Craig Katz began championing his proficiency for craftsmanship and standards early in his career, working in Excel and manipulating numbers as an accountant. Convinced that the most tedious tasks could be simplified, he set up Excel automations that translated cash flow statements into sales tax reports, reducing effort from 6 hours to a mere 4 minutes.
Steering his mindset for problem-solving into innovating programmatic process fixes, Craig earned his next step into programming, where certification opened further into his career as a developer. Building on roles with various retail and financial institutions, he came five years ago to Discover. Craig is widely regarded for being a change agent, with an ardent focus on software craftsmanship that runs consistently through his work at Discover. He's diligently demonstrated how craftsmanship is elevated and spread by standardizing the processes and technology tools we use.
While working on projects like the Discover agent chatbot and authorization external router, Craig noticed that teams working on front-end systems were spending too much time weighed down in design decisions and not enough on actual coding. Addressing this deficit, Craig and his team created and launched Radiant, a library of Discover-approved components that can be quickly inserted into a design. Through Radiant's standardized, automated approach to front-end coding, developers found ways to bypass the friction of decision-making and implement a consistent look and feel across Discover entities.
"Lots of engineers want to be unicorns," Craig says, "but if you have a standardized approach that works for people, then it raises the ceiling because you come with a given floor. By standardizing commodities like front-end development choices, employees can use their skill set to deliver better business faster."
As Director of Infrastructure Product Management, Craig came to own Red Hat OpenShift and helped steer the hefty migration effort of Discover's entire technology stack to the container platform. His call for quality software craftsmanship and standardization through this years-long process has been crucial in providing teams with new freedom in their cloud deployments.
To achieve conformance with Discover's highest principles for quality, Craig and his team set in motion a standardized approach that enabled teams to transition from their individual containerized platforms to a common CI/CD platform. In further support, they instituted an intensive organization-wide campaign to upskill engineers on the best practices for migration. Teams took advantage of new weekly troubleshooting sessions that were convened to address real-time questions on blockers in setting up their new OpenShift environments.
In the massive and ongoing success of the OpenShift migration, Craig continues his support for the product while focusing his proficiency for standardization on a partnership with cybersecurity. This collaboration focuses on forming a standard around the frequency of deployments to encourage smaller, more iterative deployments capable of getting innovations to customers faster and correcting issues more rapidly.
Although Craig has been at Discover for only five years, his work has had an immeasurable impact in creating the company-wide playing field for innovation that is encouraged and enabled by engineers.
