Professional

I think of a business as a human system before I think of it as an org chart or a roadmap. The people in that system have to be healthy and heard, or the output suffers no matter how good the strategy looks on paper. That's the lens I bring to product and engineering leadership: talk to the humans generating the qualitative signal, not just the dashboards generating the quantitative one, and treat leadership as a job that works for the people in it, not the other way around.

At Geospan, I stepped into leading an engineering department instead of a product one, while the company's product direction had stalled. Nobody outside my own team asked me to fix that, so I built a roadmap anyway: a now/next/later plan with a timeline and the value each piece would create. The product team adopted it. The 3D modeling tools it funded cut turnaround time 40% and raised model accuracy 30%, and it's part of why I was promoted twice in fourteen months.

At Beacon, I pushed for a data integration with a channel partner that the sales team wasn't fully sold on. They liked the white-label approach we'd used before, even though it caused problems downstream. I laid out how a direct integration would remove friction for the customer, and my skip-level manager backed the plan on the strength of that case. It did $1.5 million in orders in its first 30 days. Within six months, that channel was averaging $10 million a month, and it became the single biggest driver behind the company's first $100 million year in digital revenue.

I don't get every call right. I once hired a senior DevOps engineer into a role that was a stretch for him, betting he'd grow into it. Within a month it was clear he'd misrepresented his skills and was working against the culture I was building on the team, so I let him go and started over. Now I bring my tech lead into interviews with questions that can't be faked, get the team time with every candidate to judge character as much as skill, and decide up front whether a role is one someone can grow into or one that needs the experience on day one.

Some of my titles read engineering, but the work has always been product. Geospan hired me in part because their VP of Product didn't have real product experience and someone needed to fill that gap, and in part because, as the person who hired me put it, my people-leadership skills "emanate from your soul." Every other role on my resume besides the two engineering titles has been a product role. What the engineering titles add is systems fluency: the ability to sit in technical, business, and strategy conversations at the same time and make a call that works across all three.

I didn't start in an office. I drove a truck first, then went back to school as an adult and spent years in social services before I ever wrote a product spec. That's probably where the instinct to treat every system as a group of people first came from.