About

I have always wanted to know how the world works. I love how people, teams, companies and partnerships let us do more together than any of us could alone. I like growing an organization from the inside: keeping it focused on the best opportunities, and finding where what the business needs lines up with how people and teams want to grow. Together we can do more.

At Snagajob we needed to cut vendor spend by 20%. I built an approach that let anyone find the best opportunities, not just my leads or me. Because all of us contributed, we cut spend by 49% in six months. It was not only a cost cut. We did it without raising the company’s exposure to risk or adding to anyone’s workload. We made both better. The full story is here.

People know me as empathetic, calm, adaptable and open.

• Empathetic. I love celebrating people and their goals, and matching those goals with what the business needs. It is what I look forward to most each day, especially celebrating wins.
• Calm. I challenge anyone to find a time I was not outwardly calm under pressure. My kids call me “the robot”, lovingly I think, because they never see me lose control.
• Adaptable. My whole career has been adapting to the situation to solve the problem in front of me. I have taken on huge projects to fix pain across an organization, and I have coached leaders to do the same. I am as comfortable in the weeds as at the high level, though I prefer business, strategy and leadership, where the outcomes are less predictable.
• Open. If we do not change, we cannot grow, as people or as a business. I value most the people who challenge the status quo. What could we do better? The best ideas can come from anyone, whatever their title.

How I lead

Servant leadership. I put the growth and well-being of my team, and of everyone else with a stake in the work, first. What drives me is getting others to succeed. I do want to grow my own career, but so that I can grow more people, at a bigger scale.

What I am most proud of

The project I am best known for at Snagajob is One Platform. It touched every employee in every department.

A mistake I learned from

A mistake is a chance to learn. Here are two of mine.

As a director. Shortly after I inherited a whole new engineering department, Engineering Operations, I wrote a LinkedIn post asking for advice on turning operations teams into product-driven teams. One of my new teams read it as a critique. They thought I believed they were broken.

I was lucky: the team’s lead told me how the team was feeling. I had not realized that team did not know it was part of the wider operations group. I went straight to the whole team and explained why I wrote the post and how the change could help them too. In the end, they said my miscommunication had made the team feel more united.

As a software engineer. My department was full of desktop application developers moving to the web. I designed a web framework that hid the differences. They could write code exactly as before, with all the same features, and without the slow, disruptive “post back”.

Technically, and for the team’s short-term productivity, I was rightly proud of it. Looking back, it was a terrible solution. When I left, the knowledge of how the custom framework worked left with me. And the developers were no better at web development than before. I traded a short-term gain for a bigger long-term cost. I am so sorry!