At Databricks, our core focus is to enable customers to achieve their business outcomes with measurable impacts. In our professional services teams, we are implementing this through our OKR-focused delivery model. This post builds on our previous story, which showed how Databricks Professional Services (PS) boosts results by integrating OKR-driven methods with our agile ‘pod’ deployment and leveraging AI for maximum impact.
This blog highlights our learnings on how this model is helping accelerate value and has been transformative for engineering-focused clients. These are the key principles of this model:
- Customer-Centric Execution: By aligning with clients’ OKRs, Databricks PS ensures that project scope and priorities truly reflect business-critical needs, not just technical checklists. Value centers the business on ROI, ensuring outcomes such as rolling out new capabilities, improving performance and reducing costs, and securing a strategic impact that goes beyond technical perfection.
- Agility and Partnership: The new model is about agility through continuous joint planning. Instead of a rigid SOW, teams engage in real-time collaboration with the flexibility to add goals, modify key results, and pivot as customer priorities change.
- Skills and Resource Fit: OKR-focused models allow PS teams to match expert skills to specific key results, bringing in the right expertise at the right time, and fostering true co-ownership of project outcomes.
- Measurable Impact: Reciprocating OKRs facilitate continuous progress tracking, review, and reporting. This ensures transparent accountability and links activities directly to customer ROI.
Business Service Pod deployment for OKR-driven engagements
In 2024, we introduced a bold new way to accelerate customer value: pods, small autonomous cross-functional teams built for the purpose of speed and impact.
Unlike the traditional delivery model, which employs one or two engineers for the duration of a project, pods operate as self-contained units with full ownership. Pod leads can quickly get the right expertise at the right time without lengthy change requests or disruption to contracted hours. The result is faster decisions, seamless execution and dramatically improved agility.
Designed for flexibility and responsiveness, Pods empower clients to move from strategy to results faster than ever, speeding up complexity and turning ideas into results. Here’s how they implemented:
- Cross-functional structure: Each team blends architects, engineers, DevOps/Cloud experts, and technical project managers, bringing together the broad skillset required to execute on OKRs within one agile unit. These forward-deployed engineers are embedded within clients, ensuring a deep understanding of the objectives within the overall business context, leading to quick problem-solving and driving key results.
- End-to-end ownership and autonomy: Our teams work independently, able to make decisions and adapt to changing needs and key results. They are guided by our one true North Star – “Customer Success”.
- Customer Success at the Core: Our teams not only deliver technical outputs, but they engage directly with OKRs, keeping critical business milestones front and center. These teams continuously engage with the Databricks core product and engineering team to advance features and remove technical roadblocks necessary for the customer’s specific business use-cases.
Impact on many large enterprise customers
The integration of our team structure with OKR-focused delivery is already delivering demonstrable value for Databricks customers.
- Quick High-Quality Delivery: Streamlined execution, fast launch, low disruption, and robust platform deployed on time and within budget.
- Major Cost Savings: Strategic cloud migration has reduced costs for customers by 20-40%. For example, the migration of Dropbox to Databricks, guided by clear OKRs and our agile teams, delivered transformational savings coupled with full business continuity.
- Increase in Customer Satisfaction: Transparent progress communications, clear accountability and constant alignment mean clients trust PS as a true strategic partner.
Through ongoing advice, enablement and risk mitigation, Databricks and its partners help customers reduce total cost of ownership, build in-house expertise and pave the way for sustained digital transformation. Real-world partnerships, such as our joint success with Shell, demonstrate the tangible benefits of this approach.
Embedding Effects: Forward Deployed Engineered Models in Databricks
Our pod-based delivery model, particularly the emphasis on embedded expertise and outcome-driven delivery, is essentially working in the spirit of the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) model, which is gaining popularity in an AI-first world. Their service covers the full spectrum of software engineering including infrastructure development, CI/CD, data engineering and application development. This embedded approach allows them to collaboratively create tailored solutions, leveraging the Databricks platform as well as modern AI tools to deeply understand unique operational contexts, proactively address challenges, and deliver meaningful impact. Through continuous engagement and an OKR-driven delivery approach, we have consistently reduced time-to-market for customers and increased the satisfaction of both technical and business stakeholders.
Building on our success over the past year, we are in the process of officially formalizing this OKR-driven FDE model as part of the Databricks business services offering. This will enhance our established commitment to pragmatic partnerships, flexibility and results-driven delivery. Moving forward, the FDE approach will continue to deliver personalized, high-velocity innovation to Databricks customers, keeping them at the forefront of the data and AI transformation.
Databricks PS Difference: Summary
Databricks’ Professional Services (PS) team plays a critical role in accelerating the adoption of advanced AI and machine learning solutions for our customers. By bringing together the OKR and Pod delivery model combined with the FDE proposition, Databricks PS provides a forward-looking model for organizations that want to make the transition from standard consultation to proactive, business outcome-focused collaboration, driving:
- High delivery quality and throughput
- Resource efficiency and cost savings boosted
- Strong customer engagement and satisfaction
- Scalable, sustainable value as data needs grow
This approach has been praised by customers like Rivian, Dropbox, and Walgreens, who credit the joint OKR model for creating shared goals, clear accountability, delivery confidence, and removing ambiguity from even the most complex projects.
Databricks Professional Services (PS) works with a trusted global network of partners to accelerate client innovation and deliver exceptional business results. The combination of Databricks’ deep technical expertise with an extensive partner ecosystem provides seamless, scalable support tailored to each customer’s unique journey.
Get started with OKR-focused delivery
Are you ready to accelerate your data and AI implementation and drive tangible business results? Our engineers are ready to join your team, provide practical expertise, and bridge the gap between strategy and implementation. Please contact us and check our offers.
