For this installment of our People of Atypon series, we sat down with Rob Posadas, Atypon’s Vice President of Solution Architecture.
Fast facts: Rob joined the Atypon 8 years ago and works remotely out of the office in Campbell, CA. He’s a fan of James Bond, watching American football, playing soccer/football, and starting the day with fresh-squeezed orange juice from his Valencia orange trees!
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The first thing to know about Rob Posadas is that he loves his job. The best advice he’s ever been given, he says, was Pick a job you enjoy, because you’ll be spending most of your waking hours doing it. For 20 years, working as an engineer or a manager, the part of his job he most enjoyed was working directly with customers; in his role as VP of Solution Architecture, Literatum customers are the focus of everything he and his team do.
What is a Solution Architect, anyway?
“In one sentence,” Rob explains, “Solution Architects make sure that the websites we build match the customers’ requirements.”
Solution Architects are the Literatum and scholarly publishing experts who work with customers to show them what the platform can do and how they can take advantage of its features. They’re also the hub of an ongoing conversation, working with Sales teams on sales opportunities, with Product teams to help define new Literatum features, and with Account Managers to address customer issues.
Playing to your strengths
“We have many Literatum experts,” Rob says, “so when I joined Atypon I realized the value I could add was my experience outside of Literatum, gained through 20 years of building websites.”
When he’s not managing his team of 30+ Solution Architects, Rob focuses on the core priorities of all websites. He works with customer issues related to Google, SEO, Google Scholar, and Google Analytics, and has increasingly focused on web accessibility over the past few years. He represents Atypon at meetings with Google, presented Atypon’s accessibility story at the Accessing High Ground web accessibility conference in 2018, and is one of our subject-matter experts supporting the Accessibility and Discovery community groups.
Raising the bar
The growth and success of the Solution Architecture team is a source of professional pride for Rob. It was a team of very good Solution Architects in 2017, when he took it over, but it also needed to grow substantially, and he set out to raise the bar even higher for new hires.
Two years later, at a 2019 Atypon user conference, he introduced himself to a Literatum customer as the head of the SA group. “Oh,” said the customer. “You have the team of geniuses!”
Mission accomplished? Maybe—but there’s always something new to strive for! These days, Rob is most excited about the new opportunities Partner Solutions presents; he and his team are working with other teams across Partner Solutions to create integrated solutions for customers.
Getting outside
When Rob talks about what he does outside of work, he really does mean “outside”: when he’s not working, he’s playing soccer or tennis, tending to the family’s 100+ fruit trees, or taking care of their koi.
An enthusiastic traveler, he says his favorite destination is France, because “they take their food seriously: from the street vendor to the Michelin-star restaurant, everything has to be perfect.” But if he could have one superpower, he would choose immortality—the world is too full of things to do and places to experience for just one lifetime.
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Thank you, Rob, for sharing your insights with us!
Meet more People of Atypon!
Dina Abulfailat (Product Manager, Digital Objects) § Polivios Roussis (Program Manager) § Dino Paravandis (VP of User Experience) § Hannah Smith (Director of Account Management and Development)