David Hanrahan, SVP People Success at Solarwinds

Show Notes

Scaling Through Change: SolarWinds’ People Leader on Functional HRBPs, Sales Talent, and AI-Driven Performance

Summary

What does it take to steer a 25-year-old tech company through going private while raising the performance bar?

David Hanrahan, SVP of People Success at SolarWinds, shares how his team is navigating culture integration with a data-driven parent company, reorganizing HR for impact, and using AI to modernize performance.

With 2,100+ employees and deep tenure across the business, SolarWinds is balancing “what’s worked” with a sharper go-to-market focus. David explains why he shifted HRBPs from site-based support to functional teams (GTM, R&D, G&A), how he built trust quickly across global sites, and why HR must solve revenue problems—starting with hiring and retaining top “native sales” talent.

He also opens up about building an attrition prediction model (and what they learned when v1 missed), plus how AI writing assistants can free managers to be coaches, not scribes.

He closes with a research-backed principle: managers who truly understand their team’s work dramatically boost performance, engagement, and retention.

Timestamps

[00:45] – SolarWinds overview: going private, observability software, and the change agenda

[02:17] – Balancing long company history with Turn/River’s speed and data-orientation

[04:42] – Rewiring HRBPs: from site-based coverage to functional alignment (GTM, R&D, G&A)

[07:19] – Earning trust fast: global site visits, human updates, and building rapport remotely

[11:44] – HR as business problem-solver: zeroing in on “native sales” talent to drive bookings

[14:06] – Attrition prediction model: partnering with IT and learning from first-pass misses

[15:06] – AI in performance: writing assistants, meeting people where they are, manager as coach

[22:13] – The performance multiplier: managers who truly understand the work

Takeaways

- Align HRBPs by function, not just site, to strengthen partnership with global business priorities.

- Build trust quickly through intentional face time and human touches—even in remote-first contexts.

- Aim HR at revenue levers: hire and retain top “native sales” talent to fuel bookings growth.

- Treat analytics as experiments: iterate on models that miss and learn from actual attrition drivers.

- Use AI to handle synthesis and writing so managers can coach, set trade-offs, and elevate performance.

- Make “manager understanding of work” a habit—it doubles high performance and slashes attrition.

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What is HR Voices?

HR Voices is a scenario-based podcast for People Leaders who’ve actually had to make the call.

Each episode brings experienced HR and People leaders into realistic, anonymized workplace scenarios—the kind you recognize immediately. Performance issues. Messy conflicts. Investigations that don’t fit neatly into a policy box. Instead of talking about their own companies, guests react to outside cases and walk through how they’d think it through in real time.

There are no right answers here. What you’ll hear is judgment: how seasoned leaders balance risk, fairness, legal reality, and humanity when the stakes are high and the path isn’t obvious.

HR Voices is for HR, People Ops, legal, and leaders who want to hear how other smart humans actually handle employee relations—without confidentiality breaches, hypotheticals that feel fake, or a lecture on “best practices.”

Rebecca Taylor (00:17)
Hello and welcome to HR Voices. I'm Rebecca Taylor and I'm here with David Hanrahan the SVP of People Success at SolarWinds. David, finally excited to chat with you after following you for years on LinkedIn. Welcome to HR Voices.

David Hanrahan (00:31)
Rebecca, likewise. So thank you for having me and great to finally connect live.

Rebecca Taylor (00:35)
Likewise. So I know that we were talking very, little about, you know, solar winds before we kicked off this conversation here, but I figured it's like, okay, now it's time to hit record because people are going to want to hear this. So can you tell us about solar winds and about your role and the people that you're supporting?

David Hanrahan (00:52)
Sure.

So, ⁓ you know, it's not a solar company, I'll start there. But we're about 2,100 employees, almost 2,200 employees globally, been around for about 25 years. So we're a B2B software company and specifically hybrid IT operations and observability software. So what we do is we build products that give IT and DevOps and ops teams a single pane of glass across all their workloads. And at the core, it's about observability.

