Cobry

This is a small blog about my employment at cobry - the wins, the losses, and how I've grown as a person.

The Beginnings

I started working at Cobry while still in uni. Cobry was a Google Workspace migration house ran by our MD, Colin Bryce. I applied in early 2017 for it as a between-terms job. A summer job where I could hone in some of my learnings from university. On my first day, the team (the two OGs, at the time - Rowan and Colin) sat me down and gave me a 'summer intern tasklist'. These tasks were great - anything and everything between "Create a pricing calculator" to "Photography broadly").

I was chuffed - look at all of the things they're trusting me with! I got to work. The commute was great, and the Scottish summer was one of the best one's we had. Early rise, bike to the station, train into Glasgow, then bike over to the office.

It's only on week 3 the lads came up to me and told me I was leaving an hour early. I thought a 7 hour contract meant from 0900 to 1600. Oops. But the work made up for it. I made my blunders, but quickly got into the swing of things. One of the famous ones was the website refactor. "Make website better". Sure, no problem. Got to work Saturday afternoon, and we had a brand-spanking-new website by Monday morning. Did it work well? No. But boy, was it beautiful.

After a slap on the wrist and a few intense dev days later, we had the website up and running, and it did, in fact, run a lot better, and convert a lot better, too.

The pivot to dev work

Cobry has always had it's roots in Google Workspace. Migrations, change management, support, training, and helping folks make the most of the tools. My exprerience with programming allowed us to automate a lot of the cruft work when it came to migrations. Getting user lists, groups, domain mapping... Boring stuff that would usually take hours and days, with a bit of apps script, reduced to minutes.

Some customers picked up on this cool thing we were doing - automating with Google Workspace, and asked whether we could do that for them. That's where the red team was born.

We categorise our teams based on colour - red; development, blue; sales, green; technical (migrations), and yellow; operations.

I was the first red team member, writing out scriptlets and helping organisations automate a lot of their manual work. Quickly, I needed backup, so my dear university colleague, Rares, joined us. We pair-programmed dashboards, automations, data collection scripts, the lot. We intergated a lot of 3rd party tools with Google Workspace, and our team began to grow. Over the course of that time, we noticed a lot of customers had issues with data visualisation. Data Studio (now looker studio) is still probably one of the most underrated tools in the Google Workspace ecosystem - it's a free PowerBI, but all in-browser.

The pivot to data work

We became early pioneers of Data Studio, some organisations migrated over to Google Workspace purely because the Data Studio project had them do it. It was a huge vaule-add, and it was around this time that the Google team acquired Looker. I think we were the first organisation to partner with Looker under the "Google Cloud" umbrella. Contracts were clearly rapidly-made, but we got there. We became Looker partners.

Now, Data Studio is free, Looker starts at tens of thousands of dollars. It was a 2 year struggle pivoting our services away from the free "noddy" tooling, and maturing into BigQuery + Looker consultants, but we got there. Different customerbase, different set of skills, but slowly and surely, our Looker customerbase started growing.

And now?

At this point, cobry is known for Google Workspace + Data on GCP. I run the Data on GCP part. I'm proud to say I've helped tens of organisations move to Looker, created a team that's rock solid on end-to-end data principles, and service a customerbase I look forward to speaking to every day.

It's been a great ride, but the journey's only just begun!