[numair]

I would say that building and running a cloud — multi-tenant outsourced digital infrastructure — seems to be the very definition of “highly operational.” Especially when you’re working at Microsoft, which continues its unregulated tradition of cloning and/or embracing-and-extending its competitors.

[aboodman]

I don't think there's any way to build something like CosmosDB - or even heck, s3 - at scale, without an extremely high degree of creativity on the team.

[015a]

A useful proxy for organizational creativity oftentimes comes down to "how well-defined are the edges".

Every human who interacts with (externally) and works on (internally) S3 has an intrinsic understanding of what S3 is. It has well-defined edges.

Higher definition of edges within a product domain naturally correlates with a decrease in necessary creativity and an increase in operational expertise. Its more important that someone who works With and On S3 understand what S3 is, rather than what it could be. That's just the nature of the beast.

That isn't to say that it requires zero creativity; that isn't remotely what I'm saying. There is creativity involved in operational expertise, and beyond even that, S3 gets awesome new features all the time which requires creativity in thinking about how to solve customers' problems in a generic, customer-agnostic way, how to implement those solutions at scale, etc.

Though, even developing out these features are more operational, because you have the defined edges to anchor yourself against. You have customers who are reporting their problems to you. You have a profitable operational model which guides investment in the product.