Rebecca Taylor (00:56)
You

David Hanrahan (01:22)
incident response and IT service management. So issues can be detected, triaged and resolved quickly. But we were just acquired last year. So when I started, I've been at SolarWinds now a year, a couple of weeks after I started, we were being acquired. so now we're a private company, we were public and now we're private. And so there's a lot of change management. We're grappling with a new go-to-market model, lots of organizational change, lots of levels.

leveling up our performance with the new parent company. And I like all that, so it's exciting, ⁓ and I can kind get into some more challenges that we're facing and all that.

Rebecca Taylor (02:02)
yeah, I was actually going to ask because I know ⁓ &A is very classically a very relaxing part of what we do in HR. Very low pressure, right? So I imagine, you know, taking people from going from public company to private, merging, you know, with a larger company. Can you talk about some of, you know, some of the main challenges that you're facing from a change management perspective or from, if not from change management, then just from an overall perspective that you're experiencing.

David Hanrahan (02:30)
Yeah. you know, SolarWinds, something unique about SolarWinds history, being around for 25 years, when I first started, you know, and I still have this, this kind of experience today. I'll meet people who've been, been here for over 15 years, 15 years, 20 years. And so there's a lot of tenure across the company. There's a lot of individuals with long memories. And we have been, we have gone public, we have gone private, we've gone public again, and now we've gone private.

So we've had these different sort of ownership models and we've kind of gone through different iterations of ownership and different structures. ⁓ so that balancing history with the needs of the future, always have, ⁓ you kind of bump into people where it's like, hey, I've seen this before, I've seen this story before, or this didn't work that time, or we're really wedded to this one way of doing things. And our Turn River is the name of our parents'

company, they're kind of a newer company. So they don't have 25 years of history. They've they've were their biggest acquisition and they're very eager and they move really fast and they're very data oriented. So the orientation around data for us being more analytical, more structured thinking, a little bit of like culture change is a little bit of like we're having to find really clever ways to weave our values into their ways of working so we can be true to who we are. We know who we are when we do our best work, but also kind

kind

of level up a bit, meet them where they're at on things like data orientation. The transformation, all of that is very difficult. Our people team plays a really big role in this. Being catalysts for that change, invested a lot in our HR business partner function. I think it plays a really critical role helping people navigate the change, but also think two steps ahead. How should your org design evolve?

What's your bench like? Where are you gonna be pressured six months from now? Coaching to the leaders themselves. Hey, how do you need to scale? How do you need to play a bit different role? Because I see you drowning right now. I see you kind of underwater and I need to help you with that. So that the business partner role plays a big impact for what we wanna accomplish.

Rebecca Taylor (04:45)
Yeah. And I can imagine across 2100 employees, roughly how many business partners do you have?

David Hanrahan (04:52)
The business partner team, believe globally is 10 and we have it, it's led functionally. So we have a head of go-to-market business partners and I have a head of R &D and G &A business partners. And we've tried to organize those business partner teams with the functions that you primarily support. So if you're at a site that is primarily an engineering site, you're probably an HRBP on the R &D side.

Rebecca Taylor (05:16)
Okay, that makes a lot of sense, especially because it gives them the chance to sort of have a little bit more specialty knowledge of what their employees and their business units might be going through and what they might need instead of having to be a true generalist who knows a very little bit about so many different components. But, you know, it's different from having someone who's kind of covering everybody to having those specialty kind of places.

David Hanrahan (05:39)
Yeah, and this is one of the changes I introduced. When I started, observed, you know, we have a business partner in Cork, in Krakow, you know, in Charlotte, and around the globe, Manila, India, et cetera. Our business partners were a little bit more like how they kind of thought about themselves as my site, and then a little bit further extension, my region. And so I've developed a really good knowledge of, you know, local customs practices, laws even in Ireland.

