Editor’s Note: Welcome to our blog series, We Are Celigo! In each feature, get to know the amazing people who work for the leading enterprise-wide integration platform as service (iPaaS) for the mid-market. Find out what inspired these Celigans to join the company, what it’s like to work here, and much more. This first-person article is based off an edited interview with Sarah Kyo.
Celigo’s Purpose
One of the things that really attracted me to Celigo was the product and the market that we were in: Celigo solves efficiency issues that allows businesses to scale.
If I had to explain to someone who was unfamiliar with Celigo, I would tell them to think about any business that they’ve ever been a part of – anything they’ve ever done.
Think about all the bottlenecks, all the issues that you had, and think about how nice it would be if all that was connected, and everyone was able to pass information along. That’s the problem we’re trying to solve here, that’s what we’re trying to offer to our customers with the iPaaS platform.
Getting Started With Celigo
Celigo sent out some literature and materials to the mayor of Indianapolis, who went ahead and posted them in some of the Indianapolis business journals, so I heard about Celigo in kind of this really interesting way that they were launching this ecosystem here in Indianapolis.
I wanted to be a part of that. I wanted to be a part of the cutting-edge of technology. I wanted to be a part of the next wave of what’s to come.
When I applied to Celigo and I got to meet with my old supervisor, Emilee Johnson, she really drilled into me how much Celigo was pushing the envelope forward, how much our integration product is state of the art and really changing the game here — and that made me super excited.
My Typical Work Week
My number one responsibility is managing the new hire boot camp. We have pretty much all the new hires who come into Celigo spend about two weeks with me or someone on my team. I’m going through a whole bunch of different materials, covering things from the basics about Celigo to a deeper understanding of business processes, how that affects our customers, and how we position ourselves using that type of language, diving into the product, getting hands on, and building things out.
In addition to that, I have a leadership role in the rotational trainee program. The rotational trainee program is a newer initiative of Celigo, where we’re taking six to larger groups of students fresh out of college, and rotating them through a whole bunch of departments here at Celigo with the goal of making them experts in our product under the different contexts of different teams. I spend a lot of time working with them day-to-day, ensuring that everyone’s got all the materials and things that they need.
My last responsibility outside of the random things that come into the department is the live training series. I hope to host a couple of those trainings, and those are things that we offer our customers and partners as ways of helping to enable them to move further as they build out their own integrations and things of that sort.
In my role, I get the opportunity to interact with a lot of different leaders, types of applications, and resources here at Celigo. Oftentimes, even though I may not be the direct answer to a question, I really do know who has the answer to the question. So if anyone at Celigo ever is looking for a resource, I would definitely be a good place to start – shoot me a quick Slack message. Just because of the nature of my role, I’ve gotten a chance to really explore a lot of different stuff, and I’ve got a lot of insight that I think is interesting and useful for a lot of people.
My Favorite Celigo Value
I think all of our Celigo values are truly special, and they really do speak to the culture here at Celigo, but thinking just off the top of my head, I’d pick, “We win when our customers win,” and it’s really interesting in that my customer is not necessarily our Celigo customer, right?
I kind of serve the internal customer, but it’s a really important role that I play here: I’m giving that foundational knowledge for all of our employees to take off here.
When I see someone in the boot camp, and then I hear in the next all-hands meeting that they were instrumental in closing a deal, or I hear that they helped a customer, or they answered a support ticket faster than the other support reps, it gives me a sense of pride in knowing that my customer is taking the information I gave them, applying it to the context that they’re in, and accelerating.
Tips for Celigo New Hires
My biggest piece of advice is to spend time in Celigo University. We’ve got so much useful content in there about how to build things, about the products that we use, about business processes, about our customers – there’s so much useful stuff in there.
I also, of course, recommend everyone attend the boot camp, and do everything that you can to complete all the requirements of the boot camp. But, my first encouragement is to work through that technical Celigo University stuff because it is quite a lot.
And then my second recommendation would be to internalize those business processes – that’s the future of the company. We’re moving toward spending more time focusing on that, and the more knowledge you have there, the better you’ll be set up for the future.
Thanks for sharing your experiences, Kyle! Want to be a part of the cutting-edge of technology and the next wave of what’s to come? Discover the latest career opportunities at Celigo.
