For years, whenever someone asked me what I do, I described my projects and activities, like “I worked on a cloud migration, reduced technical debt, refactored systems to be cloud-native, designed environments for scalability, cost effectiveness and security, …”. But I could never express in a TL;DR what I really did. My official title “Senior Process Manager” wasn’t very helpfull as well.
I could describe the what — the projects, the optimizations, the infrastructure changes — but I could never pinpoint the bigger picture.
Then, this week, I found myself in the same situation again. At an event, after another round of explanations, my conversation partner paused and said:
Ah, so you do architecture and operations.
And thats when it clicked!
I had never thought of myself as an architect. The term felt too formal, too deliberate, too big — something reserved for people who have a big & good plan and proper system design. But in reality, that’s exactly what I had been doing all along.
Sometimes, it just takes someone else’s perspective to see what’s been right in front of you. A single conversation can reframe years of work in an instant. And in this case, it finally gave me the words to describe what I actually do.
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