But I'm part of something bigger. The Cork site is the international headquarters. It's a commercial site, a GNA site. There's things happening around me and how do I connect into that work? What is my true team? This leader here who's on the go-to-market side reports to someone else. How do I help them be more effective? I introduced this idea of the functional business partner and it's been tricky to sort of acclimate the team to that because I think they've...

obviously naturally think about the sites that they work in and being known at that site is like I'm your business partner, but I'm your business partner, but also some of you are part of a function that is something bigger going on globally.

Rebecca Taylor (06:50)
Yeah, yeah. I think it's a really key thing, especially when you had to learn a lot in not that much time, right? So you had to kind of build a lot of trust and learn all these different components of the dynamics between the different sites and the different sort of areas that you're talking about, because it's been, you've been there for a year, right? And then right when you got there, everything you may have known just started to change in the acquisition. ⁓ So what are some of your tips for?

David Hanrahan (07:14)
Yeah.

Rebecca Taylor (07:18)
how you're building trust and how you're building these relationships for someone who might be listening to this and feel like they're kind of trying to learn a lot of new people at the same time.

David Hanrahan (07:26)
Well, so the trust part is really key. In HR roles, we're constantly like trust is our currency, being a trusted partner and building trust and how you do that ⁓ is tricky. There's things about being consistent, being reliable, being information that I give you, I know how you're using it. But I had this balancing act of I'm new and ⁓ you have a window of like, hey, I'm kind

of

knew I'm going to play dumb, I can make some changes here and ask for forgiveness later. And if you don't move soon on some things, they may never change. So you kind of have to move quickly when you're new, but also you haven't built the trust yet and you don't have a full accounting of the history of this team and the company. An important part for me, kind of unintentionally, I did it and I was fortunate, was I got out to most of the sites and early on

I just kind of made ⁓ a point to get to Cork, to India, to Manila, to all these sites, in some cases going with the CEO, but in all of these cases, spending time with the people team there. And I had one moment where ⁓ I was in Krakow where ⁓ the business partner, and they said to me, you're not as scary as I thought you were.

And, and then I was, I was on a road trip with them, from, from crack out of Brno. And, ⁓ that was like a, an ⁓ eye opening, like, what do you mean? It's like, well, on these calls I've seen you on, you know, you just, you just seem scary and you're very different in person. And it was just a reminder of like, you can't really beat, you know, just being face to face with someone and learning them, particularly if there's nuances on culture and language and all these other things. And so,

Rebecca Taylor (08:59)
Yeah.

David Hanrahan (09:18)
You have to get out and learn and be curious and ask questions. And I think there's a serotonin or dopamine effect that when people feel like they're heard, you're just naturally gonna trust this person more, right? Like I'm talking to you and you are listening and you're present in this conversation, trust is going up, you know, versus, yeah, you care and you care, that's right.

Rebecca Taylor (09:30)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and you care.

Yeah,

it's so funny because it's, I've gotten feedback before too, where it's like, you come off a lot different in person, or you know, I thought that you were going to be a lot scarier, a lot more intimidating. I think it's because when you're, when you're in, I'm a big advocate for remote work and you know, I'm sort of, I think that it's a really great resource that's available to all of us. But a lot of times, most of the interactions that you have with your coworkers when you're working remotely are in more formal structured type things. So it might be in a meeting where you're presenting.

David Hanrahan (09:54)
Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Taylor (10:07)
And there's a lot that you can do to kind of build trust and just build rapport and camaraderie when you can spend unstructured time together. You know, even if it's if you're on a work trip together or, you know, if you're coworking for, you know, a certain amount of time, because it's not as formal of a structure. So you can kind of all just, I guess, just relax a little bit and, you know, let that trust kind of start to really, you know, build from that point.

David Hanrahan (10:17)
Yeah.

Yeah, 100%. I have a weekly update I do now where I try and drop in personal family photos and tidbits of what's going on in my household at the moment. And it's silly, but it's like you gotta be human first and foremost.

