McKinsey & Company — Matter Foundations (2021–2024)
My best experience at McKinsey was working on Matter Foundations (MF) — a cloud-enablement product that codifies best practices from McKinsey's cloud transformation engagements into repeatable, automated infrastructure.
The Problem MF Solves
The best analogy is residential construction:
Before a single house can be built, a developer has to name the subdivision, plan the roads, sewers, utilities, and community facilities, like pool, clubhouse, and choice of gaudy fountain at the entrance. Only then can homes be built.
McKinsey cloud engagements have the same requirement. Historically, teams would handcraft cloud foundations from scratch — weeks or months of work before any application development or migrations could start.
Matter Foundations automates that "subdivision build-out" step. It provisions a fully governed, well-architected cloud foundation in a fraction of the time (good for clients), with consistent structure across engagements (good for the consulting delivery teams).
Multi-Cloud by Design
MF targets all three major clouds — AWS, GCP, and Azure — with a common vocabulary and consistent abstractions:
| Cloud | Account-level concept |
|---|---|
| AWS | Account |
| Azure | Subscription |
| GCP | Project |
Where a cloud provides a native service, MF uses it. Where one cloud lacks something another provides, MF fills the gap with an open-source alternative.
Example: AWS has IPAM for IP address management across accounts. Azure and GCP don't — so MF provides an equivalent built on open-source tooling for those platforms.
My Role
I was a core contributor to Matter Foundations for three years, working on automated end-to-end testing infrastructure that allowed the team to catch regressions across cloud providers as the platform evolved. I worked on the AWS edition first, and later the GCP edition.