| About My Work | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
During this time, I had to keep track of what was tested, and what was known to work and not work. The combinations of technologies were rather complex, as you needed to know what operating system versions were supported, what database versions, what versions of our tools products, and what patches were necessary to get everything up and running if you used different sets of combinations that were tested after the product was initially released.
To monitor all of this, several people and I collaborated on a database application to make it easy to store and retrieve the data when dealing with customers on the phones. In time, I worked with one other person to make this database accessible via the web. This probably sounds quite ordinary by today's standards, but in 1996, very few people had conceived of using the web in this way: the idea of using a database and program code inside that database to generate web pages dynamically was not something you just threw together in FrontPage or Dreamweaver. We had a great time breaking relatively new ground in this area, and in time, the site and its architecture went on to become a crucial part of the foundation for Oracle's electronic support offerings. The other designer and coder of this system and I both moved away from Applications into the "support development" organization to take part in the design of the customer-focused support web site, called MetaLink. (This is still one of my proudest architectural feats; I used the same ideas to build my software kitchen so I had a way of demonstrating the concepts to people who were unable to see the inner workings of MetaLink and its predecessor, although I never managed to get it up and working on this web site, as I could never find an ISP that would run an Oracle database for me!)
After a while, the bureaucracy in this division began to overwhelm me, so I began to look elsewhere. Though I considered leaving the company, I realized I was still happy at Oracle, just not in Support. So I turned back to what I knew best - Applications - and went to work in product development as the product manager for the installation tools.
Most people associate "product manager" with a marketing role, but the truth is, it was more of a development role than a marketing one. Most of the tools were used by other development groups to indicate how their product gets installed. However my past experience in support was still ideal for helping with the customer-facing side of the product as well, and I worked with the developers all the time (who fortunately had gained respect for me while working in support) to improve the product, sometimes subtly, sometimes in big ways. I was also the central contact for the group, answering all questions that poured in over email (so much for giving up tech support!), and wrote the installation documentation, which I'm happy to say was hacked up to be only half as thick as it was in previous releases.