Rebecca Taylor (10:42)
Yeah.

Yeah, just kind of share a little bit more about just kind of like who you are and what you're about and kind of remember, we're all just here trying to do our best, right? We're all, you know, this isn't Severance, we don't live at work. We're not our innies that are just always working, right? And, you know, we're all full people that kind of show up and need support. And I think that's kind of what HR can be really, really great at is being that connective tissue or just as a function building those, you know, the cultural.

David Hanrahan (10:59)
Right. Yep.

Rebecca Taylor (11:13)
aspects, building the programs, the strategies that actually help people to feel like they're connected to the mission, the vision to each other. And that's sort of the invisible work that HR kind of sometimes does.

David Hanrahan (11:25)
Agreed. Yeah, well said.

Rebecca Taylor (11:27)
Yeah. So we know change is kind of challenging. There's a lot to kind of unpack a lot at the same time. ⁓ But I'm curious about maybe it's because it's timely because it's the start of the year. But what's something that you're really excited about that your team is working on right now?

David Hanrahan (11:44)
⁓ Well, gosh, there's a number of things. You know, one of them is, you know, I've increasingly thought about our role.

as solving business problems. And that's not really a profound statement, but like when I first kind of started my HR career and I first started taking on like HR leadership roles, I kind of thought about my job as like all the staples of an HR function. You got compensation, you got performance management, you got recruiting, you got onboarding, and so on, HR systems. And I thought about just getting each of those right, the processes, the design,

being flawless in them. And we could do all those things really, really well. You could run the most perfect performance management cycle.

⁓ And it has no impact on the business. As one private equity person talked to me about, you know, her experience working with HR teams is, seems like a lot of what you do is performative in HR functions, right? And they're sitting there thinking about why is the sales team not hitting its goals? There's something happening in the funnel here. There's degradation between these two stages of the sales funnel.

Rebecca Taylor (12:44)
Performative management.

great.

David Hanrahan (13:00)
And there's people involved in that. And so back to your question, ⁓ I've been thinking about, have a type of sales professional at our company called Native Sales. It's like, own the quota. The quota is not shared, but I own the quota. These account managers, account executives, that's the, like, we call it the tip of the spear of being able to hit our bookings numbers. And this acquisition is all about top line growth. So it's not about like cost containment, you know, which PE firms often

sometimes

think about, it's about growth, growth on bookings. And so I've been trying to deduce like what are most the most important business goals, know, what's most important to the business in the next three years? And then where do people come in? And being able to hire and retain the best native sales talent is a very clear people goal that I can kind of think about with both my head of recruiting, but also my go to market HR business partner lead and talent development.

Rebecca Taylor (13:33)
Right, right.

David Hanrahan (13:58)
And so ⁓ we've been creating a attrition prediction model for native sales talent as a partnership with our IT team. number IT data analysts have started creating this model. And I'm excited about this. And, but I'll also share a failure is the model didn't work at all for the, for the very first quarter that they, that they analyzed. was like, didn't, didn't predict a single, ⁓ a trip in the quarter. Now that, that's not a, that's not a failure from my perspective. There was like a learning in there. Okay.

Rebecca Taylor (14:09)
Mm-hmm.

Hahaha

Right, right.

David Hanrahan (14:28)
What was the logic on the model? How are you weighting things? The person hasn't had a comp increase in the past year, they've changed managers, all those typical things. Let's actually go back to the people that we've lost and kind of reanalyze what the characteristics were of them, who we lost, and try again. I'm excited about that. I'm also excited about, ⁓ as you probably heard talking to other people leaders, ⁓ applying AI in the performance cycle. So we now have this AI

Rebecca Taylor (14:56)
Yeah.

