Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional
John White | Nick Korte
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Steady Build: Broadening Exposure and the Priceless Perspective of People Management with Daniel Paluszek (2/3)
Could a greater understanding of what people managers do make you a better individual contributor? And would it also cause you to treat your manager differently? For Daniel Paluszek, our guest this week in episode 338, it definitely did. And though this was a short stint in Daniel’s career, he refers to that experience as priceless. This week in part 2 of the story you’ll hear about Daniel’s experience working in professional services both in pre-sales and post-sales and how he built expertise to help increasingly larger customers over time. Daniel will reflect on the lessons learned from his time as a people leader, and pay special attention to the moment when Daniel turns the microphone on John during our discussion! We also explore the reasons why Daniel eventually chose to move back to the individual contributor side of the house. How do you think your mindset would be different when making a move like this? Listen to the full story from Daniel’s perspective. Original Recording Date: 06-11-2025 Daniel Paluszek is a Principal Partner Technology Strategist at ServiceNow. If you missed part 1 of our discussion with Daniel, check out Episode 337 – Finding Drive: The Parallels of Mentoring and Technology Partnerships with Daniel Paluszek (1/3) Topics – The Nuances of Professional Services, Getting to Know Service Providers, Becoming a Practice Manager, Difficult Conversations, Returning to Individual Contributor 2:46 – The Nuances of Professional Services It seems like Daniel would have been able to bring some of the government work he had done into conversations to help build credibility and relationships. Doing federal defense contracting is certainly different but provides a level of expertise that cascades to any government organization. When Daniel joined the partner, most of the conversations were about getting into virtualization, and the projects focused on consolidating infrastructure. Daniel had direct exposure and expertise in designing and orchestrating these kinds of projects from start to finish (design, build, migration, providing a day 2 runbook). Daniel had the technical expertise he needed but did not at first have the sales and consultative skills he needed. Daniel had help from mentors (his sales rep, his leadership chain, other colleagues on the professional services team) to improve in this area. Daniel would later join Cisco Systems doing professional services. This was around the time they launched the UCS computing platform. He had worked in in professional services for DynTek for a couple of years previous to making the move. Working in professional services granted opportunities to work with many customers across multiple industries. Daniel calls gaining this experience getting “at bats.” Working within a large professional services organization can also be challenging. Usually, the person who creates the scope of work for a services engagement is not the same person who will execute the statement of work. Something could have been scoped incorrectly or improper expectations set, for example. Daniel tells us part of the role was about overcoming these types of challenges and mitigating risks. “You had to work through these situations and challenges on an ongoing basis…. Not only make your customer happy (do what’s right) but also make your organization healthy from a profit and loss perspective because…companies and PS organizations, their largest cost factor is people….” – Daniel Paluszek, on life working in professional services Daniel tells us that a professional services organization has to balance executing well for customers with remaining profitable. Before Daniel joined Cisco, was he 100% pre-sales or doing a mix of pre-sales and post-sales? Daniel says it was a mix of both and refers to it as a hybrid role. He was brought in at DynTek as a professional services engineer but began getting exposed to the pre-sales side of things. In fact, Daniel wanted to learn more about pre-sales. Over time, Daniel began scoping professional services engagements and presenting to customers followed by later delivering the work (i.e., "wearing both hats). Nick stresses the importance of determining whether roles are post-sales, pre-sales, or both to ensure you fully understand. Ask these questions in interviews so everything is clear! Maybe doing both can help one decide which area is more interesting. “I also think that doing both and then doing professional services delivery for many years also shaped me into the individual I am today because I had to live and go through delivery of projects…. When I scoped it…I knew that this is something to watch out for from a field-level direct exposure perspective. So, I knew the nuances to my area of expertise, my domain, and I was able to scope it in a way that ensured success and mitigated that risk just because I had that direct experience.” – Daniel Paluszek Processes like the one described above will not scale for large organizations. Sometimes a large organization will give people the chance to move from delivery to pre-sales to round out their experience. Daniel was fortunate to have the chance to do both and gain exposure to different areas. John mentioned there is usually another level of separation and complexity in these scenarios. He highlights 3 distinct roles – someone selling a solution that includes professional services, someone who scopes the professional services, and someone who executes the professional services. John has seen this divided even further and mentions sometimes there is a special professional services workshop that helps provide the inputs to the person writing the statement of work. “Again, if we’re talking about roles and educating people about roles, the number of different types of roles that are out there just continues to amaze me. Going to school, I have no idea how you would know any of these roles existed.” – John White Daniel says for multi-pillar transformations within large enterprises, it can require subject matter experts (SMEs), architects, and engagement managers to make a professional services project successful. When Daniel began working in consulting / professional services, he started working with smaller companies. It was the move to working for Cisco that helped him gain experience working with large enterprises and service providers. Daniel speaks to the complexities of delivering engagements for these organizations. He might have to design an engagement that required dozens or hundreds of people over a multi-year period. Starting off small helped Daniel focus on understanding the fundamentals, and he was able to build upon that through varying experiences with larger customers across different industries over time. 11:20 – Getting to Know Service Providers What is a service provider? Let’s define that term. We’re talking about a company that provides a service like a cable provider, for example. They might be considered a traditional service provider. Cable providers offer telecommunications services to end users / consumers. But a cable provider can deliver services to a business too. If we’re talking about the business-to-business market, a service provider (could also be called a managed service provider) is providing a discrete service injected into a customer’s business. That service is a function of a customer’s overall organization. Daniel gives some examples Business Process Outsourcing (or BPO). This could include processing accounts payable or accounts receivable transactions. An MSP (Managed Service Provider) providing service desk operations for an end customer A service provider can help a customer scale their business. Daniel gives the example of a retail customer. Retail companies exist to sell products and goods. This is their core business – driving incremental sales of products. Anything else required to operate that business, according to Daniel, is context. In the retail example, management of back-end IT systems, management of the service desk, or management of finances and supply chain would be considered context. In some cases, companies like this will partner with a service provider (or GSI / Global Systems Integrator) to assist in these areas. “It ultimately comes down to…what is your core business, and what’s your context? And…is this something we want to staff and skill in-house, or do we want to partner with somebody that’s going to provide this as a service to us?” – Daniel Paluszek Nick mentions there is usually someone in-house tasked with working closely with service providers to ensure business operations run smoothly. Daniel says there is always an interface on the customer side, and in very large companies, it’s usually a small team which will manage the line of business in question and work closely with the partner / service provider executing much of this function. The team on the customer side would work closely with business leaders to ensure everything aligns with the business strategy. Nick liked Daniel’s description of his progression of experience from small customers up to large companies like service providers. There is an increased need for availability and resiliency as we get into talking about service providers who may have systems accessed by end customers and not just internal employees of the service provider. During Daniel’s tenure at Cisco, service providers spanned telecommunications, media, and technology partners. Daniel worked with many telecommunications providers and says it was incredible to learn about all the systems required to deliver a cell phone, for example, and the network functions that were part of it. When Daniel was working with telecommunications providers, Network Function Virtualization or NFV was the next emerging technology which extended the benefits of virtualization to help service provid
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