The Roles
The positions this industry is made of.
A product passes through many hands between the company that builds it and the person who depends on it. Each pair of hands is a job with its own clients, its own suppliers, its own accountability and its own measurement.
8 held35 from published sources
Grades, the fork, and where these roles are found Read The Practice Read the overview: the path a product takes
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Understand a role →
43 roles, grouped by where they sit in the value chain, each with what it is, what it is not, and how it is judged.
Understand the value chain →
The path a product takes, from the company that makes it to the person who teaches it, in 8 stations.
The roles he held →
8 of these roles were held in first person; the rest are documented from sources and from people who worked alongside.
Held in first person
The roles this record is written from, with where and when, before the directory of all of them.
Who makes it
Product management, product marketing, engineering and research: the people who decide what the thing is before anyone can buy it.
Network software engineer
The engineer who writes the operating system a network runs on.
Written from published sourcesProduct manager
The person who decides what the product is.
Written from published sourcesProduct marketing manager
The counterpart to product management, facing the other way.
Written from published sources
Who moves it
Distribution and the channel. The layer between the company that builds a product and the company that sells it to whoever will run it.
Who sells it
Pre-sales, inside and outside sales, account management, business development - and the procurement function on the other side of the table. A transaction has two sides, and both are described here: the technical truth and the commercial promise, carried by people who answer for the same deal from opposite directions.
Systems engineer
The technical half of a vendor sales team.
Held this roleAccount manager
The commercial half of a vendor sales team, and the person a customer's management calls.
Written from published sourcesProcurement specialist
The person on the other side of every sale described in this corpus.
Written from published sourcesCustomer success manager
The person who owns the relationship after the sale closes.
Written from published sourcesSales development representative
The first human contact between a company and a prospective customer.
Written from published sources
Who deploys it
Professional services, integration and consulting. Turning a design into a working thing inside somebody else's network, on their schedule.
Network consulting engineer
The engineer who turns a design into a working thing inside somebody else's network.
Held this roleProject manager
The person accountable for a piece of work arriving: on the agreed scope, inside the agreed time, at the agreed cost.
Written from published sourcesManagement consultant
The adviser who is paid for judgement rather than for hands.
Written from published sources
Who runs it
Managed service providers, in-house operations, the service desk and the network operations centre. The people for whom the product is a Tuesday rather than a project.
Managed service provider engineer
The engineer who runs other companies' infrastructure for a living.
Written from published sourcesService desk analyst
The single point of contact between an organisation and the people who use its technology.
Written from published sourcesSystems analyst
The role that faces two directions at once.
Written from published sourcesSystems administrator
The person who keeps the systems running.
Written from published sourcesChange manager
The person who decides what may be done to production, and when.
Written from published sourcesProblem manager
The person who asks why the same incident keeps happening.
Written from published sourcesNetwork operations specialist
The engineer who runs the network an organisation depends on.
Written from published sources
Who supports it
Field engineering, the technical assistance centre, third-line product support, escalation and named support. The tiers run from the queue a customer reaches to the engineer who hands a reproduced defect to a developer, and the last of those is the boundary between the organisation that runs a product and the organisation that makes it.
Field network engineer
The vendor engineer who goes to where the equipment is.
Held this roleProduct support engineer
Third-line support: the escalation layer between the technical assistance centre and the people who write the firmware.
Held this roleHigh-touch operations manager
A named vendor engineer assigned to one large customer, holding their support relationship end to end.
Held this roleTechnical assistance centre engineer
The engineer a customer reaches when they contact the vendor.
Written from published sourcesKnowledge base manager
The person who turns what the organisation learned into something the next person can use.
Held this role
Who defends it
Security operations, offensive and defensive practice, research, incident response and crisis management. The work that assumes an adversary.
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Security operations analyst
The analyst who watches an environment for the signs of an adversary.
Written from published sourcesIncident responder
The person who takes charge once an event is confirmed as an incident.
Written from published sourcesVulnerability analyst
The analyst who looks for the weaknesses before an adversary does.
Written from published sourcesSecurity leader
The top of the management arm, in security.
Written from published sourcesSecurity manager
The first rung of the management arm, in security.
Written from published sourcesThreat intelligence analyst
The analyst who studies adversaries rather than systems.
Written from published sourcesDigital forensics analyst
The analyst who reconstructs what happened from what remains.
Written from published sourcesPenetration tester
The specialist who tests defences by behaving like an attacker, inside an agreement that says exactly what is permitted.
Written from published sourcesIT auditor
The person who establishes whether the controls an organisation believes it has are actually there and actually working.
Written from published sourcesSecurity architect
The person who decides how a system will be defended before it exists.
Written from published sourcesSecurity engineer
The person who builds and runs the controls.
Written from published sourcesNetwork security engineer
The role where the two disciplines on this site meet.
Written from published sourcesGovernance, risk and compliance analyst
The role that writes down what the organisation has decided to require of itself, and then finds out whether it is true.
Written from published sources
Who teaches it
Instruction, enablement and certification. Capability transfer as a product in its own right.
Technical instructor
The engineer who teaches the product to the people who will run it.
Held this roleInstructional designer
The person who builds the course rather than the person who delivers it.
Written from published sourcesTalent development manager
The person who decides what an organisation needs to be able to do, and builds the programme that gets it there.
Written from published sourcesDeveloper advocate
The engineer employed by a vendor whose work serves the people who use its technology.
Written from published sourcesCommunity manager
The person who tends the space where users of a technology meet each other.
Written from published sources