David Hanrahan (14:57)
writing assistant ⁓ in our HRS and the performance model. And on a call the other day, at a marketing call, I think it was our CMO said, you know, and we use a tool called Glean for a different use case. said, I had Glean do my self review. was perfect. ⁓ And someone else said, I had it do my self review. It wrote 18 pages. And that wasn't the tool that we used for the writing assist. We're like, my gosh, they're using a different tool. ⁓

Rebecca Taylor (15:18)
Right.

Yep.

David Hanrahan (15:24)
perspective is like go in that direction meet people where they're at in terms of the tools that they're using. So I'm excited about those experiments or how we can use AI to really change the role of a manager in the performance process from like synthesizing information to being like your coach and I'm to sit down with you. The tool has the information in fact it wrote it better than I could it had more access to information than I had and now I can be your coach I can play a little bit different role.

Rebecca Taylor (15:50)
Yeah, you're speaking my love language right now is talking performance and just kind of, you know, how AI can help with that. Because I think it's like the hardest part about performance is all of the things around what the data shows you. So it's about managing the people to have the skills to do the job, or sometimes it's the motivation, or sometimes it's all the things that can sometimes just hold a real human back from executing the way that they know that they're supposed to. And that to me is where

David Hanrahan (16:04)
Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Taylor (16:18)
like the crux and the nuance of performance management really comes in. It's partially collecting the data, but it's also then like saying, what are we gonna do about this? How am I as your manager going to make sure that you're hitting your goals? Most people don't need to be reminded every day what their goals are. That's not how you performance manage. That's how you say, you hey, you're ahead of goal. What are you doing that someone else on the team could be doing too? How can I mirror that behavior? How can I encourage that behavior in others or?

David Hanrahan (16:35)
Yeah.

Rebecca Taylor (16:45)
adjust it in yours if that's something that needs to happen to help you to get where you need to go. It's funny because I think it's something like 15 % of employee relations cases that was tracked in All Voices last year were performance related. So it was employees getting feedback from their manager that they weren't performing and finding that they didn't know what to do with that. And they were worried that they were going to get fired. they'll put that in and they'll say,

David Hanrahan (16:59)
⁓

Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Taylor (17:13)
I need help, I need to understand what to do. And it's kind of like, I think that there's a really cool moment now for tools to kind of help managers get really good workbooks on or workflows on what they can do if someone's not performing, really formalize that process so that we're also not hearing about NHR saying I need to fire this person and we have to ask, do you have any documentation? Do they have any performance reviews? Like, what are you basing this on?

And I think that there's so much talk and you might see this on the LinkedIn side or the HR side of LinkedIn too. There's a lot of talk about performance based cultures and you know, some, I think CEOs love it. think HR, not to speak for all of us, but from what I've heard just from a lot of people is that HR is kind of taking it with a grain of salt because they're like, well, we thought we were that. So how is that being redefined and how can we meet the moment to redefine it and make sure that we're bringing people.

David Hanrahan (17:51)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's ⁓ encapsulated a lot really well there. ⁓

I think that there's, I was talking with someone earlier today about there are these barriers to like, know, hey, I want radical candor. I want continuous feedback. I want a feedback culture. I want a performance culture. I think we all want these things. You know, all employees want to perform better too. I believe no one like wants to perform poorly. I think I want to, I want to perform well, even if it's really just, can perform well so like, so I can like go to my next job. If I can do well here, I can like give you my catapult to something else. There's always, there's always a...

Rebecca Taylor (18:46)
or just not feel like I'm failing.

Yeah.

David Hanrahan (18:47)
I feel like

I'm failing. Yeah, I feel proud. I just like you want to do well, no matter what your level is. And there's barriers to that. The manager wants to wants that for you as well. And what are the barriers? The barriers are for a manager like, hey, ⁓ you know, I'm not in all the meetings that you know, that Rebecca's in. I feel like something is wrong here with David. It's hard. It's hard for me to pinpoint it. There was that one interaction I had, but I'll ignore it. I'm busy. I'm going to move on.

onto

something else. There's all these little bit, like you want me to fill it out in this tool? want me to, continuous feedback is like each week I have to fill something out. What? I'm not going to do that. There's all these little barriers. And ⁓ I think now with AI ⁓ understanding has a lot of situational and contextual understanding what's going on in all of the meetings David's not in, that his manager's not in. And there's conversations going on and there is a big brother aspect to this, but there is something there that I believe technology

Rebecca Taylor (19:25)
Yeah.

