I ended June by asking a simple storage question: who else should be in the room?
We had spent months deep in replication, capacity, device retirement, active-active ideas, and the traffic moving between facilities. The work was technical, but the decisions were no longer only about operating the current storage system. They affected product workflows, engineering priorities, cost, and what the company could build next.
I started a list of product owners and engineers who could join the strategy discussions at a tactical level. I also asked the existing leaders whether they wanted to participate and who else they believed we should bring in early.
The phrase “at a tactical level” mattered. A large meeting of interested people can generate opinions without producing a decision. The goal was not to create an audience. It was to involve people close enough to real requirements that they could test the strategy and help move it forward.
I also wanted to be conscious of their time. Storage could consume every conversation if we let it. The system touched images, video, search, review, backups, databases, and the data platform. Almost everybody had a plausible reason to care. Not everybody needed to attend every working session.
The job was to find the right boundary: broad enough to avoid designing infrastructure in isolation, small enough to make progress.
Earlier in my career, it was possible for an operations group to receive requirements and return hardware. At Shutterstock’s scale, that handoff model was breaking down. Storage architecture shaped the product, and product behavior shaped the storage architecture. The people on both sides needed a shared picture before decisions hardened.
This email does not record the final stakeholder group or the strategy that emerged. It records the moment I started widening the conversation deliberately.
That is a useful leadership move in its own right. Ownership does not mean holding every decision close. Sometimes ownership means recognizing that the system has become important enough to need more perspectives and inviting them before the plan is finished.