Just over a year ago, I made the leap from a leadership role at Zillow to CTO at Lessen. It’s been a wild ride ever since. In just one year, we’ve grown Lessen from an early stage, seed-funded company with a modest $19M valuation and 50 employees to a $1B…

I recently partnered with Product School to give a talk on my approach to planning and execution of software development. I really enjoyed the session and the lively discussion that followed. The attendees shared their experiences, asked some thoughtful questions and I hope walked away with some good takeaways. Here…

When it comes to work, there’s nothing better than being a part of a high-performing team firing on all cylinders, cranking through projects, overcoming challenges and having fun along the way. It can be equally demotivating to be on a team where everyone is dragging themselves into the office for…

A common decision point engineers, designers, data scientists, PMs and many other professionals are eventually faced with is whether to stay on the individual contributor (IC) path or work toward a manager career path. Years ago, the only way to advance your career in most company structures was to become…

If you are a software startup leader, Product Manager (PM), Engineering Manger (EM) or anyone who wants to get their product and engineering team executing more predictably, more efficiently and with less stress, this post is for you. While there are countless tools and software out there for managing your…

If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a healthy list of non-pressing, but important goals that you’d love to accomplish, but never find the time. The list probably spans both work and personal life and is comprised of a lot of endeavors that would take our life and productivity to…

On the surface, it seems obvious that we would leverage software that has already been built if it suits our needs. The underlying theory behind open source software and service-oriented architecture are, at least in part, based on this principal. In a similar vein, there was an article that got…