Industry Expert Interview

 Introduction

For my industry expert interview I spoke with Kevin Strishock, Director of DevOps at Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies. I selected Kevin because of his position as a Director in the company where I want to further develop my career. He has multiple years of experience in this company as well as being a devops leader for many years previous to this company. He has experience from non-automotive industries that he brought to Rivian Volkswagen that have made him successful in the role, which is something I would like to emulate.

Summary

Kevin started his career as a system administrator, developing deep expertise in managing BSD and linux systems. He said that he still leverages this experience today, joking that he’s been pushing the same buttons for 30 years. Reflecting on his career and what led him to be successful in the automotive industry, his depth serving cloud and IoT businesses was an advantage. Understanding the physical aspects of systems gave him an advantage when it came to supporting the needs of developers working on embedded and global connectivity systems. He joined Rivian at a time when they were going through rapid engineering organizational growth. After the Rivian Volkswagen joint venture (JV) was founded, he transferred to the JV to lead devops through another step function in growth to support the needs of Volkswagen Group.

Effective leadership through organizational hypergrowth is one of my key takeaways from my conversation with Kevin. Being able to bring my experience as a startup leader to the JV would give me an edge over people that have not been through that kind of change. The automotive industry is changing rapidly from hardware-centric to software defined vehicles. He said that there are still a lot of people working in the industry that have a legacy/old-school mindset and are challenged by the new ways of developing vehicles. There’s also a conflict between regulatory bodies and the automakers that requires careful navigation. All of these changes in the industry require people with years of experience in different industries that understand the nature of change, and understand how to develop and maintain safe systems through constant change.

Reflection

The shift to software-defined vehicles is the biggest change happening in the industry. There are many new regulations that are now applicable only because of the extreme connectedness of vehicles and how software plays a new and powerful role in vehicle functionality. Cybersecurity is the center focus of most of the regulation. Traceability through the entire software supply chain to ensure that vehicle software functionality is both safe and unalterable by hackers is a growing challenge.

Cross-functional leadership is one of the biggest challenges he described. In devops, as in my desired function of systems architecture, much of the work requires providing soft leadership through multiple silos and disciplines. While he is a director and leads multiple teams, he does not have responsibility for or direct managerial power over many of the teams that need to use the systems his teams develop. Being a practiced communicator and networking with the right people in other divisions is essential to making his work successful. Some of the points that have already been raised in our coursework, especially networking, are relevant.

Future Steps

My conversation with Kevin gave me a much deeper understanding of, and appreciation for, the complexity of the automotive industry. It reminded me of how much I enjoy leading large teams to solve complex problems, both organizational and technical. Having led multi-disciplinary teams through hypergrowth before, it reaffirmed my belief that this is the right industry for me to be a part of and that Rivian Volkswagen Group Technologies would be a good company to find my footing in the industry. Going forward, I plan to develop my knowledge of the industry and the technical aspects of the automotive industry further as an individual contributor before pushing for a move to people leadership. As many people in the industry have advanced degrees, completing my college education and continuing to a graduate degree would set me up for long term success.