About

I was given the opportunity to lead a new team for a challenging project, and given free reign to conduct the project as I pleased. I worked together with the team to discover what process would work best for us and our goals, and we established a way of working that eschewed many of the rituals and processes held sacrosanct by many developers and managers. Using this technique, were able to produce brand new valuable software in just a couple of weeks that served an area of the company that was left neglected for years, and continued to iterate to give them exactly what they needed for week after week, and became the model of productivity in our organization.

Our way of working was able to maximize the creativity of the developers on the team, and we came up with new innovations for our company on both a technical and product level. Some of the innovations brought forth in that project were noticed by, and copied by other teams in our organization. Even though they had ample access to the data, knowledge, and techniques before, our approach fostered the innovation necessary for these improvements to become reality.

I took an undocumented, underbaked process of recruitment and rebuilt it from the ground up, taking into account the unique opportunities and challenges our company required. We were limited in the kinds of offers we could give candidates by our company structure, so the challenge was to attract candidates who would otherwise not accept that kind of contract. I created a comprehensive hiring plan that established processes, goals, strategies, and heurisitcs for identifying and hiring candidates who met our specific needs. I assembled a team to conduct the interviews, and together we iterated and improved the process. Some of these improvements included reducing bad candidates at the top of the funnel, slimming down the process to improve efficiency, and identifying the best candidates early on so they could be pursued more efficiently.

I'm most proud of identifying, attracting, and hiring three of our top performers, whose unique backgrounds didn't fit the typical mould of what most companies look for. I was able to verify this later by talking to them, and finding out that we were the only company to give them an offer.

Working for a media company, our customer-facing product didn't always have new features to develop, but we had an extensive set of tools for our employees and contractors. With limited engineering resources, I lead an initiative to create and improve internal tools. I personally handled the entire cycle of shadowing my co-workers, interviewing them, making workflow improvement suggestions, designing and implementing these ideas, and gathering feedback. Through this process I was able to radically reduce workloads through automation, improve coordination by introducing collaboration tools, and improve visibility by creating dashboards.