In my dream job I learn the customer and business needs and focus the team on delivering them in a sustainable manner. Simultaneously, I help team members grow, develop our culture, and build valuable tech. When talking to others I prefer a couch to a table, and when I need a break you might see me juggling, practicing magic, or riding my folding bike - often in the office.
Engineering Manager or Tech lead: Engineering Manager
I’m passionate about tech, but I’m even more passionate about aspiring to be the best boss my team will ever have. Part of being the best is having deep understanding of the tech, so I always have some small projects on the side, and every few years I’ll do a rotation as a tech lead.
Product Domain? Well being, Productivity and Natural Language Processing
As a human, I’m incredibly passionate about well being. I’m excited about the whole field from nurturing mindfulness, increasing satisfaction, to solving loneliness and enabling self-reflection.
Such jobs are rare, so if that’s something you need help delivering on, please reach out immediately.
I’m also very excited by Natural Language Processing and Productivity so if you need help delivering them reach out immediately!
Startup, Turn Around, Accelerated Growth, Realignment, Sustaining Success: Startup and Turn Around
If you don’t know those words, read about STARS
At this point in my career, my favorite situation is startup (e.g. Smile, Amazon Video Shopping, Employee #50 at Azure) because it allows me to build a high performing team that can use ingenuity to get a solution out the door as quickly as possible.
Turn around situations(e.g. Cache) can be much like startups, except instead of going from “0 to 1000”, you need to go from “-100 to 100” with the existing team. Because the start of a turn around includes lots of demoralized players it is both incredibly difficult and also intensely satisfying for me once progress is made.
Accelerated Growth, Realignment, Sustaining Success aren’t things I’ve tried yet. I’m looking forward to trying them to both round out my skills and to learn how much I enjoy them.
B2C, B2B, Infrastructure? B2C
At this point in my career I’m interested in making the lives of others better. Right now, I’d like to do this via consumer software.
Technologist or Entrepreneur: Entrepreneur
As I get older, I’m finding more satisfaction in solving a customer’s problem than extending the limits of technology. That said, I’ve built bad ass complex technical systems for the first 20 years of my career so I make sure we build and use the right architecture and technology to effectively meet the customer’s need.
Product/Market Risk or Technical Risk: Product/Market Risk
Incubations need to prove a risk can be overcome, either product/market or technical. Product/market risk is “Do customers want your product,” while technical risk is “Can we build the tech to deliver it.”
I’m most interested in proving product/market fit. That said, with over 20 years experience as a software engineer, I’m well versed in resolving technical risk, an expert at system design, code, and mentoring developers.
Signals, Inferences, Experiences? Experiences
A lot of modern software can be decomposed in three layers: signals, inferences, and experiences. Signals are the raw input in the system, both static, and dynamic. Inferences are the computations performed over the signal to determine something meaningful, this often involves big data and ML. Experiences are the way inferences and signal are presented to the user, this is often an app and the services which power the app. Inferences and experiences often become new signal to drive the system.
I’m most interested in building the experiences, but that requires me to deeply understand and drive signals and inferences. Steve Jobs says it well:
One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. And I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room. And I got the scar tissue to prove it.
Business, Experience, Technology: Business and Experience
Technology leaders need to divide their time among the business, experiences, and technology. While each of these are interesting at this point in my career, my technology skill is well developed and now I want to focus on building my business and experiences muscles.
Regardless of my job I will be successful when
My manager skills are continuously improving
I am the best boss my team has ever had
Everyone gets value from personalized coaching
Work is filled with peak moments
- (In very special places …) I run Feelings meetings
The team is high performing (even if they start off in trouble)
Going to work is like hanging out with friends.