Seemant Kulleen

Case Studies

Twenty-five years of org building — at every scale and in every context. Every case study here is a situation where an organization had stopped working and needed to be rebuilt.

Turning a 23-Person Cost Center into a $1M Profit Center

Engine Yard · Director of Customer Support → Product Lead

I took over a demoralized, 100% remote support org targeted for outsourcing. I diagnosed career stagnation as the root cause, not performance. I rebuilt incentive structures, created engineering rotations, and reframed support as a revenue driver. I bundled support into every paid customer offering (previously a separate add-on most customers skipped) and negotiated a share of the CFO's AWS reserved instance discount. Unit economics flipped entirely. Full P&L ownership: budget, headcount, vendor contracts.

org design P&L ownership team turnaround team building
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The Turnaround That Got Me Asked Back

Gap Inc. · Director-Level Engagement

Four leaderless teams, a hostile architect, and two years at Gap. I took over four demoralized cloud infrastructure teams after the director departed, turned them around, and earned enough trust that a second director handed me his problem team — the one that had been stonewalling the org's 130-team observability migration. I delivered the migration before PEAK.

team turnaround trust-building conflict resolution
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The Only Function 3M Kept When They Shut Down Brontes

Brontes Technologies / 3M · Support Engineer → Head of Customer Support

Brontes had built a 3D dental scanning device and hadn't thought about support at all. In a meeting with the CEO and COO, I asked 'what about support for these?' They looked at each other. I said I'd run it. That was the entire handoff. I built the function from scratch — hired for disposition over credentials (bartenders, not Linux engineers), scaled across the US and five European countries, and ran our own 1-800 support line out of Lexington, MA. After the 3M acquisition, St. Paul kept trying to shut our line down and centralize support. I fought them on it for three years, eventually negotiating a redirect in their phone tree that routed calls straight back to us. When 3M shut down Brontes, my team was the only function they kept.

org building hiring philosophy defending autonomy within a parent company
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4x User Acquisition by Giving Marketing Control of the Funnel

New Relic · Senior Product Manager (Growth)

Engineering owned the Instant Observability site — a key acquisition funnel — but didn't want it. Marketing needed to optimize it but couldn't touch it. The site was built on a static generator that made every change an engineering ticket. I transferred ownership to marketing by moving the platform to a CMS, created shared KPIs so both teams had skin in the outcome, and got engineering out from under an albatross they'd been carrying for years. Marketing could finally run the funnel. Engineering could finally stop babysitting it.

ownership restructuring cross-functional unblocking
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12 to 250 Developers — and Still Shipping 25 Years Later

Gentoo Linux · Core Developer & Developer Relations Lead

This is the same approach that produced every case study above, twenty years earlier, with 250 developers — the largest org I've ever built, and it's still going.

org scaling talent pipelines community building crisis leadership
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