David Hanrahan (19:46)
can help with the idea of synthesis, synthesis of information that I can just tell David and Rebecca before their next one-on-one, hey, here's some things to talk about. Here's what maybe is going well for David. Here's some things that are maybe not going well for David. And Rebecca as the coach, maybe talk to him about these things. And it's like, wow, okay, we've put the information right there. It's right there in front of us to now talk about. And I believe that there is something coming here for this performance management.

shift through AI. That will be scary in part, but I think it will also be about in the end helping us to perform better, which I think will be ultimately good for us.

Rebecca Taylor (20:28)
I agree. I think the key is also going to, it's going to be that companies, employees, managers have to take it all with a grain of salt to start. sometimes there's a lot of pressure for something to be completely fleshed out and completely perfect before it's launched. I keep saying my soapbox is we all need to be comfortable with the fact that this is constantly changing and that we're learning and that, you know,

David Hanrahan (20:38)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Rebecca Taylor (20:52)
we can't have a situation where one incident can be the thing that makes or breaks someone's career unless it's an extreme example, right? But for the most part, when it's someone who's trying their best, like did something really well, it's like we really have to just be, we have to give all of us some grace, I think, and just kind of keep things in perspective because at the end of the day, it's more valuable to, if you have someone who is aligned to the mission of your organization, who's engaged in your work, who does a decent job, it's.

more valuable for you to try to get that person up to where you need them to be than it is to fire them and deal with replacing them and you know, all of that stuff. And that's also how you're gonna keep more people in your company. I you mentioned attrition. It's like, it's easy for people to leave when they don't feel seen, they don't feel heard or they feel like they do say something and no one does anything about it. That's the space we need to all just be a little bit more gracious on, I think.

David Hanrahan (21:45)
100%,

yeah, well said.

Rebecca Taylor (21:47)
Thank you. Well, do you have any closing thoughts? I know we're coming just towards the end of our conversation here, so any closing thoughts for anyone who's listening to this?

David Hanrahan (21:55)
Well, I have a fun fact on this.

And I think it relates to this conversation, but here a fun fact I came across is that employees whose managers regularly demonstrate understanding of their work are two times more likely to be high performers. And then there are three X like less likely to quit and 60, 70 % more engaged. And that this has been, this is research that's been replicated across Gallup, Google's project, oxygen, Microsoft internal research.

And what does that mean? So employees who's managers regularly demonstrate understanding of their work context.

What does that mean? It doesn't mean managers who are just being nice or generally supportive. It means my manager has a clear understanding of what I'm working on, why it matters, and what good look like, and what trade-offs I might need to make. And so there's the idea of digging in with your team and sort of understanding what they're working on and deeply understanding it is an interest. We talked about being interested ⁓ in your team as well.

but also like informed. And just that, just that like, I understand what you're working on is gonna get you too much more likely to turn you into a high performer. Like I think that's kind of fascinating. And we all want high performing organizations. There's a lot that we're sort of grappling with with AI and transformation right now and being good humans. And like, there's a key, there's a key for us to help our talent perform.

Rebecca Taylor (23:24)
Yeah, that's so good. That's so good. It's like just make it your business to know and then they're gonna feel more seen. They're gonna feel more, they're gonna value your perspective more too probably. Cause they're gonna say, okay, you get it. You're not just here bloviating about whatever. Well, David, thank you so much for being here. I feel like I could chat with you all day. So I really appreciate you just being here for this conversation and thank everybody for listening and I hope you all enjoy the rest of your day.

David Hanrahan (23:35)
Yep.

Right, exactly.

Thank you guys.