I've spent the last couple years at a small startup, StatusPage, following my passion for building engineering teams. There I was able to explore all aspects of what's required to run a growing, successful business and how best to craft an engineering team to fit.Prior to that I spent nine years building state of the art software development tools at Atlassian. Most recently, I led the development and operations teams for Bitbucket. Together with my team, we grew the site from 40 thousand to 2 million users, grew our storage array from 4 to 400 terabytes, all while pushing the envelope of software development practices with Git. I was the lead developer on JIRA for five years during which I created JQL (JIRA Query Language).As a leader, I find you must love your product and your team. You must have a vision of success and be articulate in your communication of that vision. You must sweat the details. You must inspire as well as hold accountable. You must lead by example and have a strong understanding of the technology. You must understand your costs. Most of all, you must build and ship quality code, early and often, that solves the right problem.