Six pieces of work. Each one covers the decision I made, the trade-off it cost, and what I would do differently.
The catalog started as hundreds of fixed server designs, each one effectively its own predefined build.
I work on the product model behind a configurable private cloud platform: customers choose across processor, memory, storage, accelerators and networking, and those choices still resolve into governed, buildable designs. My part covers the catalog model, the configuration rules and the work across teams that makes a design orderable.
Read the caseProcessors were being chosen on the quoted price difference, months before anyone worked out what the core count would do to software licensing.
Compared 27 processor designs across 15 licensing scenarios and found that a $369K hardware difference could drive $1.2M in software cost over five years. The lesson was simple: the cheaper server is not always the cheaper system.
Read the caseEvery launch was being negotiated from scratch across product, engineering, supply chain, the factory, quoting and finance.
I led new product introduction across nine ProLiant server platforms against one shared commercial structure, so product, engineering, supply chain, the factory, quoting and finance were ready for the same server at the same time.
Read the caseStorage was being designed from first principles per deal, and AI was about to open a second, ungoverned path beside it.
A single constrained component can hold up every configuration that contains it, including designs already validated, quoted and sold.
The orderable catalog had grown past ten thousand raw records, which is a search problem handed to the sales team rather than a set of choices.