Situation
I had just joined as the only T3 engineer on a quality management product with serious ARR: major banks, healthcare, prisons, hospitals, and research labs across the country. An infrastructure upgrade was underway. The product had been run out of the UK, and account / migration communication did not keep up with the cutover. Customers hit systems that were unreachable. Some were not told promptly. People were angry, and for good reason.
Task
Stabilise trust while the migration was still messy: get on the calls, protect the customer outcome, and force clearer communication across UK engineering, project management, and leadership, even though I was still learning the product myself.
Action
I joined angry customer calls without the comfort of years on that codebase, listened first, and gave them a straight path forward instead of silence. In parallel I worked the UK engineers on the technical recovery, pulled in project management, and escalated to managers where the real failure was communication, not only infrastructure. I kept repeating the same point until it stuck: regulated customers cannot find out their system is down by trying to log in. I stayed on it until access and expectations lined up again.
Result
Customers got what they needed: systems reachable, a human owning the thread, and pressure applied internally so migration noise did not keep landing on them. The work was less “I knew every screen” and more “I would not let a high-ARR estate go dark without a voice and a plan.”