WeAreDelphix: Meet Aoife O'Brien

Meet Aoife O'Brien, head of customer success in EMEA. Learn more about her exciting role, why she loves working at Delphix, and what her secret talent is in our latest employee spotlight series.

What do you do at Delphix and what inspired you to join the company?

I’m responsible for customer success in EMEA. I was inspired to join Delphix because I strongly believe in the product. I wanted to be part of a company that was in its early stages of evolution, where I could bring my previous experience but also be challenged to be innovative in my role and learn new ways of doing things at a tech company - and Delphix has provided all of that.

You can ask me anything about…?

Our customer success program, the ways in which we’re working with customers to build a long-term relationship, and the impact and value we’re bringing to them through the Delphix platform.

What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on at Delphix?

We had the opportunity to work with one of the largest global beverage manufacturing companies. It was a joint project with two partners for an end-to-end refresh of the organization's SAP non-prod environments. It was challenging as there were multiple internal partners, and we were shaking up the way people were working. Throughout the project, we visited Amsterdam and had the opportunity to sample some of its best brands. At the time I was pregnant so I had to stick with the non-alcoholic drinks, but they were surprisingly good!

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Over my career, I’ve received lots of good pieces of advice, but most recently I started reading Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” and there’s a section that talks about segmenting tasks into levels of importance and urgency. For anyone who’s interested, it has to do with the Eisenhower Matrix. This concept constantly makes me re-evaluate tasks throughout the day and helps me prioritise what’s important versus what I might prefer or be asked to deliver and support.

What’s your secret talent?

One armed cartwheels. I used to be able to do the splits, but the last time I tried I nearly broke my leg! I did gymnastics and ballet from ages 6-16 while growing up. Funny enough, there isn’t much call for these skills in the working environment.

What song instantly puts you in a good mood?

At the moment, it’s anything by the Wiggles. For those of you who don’t know, it’s an Australian children’s entertainment group. As a mother of two young children, it’s the one type of music we can all listen to and it makes me immediately want to get up and dance.

What drives you everyday?

Customer success. I genuinely believe it’s the best job in the business, and we have our own take on this approach. At Delphix, when you manage a program with a customer, you have to build out a series of activities to support and achieve the customers’ long term goals. For some customers, it may be that they have blockers to onboarding applications onto Delphix; for others, they may not have a centralised support model to support Delphix, or maybe they need a broad training program for all users of the Delphix platform.

Whatever challenge it may be, our team resolves those issues and builds out a customized solution and program for each and every customer. Specifically in EMEA, we’ve been running Design Thinking workshops, where the group brainstorms an issue with the customer using different techniques and collectively comes up with the solution to be implemented. I’m so grateful to be building out this practise in EMEA with the support of the global team, who is a  constant source of inspiration. Our customers are so appreciative of what we continuously deliver, and they’re very excited to be working with us. For me, work is not work if you don’t enjoy what you are doing, and right now, I would not want to be anywhere else.