Part 4: Human and Organizational Dimension on Designing Network Automation at Scale

13 - Cultural Shift

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

13. The Cultural Shift#

The meeting invite arrived on a Thursday, titled “Network Team Structure Update”. Jordi had been a network engineer for fifteen years. He had his CCIE. He had survived three acquisitions, two NOC consolidations, and one BGP routing incident so severe it became an internal case study. He assumed this was a staffing update.

It was not.

His manager explained that the network team was being reorganized under Platform Engineering. The team’s name would change to Network Automation Platform. The work would evolve: less manual provisioning, more building and operating the automation systems that handled provisioning. The new job description was already written. It was titled “Network Platform Engineer”.

14 - Automation as a Product

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

14. Automation as a Product#

Six months before the conversation that changed how the team thought about their work, the network platform team had delivered something genuinely impressive. Two years of consistent effort had produced a provisioning platform that handled branch onboarding end to end: a self-service interface for site requests, a closed-loop validation workflow that caught misconfigurations before deployment, and an operational dashboard that tracked service health across three hundred locations. The team had gone from twenty-four-hour change windows to forty-minute automated deployments. They were proud of it, and they should have been.