I made a pivot and stepped out of running product delivery teams and managing product managers. I doubled down on my high performing open source and innovation team. Along with the VP of Product we formed a new department and moved to focus on rapid innovation and win-wins in a single team environment collaborating across the enterprise. In the first couple months of working with this focus we identified and recovered millions of dollars in uncaptured revenue. This project is still earning us a significant amount of money month after month. Leading the engineers and collaborating with various executive stakeholders we build a SaaS platform written with PHP & Laravel to not only expose features but to help the customer along their journey. This system understands the customer, WordPress instance, environment and the general health of each of those things.Managing a unique team of high performers is very different from an average scrum team and we have refined our process to maximize impact, remove impediments, and always deliver value on time for the customer, community, and the business.* Consulting executive business partners from various organizations throughout the business on technical and product strategy* Collaborating with business development on strategic partnerships and acquisitions* Directing data efforts to enable the architecture of a new SaaS platform to provide targeted & customized experiences to customers* Managing a team of high performers who lead & consult various teams in the businessIdentifying high impact areas of the business and finding solutions that align with the reward* Enabling systems team to maintain customer systems by surfacing health dimensions and metrics

At this time I was in charge of hiring new high performing engineers with a mixed skillset to build a dream team with very high expectations. After building the team I was overseeing a full scrum high performing product delivery team, a Product Manager w/ two scrum teams, and leading my newly formed engineering team (open source focused) for a total of about 30 employees at my direction. We coordinated complex cross team dependencies to meet our commitments and exceed our goals. During this time the product delivery team that I lead doubled their velocity and efficiency to become the top performing product delivery team in the company.The open source team I assembled contributed over 2000 contributions to the WordPress project, 2 team members received commit access, spoke at over 50 conferences in 2 years, organized community events from meetups to conferences, and are the face of the company to further our good corporate citizenship intentions.* Interviewed & hired a highly skilled team of Engineers to accelerate the business goals and contribute to open source projects* Directed roughly 30 individual contributors and other leaders* Coordinating complex dependencies across teams and departments* Met deadlines & exceeded project goals* Enabled over 2000 contributions to open source projects, 50 conference presentations, and organized community events by team members* Furthered the good corporate citizenship focus and perception of the brand to the community* Delivered revenue through product deliver* Positively impacted customer churn & success rates

Promoted to Group Product Manager and received direct reports. I continued to lead my focused and high performing product delivery team while mentoring a new Product Manager and enabling them to organize backlogs, prepare roadmaps, and define outcomes and KPIs for initiatives on their teams as well as how to see through the noise and implement balanced resource allocation between moving forward and maintaining existing systems.* Managed direct reports who were leading product delivery teams* Mentored Product Managers* Defined outcomes & KPIs for teams & initiatives * Balanced moving the software forward and maintain existing systems* Continued to lead a high performing product delivery team working on mission critical projects* Business lead on call for incidents

Taking the in-depth knowledge of WordPress, I made a shift to an internal focused role to help grow the brand and build some noticeably missing features on the Bluehost platform. During this time I wrote plugins, tools, centralized systems, and decentralized codebases utilized by millions of sites. I had to balance planning and execution with being on my toes to address critical time sensitive problems. Much of the software I wrote during this time is still running in production today. During this time I reported to the VP of Product.* Managing distributed software* Planned, executed, and iterated on innovative solutions to customer and business problems* Developed custom plugins* Developed custom themes* Developed update processes for distributed code* Developed centralized systems to monitor churn* Designed and utilized APIs to build bridge between central platform and distributed software* Collaborated and implemented an advanced cache structure and management tools that improved avg performance to sub 1 second* High pressure & high impact situations affecting millions of sites* Participated in security incidents as a technical lead when the subject was WordPress

Taking the knowledge I had started to build, I took on the role of directing product teams that worked on WordPress focused initiatives. I was active in setting the vision for WordPress at Bluehost, breaking the work down into phases, and enabling the teams to execute. My contributions in this area let me leverage my technical knowledge and insights gained from WordCamp conferences paired with a growing understanding of business needs and complexities to find win-win-win situations. This often involved coordinating with our 3rd party partners and other organizations in the business to find & define those wins.* Cultivated the vision for the WordPress product* Identified the win-win-win situations and exceeded KPIs* Planned and developed roadmaps for Product Deliver teams and turned those into actionable prioritized backlogs* Enabled my Product Delivery team to become the most productive team in the organization* Leveraged my technical & community knowledge to accelerate development* Collaborated w/ critical partnerships to implement high quality integrations

During my time working as an open source engineer at Bluehost primarily on the WordPress project I learned an incredible amount of skills ranging from not only technologies like PHP, JS, and MySQL but professional skills like community management, brand awareness, planning, facilitating, and complex environments. I learned about good corporate citizenship in open source projects and how tricky a project’s commitment to backward compatibility can be in practice but also why it is so critical. During my time as a contributor, I was able to contribute over 100 patches that were accepted into the WordPress core code base that run millions of sites today.* Technology at scale* Community management / evangelism* Importance of backward compatibility* Bug triage* 100+ patches accepted into the WordPress project* Project advocate inside the business* Subject matter expert consultant for internal projects* Attended community events and represented the business* Distributed software

During my time with UK2 I had a split workload between corporate work & client work, this meant I had to do a lot of context switching and documenting my current status to quickly pick a different project back up. My last two quarters in this role were two of the most profitable quarters (client work) in that departments history.Corporate WorkI would spend 50% of my time on corporate marketing sites and internal initiatives. These projects typically had a focus on increasing customer acquisition and increasing conversion rates. We leveraged analytics and custom reports to determine our impact. Client WorkWhen I would spend time on client work it included the full process of the project. I would often take an introduction call, listen to the customer, understand their goals. I would then determine the best solution with the given constraints and goals to return an accurate and details breakdown of time and cost. After a project would kick off, I would stay in contact with the client with regular updates until the project was delivered.

Focused on delivering WordPress sites with custom themes and custom plugins. Provided training with clients on using the marketing tools provided with their site (Newsletter, SMS, etc).

Production based environment, working in a team setting to figure out the most productive solutions for accomplishing goals. I worked my way onto a senior team because of my high production rate.