Product Management
Product Management is the intersection of business, technology and user experience. Product Management answers the question of how do I connect the problems customers have in the market to a solution our business can provide down to the requirements necessary for engineering to build and the design necessary to create a delightful experience. My super power is my ability to work across teams to identify the highest impact work to drive results. This is because I’m a voracious reader, highly technical and love to learn new concepts quickly. My process is simple, read about and implement the technology, speak to all internal stakeholders cross-functionally, and speak to the customers with a strong understanding of the technology our business and theirs. From there, take notes and prioritize the highest impact work!
Site Reliability Engineering
Site Reliability Engineering is about building and scaling distributed systems to meet the needs of a globally scaled business. Ownership, culture and technical excellence along with a strong dose of courage are requirements for success. Regarding SRE, I was one of the few employees at a Fortune 500 that had root access to a $2b+ IaaS. I went on to invent a new distributed system that was supported by Principal Engineers, Product Management and frankly, the whole corporation. That work lead me to my career in Product.
Technical Support
Technical support is about the immediate and ongoing break/fix of a system along with the supporting customer experience that accompanies it. Strong empathy, technical excellence, deep care and boundaries determine success. My work as a technical support engineer included fielding calls from production down hospitals, working with market making technologies like Kubernetes and both on-prem and cloud based infrastructure. That work lead to my career in Site Reliability Engineering.