My First 100 Days at MongoDB

Gotta Go Fast

The first few months in a new role usually get measured in meetings, introductions, and the slow work of finding your rhythm. In this role, it’s best measured in boarding passes: eleven trips, a stack of keynotes, and more customer conversations than I can count, all before day 100.

When people hear my title (Principal Technologist, focused on strategic customers, enterprise strategy, and AI acceleration), they usually ask some version of the same question: what does that job actually look like? It's a fair question. Nobody reports to me, and there's no quota with my name on it. So what does success look like?

A hundred days in, I have an answer. It comes down to two things, and they're the same two things that made my last job work.

Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Quick recap first, because the itinerary tells part of the story.

Since June 1: New York, Connecticut, Toronto, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco three times, and Washington, DC three times. That includes AWS Summit before my first month was over and a panel with Anthropic and Salesforce on enterprise agent ownership. Add a couple dozen skill badges from new-hire technical training and a ranked mental map of airport Chick-fil-A locations.

The tour isn't over. Next up: New York twice, Maine, DC three more times, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Half Moon Bay.

Oh, the People You'll Meet!

Lesson one: whatever flavor of senior IC role you're in, your first job is demand generation.

I'm not in sales and never have been. But this role and my analyst role before it run on the same law: nobody hands you leverage. You earn it by getting invited into the rooms where value gets created. Keynotes, podcasts, customer conversations, boardrooms, and the internal product and marketing strategy sessions where the roadmap takes shape.

Those invitations are your scoreboard. When a product lead pulls you into a planning session or a customer asks for you by name, your point of view is landing. If the invitations dry up or fail to launch, that's a signal too.

If you aren't leading a team, your job is to make everyone else's work go further. A keynote that opens a door for an account team. A customer conversation that sharpens a product bet. A podcast invitation that puts your point of view in front of people we'd never reach one meeting at a time.

Same Day, Different Altitude

Lesson two: you have to be comfortable switching altitudes, sometimes in the same afternoon.

Here's the moment that captures it. I delivered the keynote at a developer day: a room full of builders who wanted to talk about data models and agent architecture, not strategy slides. That talk turned into an unplanned on-site meeting with engineering executives at one of our biggest customers in the region. Same day, same building, completely different conversation. The developers wanted to know how to build it. The executives wanted to know if they can bet their modernization strategy on our platform and how they'd prove it was worth it if they did.

Neither lands with authenticity if you can only fly at one altitude. Go too deep with the executives and you lose the room. Stay too high with the developers and you lose their respect. And notice the order: that meeting only happened because the keynote earned it.

Most weeks the range runs from schema design (data that's accessed together should be stored together) to a C-suite keynote on where enterprise AI is heading across a dozen industries. On paper that sounds exhausting. In practice it's the most fun you can possibly have on the job because you learn something new every single day.

What the Rooms Are Telling Me

Finance, government, insurance, healthcare, entertainment, e-commerce: the industries change, but the question doesn't. How do we get these agents from prototypes into production, and how do we prove the ROI?

Nobody asks what agents can do anymore. They ask how to deploy them safely, run them reliably, and measure what they're worth. The teams getting there have figured out that a thin wrapper on a frontier model doesn't hold up past the demo. What sets them apart is the data layer underneath: their own operational data, the stuff no frontier model has ever seen, plus the memory to carry what an agent learns forward instead of re-deriving it every session.

First things first

So, if the mission is getting a full calendar then mission accomplished. I have speaking and customer engagements every week through mid-December. But that’s only half the story. 

Now for the hard part. Once the calendar is full, you get a much better sense of where and how you deliver the most impact, and that sometimes means being more discerning with your time. Saying no, for the right reasons, becomes part of the job.

Stephen Covey put it well: the key isn't to prioritize what's on your schedule, it's to schedule your priorities. I agree. But you can't be choosy with an empty calendar. First things first: get that calendar full.

That's the plan for the next 100 days. Keep showing up, keep switching altitudes, and get sharper about which rooms I can make the biggest impact in.