"Every new hire that joins continues to have that wow factor. It's not a one-time thing. It continually gives back."

When Dennis joined Gamma about a year ago, the company was roughly 20 people. There was no IT function, just a patchwork of informal handoffs. Need access to GitHub? Hunt down the person who can help. Need a Slack account? Find another person. Sign in with Google and hope for the best.

"People would be in meetings for like an hour, four hours," Dennis says. "You could go half a day easily without getting access to the things that you need."

Dennis came in knowing exactly what he didn't want: the sprawling, legacy environments he'd used earlier in his career. Systems built for a different era that made every new tool a year long negotiation. At Gamma, he had a clean slate and a clear mandate: build an IT org that could scale without becoming the bottleneck.

Console became the foundation of that project.

A different kind of evaluation

Before choosing Console, Dennis ran a side-by-side comparison with three other platforms. He was looking for predictability.

"Some of the other tools we evaluated were very 'black box, trust us,'" he says. "Console felt like I had a lot more control. I knew what was going to happen every time a certain policy ran, every time a Playbook was triggered. In IT, that matters. You're handing over the keys to the kingdom. If an agent doesn't process a prompt correctly, you can find yourself in a lot of hot water."

The signal was even clearer from end users. Employees in the Proof of Concept (POC) gravitated toward the Console Slack channel over the others. The responses were faster. It understood what people were actually asking for. It felt conversational.

"A combination of all those factors helped make Console a clear winner in a very crowded environment," Dennis says.

From tribal knowledge to a single source of truth

Gamma moves fast. Their Slack IT support channel, lovingly called "#help," is one of the busiest channels in the workspace. As the company grew from 20 to several hundred people, the volume of requests grew with it.

"Feeling that pressure from early on, I knew that people need access to tools, permissions, and sometimes not for the entirety of their time at the company," Dennis says. "It was a huge unblock to say: this is something that can be handled without waiting on Dennis, without waiting on an engineering manager, without waiting on leadership."

With Console, everything Gamma's employees need flows through one place. Access requests, device troubleshooting, internal knowledge: all handled, logged, audited automatically. In most cases, there’s no human in the loop to slow things down.

"Knowing that it's audited, knowing that it's logged, helps us sleep at night," Dennis says.

The playbook moment

Dennis describes himself as someone who likes to open the hood and do things his own way. When Co-founders, Andrei and Neal, first showed him Playbooks, he was intrigued but skeptical. Writing out what he wanted in natural language felt like putting his trust in something he couldn't fully control.

Then he watched it work.

"I'd go a little guarded the first couple of times, and then I just fully let go and trusted it," Dennis says. "Now I find myself thinking: I can build a Playbook for that. And I know I can trust it to execute every time without fail."

One example that stuck: at Gamma, like most Apple shops, locking down system recovery is a security priority. But recovery is also exactly where employees get stuck. If someone on the East Coast locks themselves out of their machine, waiting for IT to come online could mean half a day of lost work.

Dennis built a Playbook that queries the MDM, identifies the user and their device, and walks them through resolution automatically, at any hour. "That was huge," he says. "And I can make improvements to it in natural language because I can actually read what it says."

What Console has allowed Dennis to build

Grant Lee, Gamma's CEO, describes Dennis's role as far more expansive than a traditional IT function. Since Console started handling the day-to-day, Dennis has had room to contribute across the company: supporting marketing events, customer programs, and the office build-out in Gamma's new San Francisco space. Work that would have been hard to achieve relative to a backlog of access requests.

"It's hard to imagine, given how lean the team is, for him to have had the time to do all those things," Grant says. "Console has allowed Dennis to focus on what he's great at: thinking bigger picture, thinking around the architecture, thinking around the portfolio of tools and managing costs. And it allows employees to feel the power to make decisions around the best tool for the job."

For Dennis, measuring success is easy: are the people he supports happy?

"If you can talk to your fellow coworkers at lunch and they're happy with the state of IT, that's a huge sign of success," he says. "For Console to be at the forefront, for employees to say 'I love this tool because it lets me do my job without waiting for you,’ that was a really aha moment for me."

What comes next

Gamma is in the middle of SOC 2 auditing, and Dennis is eager to get user access reviews off his manual checklist. Right now that means logging into each system, exporting a CSV, and going through row by row. As the company adds headcount and tools, that process doesn't scale.

"Being able to have a full comprehensive picture to help me make an informed decision, using signal from job title, reporting line, others on the team with similar provisions, is going to be really helpful," Dennis says. "It's a lot easier to say someone has the right access when your team is 20 versus 200."

When he thinks about what the team would look like without Console, the answer is straightforward.

"Leadership would probably be really stressed at how much headcount I would ask for," Dennis says. "We'd need 24/7 staffing. On-call rotation. Things we don't have to worry about. We trust Console while we're sound asleep."