Learn more about my experience in Engineering and Leadership

I have worn many different hats, and this unique mix of experience is what sets me apart. Having direct hands-on experience in many disciplines (Marketing, Finance, Operations etc) helps to speak a common language with key stakeholders outside of Product and Engineering.

I'm a manager who cares about people, first and foremost, and believe that my empathy is just as valuable as my technical skills.

Resume Manager Readme

New Knowledge

Engineering Manager

I was the first Engineering Manager hire, which allowed me to institute a variety of processes and structure around people management - recruiting, hiring, interviewing, onboarding, career progression, team structure and more.

With it being an early stage startup, I still got chances to implement a lot of different technical structure and best practices as well, such as configuring our workflows with CircleCI. Improving Engineering Quality of Life is a key principle of mine.

In total, I manage 10 direct reports across multiple cross functional teams, making up the entirety of what we consider Product Engineering, including some other front-line managers, team leads and individual contributors.

Cratejoy

Engineer > Lead > Engineering Manager

At Cratejoy I wore many hats, quickly progressing as an IC, naturally picking up lead responsibilities and eventually transitioning into full time management.

During various phases I acted as defacto Product Manager for teams and projects, especially in more experimental areas where MVP concepts and rapid iteration were key.

My favorite project during this time was the recommendations system I built (and blogged about). I carried it from initial inception to prototype and ultimately to production where it had a significant impact on revenue, and (more importantly) customer LTV.

Before all of that, I started a couple of businesses:

Ant Bytes Softworks

I bootstrapped this company myself because of my love of small business, and wanted to share tools that had helped my first business to grow. The tools were primarily focused on marketing, inventory management, order fulfillment and other critical aspects of small business operations.

One of my clients acquired the code base to use exclusively for their internal system.

JB Outdoors (Brown Lures)

A brand of saltwater fishing lures that I literally started out of a garage. Through creative marketing and use of technology, I was able to grow retail distribution to 80+ stores, with Academy Sports + Outdoors in particular.

Our revenues doubled each year for 3 consecutive years, before being hit (seemingly) back to back by the BP oil spill (Deepwater Horizon) and Hurricane Ike, both of which were very detrimental to fishing in the Gulf Coast. I was ultimately able to steer things back on track and profitably sell the business in time, but it was a difficult road and a very formidable period of time for me.