enjoyed working with you. So I do appreciate the the vouch. Before we go, the line I want to stick with you is something Greg said about problems on a client call. It never mattered to him where the problem was. They're just trying to solve it. That's the leader you want running the response when something is on fire. If Greg sounds like someone your team needs, everything you need to reach him is in the show notes. Reach out, that's the whole reason the show exists. Greg paid it forward to date with Kyle Berger, who has agreed to join me on a future episode. Every guest so far has been a former colleague or a client of mine. I want to hear from people who I haven't worked with too. If you'd like to be a guest or there's someone you'd put your own name behind, apply at vouchedpodcast dot com. The link is in the show notes. New episodes coming out soon. Thank you again for listening. And thank you, Greg, for trusting me with this. I'm Amber Meakin. I'll see you on the next one.