Starburst Galaxy

November 7th, 2023 (about 1 year ago) • 2 minutes

It was 10pm MYT, and I led my first introductory call for my team with a 3rd-party vendor - Starburst Galaxy.

Starburst is a managed Trino service that acts as a general query engine. It can connect to multiple different sources and perform the necessary computation.

In that call, I liked the other side's line of inquiry and really felt that he was trying to help both sides succeed. Which I think is the key to a successful partnership.

Here are some of the content we went through which could be helpful for those who are managing new customer accounts:

• Self-introduction
• Who are the main consumers of the data? And how many of them are there?
• What are the main use cases for data?
• What's the current data architecture, and why are you looking into this product?
• What are the key things you prioritize or evaluate for new tools?
• What is the timeline for implementation?
• InfoSec and compliance requirements, i.e., SOC2
• Pricing between managed and self-hosted
• Support plan expectations
• Monitoring and alerting such as DataDog integration
• Follow up steps for next week

Some of the things I will do better with similar calls:

• Prepare a generic introduction for the team and the company
• Prepare questions related to the discussion topics
• Limit the amount of information you give out (i.e., don't mention if you are only evaluating one company) and try to get the other side to talk more