Malcolm's Ramblings

Starting at Pressable as a Technical Account Manager has been exciting. Genuinely exciting.

It has also been a harder transition than I think people sometimes assume when they see a new title and a new company logo. Leaving Acquia was not easy for me. Not because I was running from something, but because Acquia took a real chance on me, and I do not take that lightly.

When I joined Acquia, I felt underqualified for the role. I had a lot of WordPress experience, but my Drupal background was more on the site builder and project management side than the developer or hosting side. I was not coming in as some deeply seasoned Drupal infrastructure person. I also felt like a bit of an outsider, if I am being honest. The Drupal world definitely has some preconceptions about WordPress, and I was aware of that going in. I was not just trying to learn a new role. I was also trying to figure out whether I would fit in well enough to succeed.

Acquia gave me the chance anyway. That mattered a lot to me.

And over time, something shifted. Acquia helped me see that the skills I had already earned were more portable than I had given them credit for. Project management, organization, systems thinking, strategic thinking, being able to parse a lot of information quickly and turn it into something useful, those things travel better than we sometimes think. They are not tied to one CMS or one platform. They are ways of working. With some effort, some humility, and a willingness to learn quickly, they can be applied in a lot of places. That was a pretty valuable lesson for me.

I had a couple of moments at Acquia where things started to click. During ramp-up, I earned two Acquia certifications, and that was one of the first times I really thought, okay, I can do this. Not because certifications are magic, but because the process confirmed something for me. I could learn quickly, absorb a lot of information, and get myself ready when the stakes were real.

The second moment was working on the NBCUniversal account ahead of the Olympics. That was one of those situations where the scale and visibility make you look at your own work a little differently. At one point, my boss’s boss basically told me that I had it handled and that she felt confident the event monitoring would go off without a hitch. That stuck with me. It was one of the first moments where I stopped feeling like I was trying to catch up to the role and started feeling like I actually belonged in it.

So yes, leaving was hard.

It was hard because I loved the people I worked with. It was hard because I had trust there. It was hard because the schedule flexibility mattered a lot with my new son. It was hard because there is comfort in a larger, more stable organization, especially when the benefits are good and you have found your rhythm. It was also hard because I had built a lot of extra connection there through what I half-jokingly called the extracurriculars, things like AI work, Sumo Logic, and being involved as an Onboarding Buddy mentor. Those things matter. They make a company feel bigger than your job description.

So why make the move? Because Pressable felt like the right next chapter.

Pressable has a really interesting energy to it. It is owned by Automattic, but it still feels a bit like an arm’s-length startup. That is a pretty compelling combination. There is a lot of leverage in not having to reinvent every wheel, and in being able to learn from what has already been built around you. But there is also real agility. There is room to pivot. There is room to speak up. There is room to help shape where things go instead of just fitting neatly into a lane somebody else defined years ago. That part has been energizing.

Even though the onboarding has been less formal than what I experienced at Acquia, I have felt empowered very early on to experiment, ask why things are done the way they are, and offer ideas on how they could be improved. More importantly, I have not felt like speaking up comes with career risk attached to it. Quite the opposite. I have been encouraged to be bolder and to help push the company toward its goals.

I said to my wife recently that maybe the only line any Pressable job description really needs is: make Pressable look good.

There is something refreshingly honest about that. It captures the spirit pretty well. Do what helps. Build what matters. Improve what you can. Be useful. That kind of environment fits me.

It also helps that Vik, Pressable’s CEO, came across as very down-to-earth during the process. In an email conversation, I asked for his executive assistant, who I assumed was managing his email and calendar to setup an appointment for Vik and I, only to receive a response from Vik that he was his own assistant and can schedule his own meetings. That mattered more than I expected it to. You can tell a lot about a place from how leadership shows up, and the tone there helped make the decision feel right.

What excites me most, though, is not just the company. It is the opportunity.

I am employee number two in the TAM department, which means this is not just a role I get to perform. It is also a discipline I get to help shape. That is a pretty rare thing. I’m already helping draft standard operating procedures, trying to craft a TAM as a service product, and

I enjoy the customer-facing technical work, but I also really enjoy thinking about systems, process, and how a function should evolve as a company grows. Getting to help define TAM at Pressable while also supporting customers directly is a very good mix for me.

I also think my time in enterprise TAM has a lot to offer Pressable customers.

One of the biggest opportunities I see is helping customers think more strategically about hosting. Their websites will not be the same a year from now. Their traffic patterns will change. Their plugin stacks will change. Their business goals will change. Their complexity will change. Good hosting is not just a place to put the site today. It should be a partner in helping them prepare for what the site is becoming. That kind of conversation is exciting to me. I love performance discussions. I love technical strategy discussions. I love the moments where a customer problem is not just “fix this one thing,” but “help us think better about where this is headed.” Any day where I get to move the needle on performance or strategy is a pretty good day.

So while this move came with a real amount of emotion for me, it also feels like the right one.

Acquia helped me prove something to myself. It gave me the chance to grow into a role I was not fully sure I belonged in at first, and I will always be grateful for that.

Pressable feels different in a way that is hard to overstate. There is more room to build, more room to question, more room to help shape what comes next. For where I am in my career, and for the kind of work I want to do, that feels right.

So yes, leaving Acquia was hard. But I am very happy to be at Pressable, and very excited about what comes next.

Featured image by Gemini