Bottom Line Up Front
I'm a servant leader who's spent the last decade building and scaling engineering teams from 5 to 40+ people across startups, Fortune 100 enterprises, and everything in between. Throughout my 20-year career, I've remained technically hands-on (including earning a Master's in data science in 2019 despite writing ML applications since 2003) because I believe the best results come when you never stop learning. My approach centers on empowering teams to deliver exceptional results: we've launched platforms used by hundreds of thousands of users, developed ML solutions that generated millions in revenue, and built systems that actually improve millions of people's lives. I'm happiest when my teams are thriving, solving meaningful problems, and creating impact that extends far beyond the codebase.
Leadership Philosophy
Leaders serve the team, so the team can serve the users, so the users can serve the customers. Empowering teams is about removing obstacles and respecting their knowledge of their own work. When engineers understand the "why" behind their work and are free to take a few calculated risks, the pride and growth they get from ownership over their work helps us all win together. A blameless environment that prioritizes flow and feedback shifts risk to the left and produces better team outcomes, which we should value over output.
My Approach
When leaders "Ask Questions, Repeat the Hard Parts, and Listen," they foster something powerful: a team that collectively understands where they currently stand, where they aim to go, and which actions will get them there. This shared vision is the cornerstone of effective change.
This approach aligns with Intentional Change Theory, which emphasizes creating a 'Positive Emotional Attractor' based on shared improvement rather than the 'Negative Emotional Attractor' driven by fear of punishment. The team can channel this positive team energy using the Theory of Constraints to identify and improve bottlenecks in an environment of psychological safety. Maintaining slack in delivery and limiting work-in-progress promotes sustainable flow, prevents burnout, and gives the team an opportunity to proactively approach technical debt.
For new products or teams, I facilitate Design Workshops where we establish the ubiquitous language of our product and develop personas that represent our users. We map these personas' journeys and align our value stream with their activities. For entirely new products, "How Might We" design sessions followed by usability testing of clickable prototypes can lower our design risk before a single line of code is written.
With mature systems, teams can leverage established user journeys to build and refine their backlogs, which get rendered into thin slices of Elephant Carpaccio. In Domain-Driven Design terminology, these slices create "bubble contexts" to systematically address technical debt while minimizing disruption.
Some technical practices that map to these beliefs include test-driven development, baking resiliency patterns into the product's design early, and where appropriate, Vertical Slice Architecture atop SOLID entities and behaviors. I value DORA metrics for measuring flow but am skeptical of most other code metrics. Most importantly, I caution against embedding our understanding of the product into rigid technical artifacts before the product achieves market fit.
This approach has repeatedly helped my teams deliver value incrementally while building sustainable systems that can evolve with changing business needs.
Scaling Organizations
My experience in scaling engineering organizations has taught me that growth isn't just about adding headcount; it's about building sustainable processes and a culture of growth — personal, team, and product — that allows increasing complexity while maintaining quality and developer-satisfaction scores.
I've been a team lead within, and a director over, departments scaling from 5-50 headcount. At Kabbage, a fintech unicorn since acquired by American Express, we maintained a weekly release cycle (three teams in staggered three-week sprints) while doubling our engineering capacity and reducing production incidents by 30%. In my consulting work, I've evolved a new account from a two-developer proof-of-concept up to 30 developers across four teams, delivering webapp revamps, mission-critical backends, and ML predictors.
My approach to scaling focuses on creating leverage through shared components, automated testing, and clear architectural boundaries, where interactions between systems are built first, not last. Investing in these foundations early pays dividends as teams grow. As Abe Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
Notable Accomplishments & Impact
Throughout my career, I've sought to deliver solutions that create substantial business value while making meaningful differences in people's lives.
Revolutionizing Postal Service Operations
I architected much of a mobile application platform for the US Postal Service that deployed to over 150,000 devices nationwide. Beyond the technical achievement, the platform created real human impact — ensuring seniors received mail-order medications and maintaining critical connections for rural communities. The platform's flexibility and pre-built assets allowed us to rapidly develop new applications, including one that statistically identified under-reporting of package size and weight by a major e-commerce retailer. This single application generated millions in annual revenue recovery and (I like to think) likely influenced the retailer's decision to develop their own delivery network.
Pioneering Sports Analytics
In 2003, the same year "Moneyball" was published, I developed one of the first machine learning applications for college football recruiting at the University of Alabama. By analyzing physical measurements, weight-room performance, and game statistics, we created models that predicted player development trajectories from high school through college and into the NFL. This system transformed the program's recruitment strategy, significantly reducing scouting costs while identifying overlooked talent — including one player who received no major college offers but eventually secured a national championship and $5 million NFL rookie contract.
Democratizing Small Business Financing
As an early engineer and eventual leader at Kabbage, I helped build a platform that revolutionized small business lending. Our technology enabled credit decisions in minutes rather than weeks, without relying on FICO score, reaching entrepreneurs traditional banks wouldn't serve. We developed sophisticated risk models that maintained profitability while expanding access to capital. This work directly supported the growth of thousands of small businesses, many of them first-time entrepreneurs, while creating a valuable dataset that powered additional SMB-focused products.
What's your story?
My path to technology leadership began in the coastal swamps of rural Alabama, where resourcefulness wasn't just valued—it was necessary. Growing up in a working-class family where my father worked factory shifts and my mother raised us at home, I learned early that creativity and problem-solving could overcome limited resources. When something broke, we fixed it — whether it was our home's plumbing or the family car. This hands-on approach to solving problems has influenced my leadership style to this day. My life changed when my grandfather saved for months to buy our family a Packard-Bell 486DX computer. Though he couldn't explain exactly how it would "make us smarter," he knew it represented opportunity. That computer opened a world of possibilities that transcended our small town's boundaries. I spent countless hours teaching myself to program, meticulously typing in code from computer magazines and modifying everything I could access. Software became my canvas for creation and exploration—a space where possibilities felt truly limitless.
I began working as soon as I was able, mowing lawns and helping at a local florist before landing a software internship at 16 through a scholarship opportunity. Throughout college, I continued programming professionally, a practical complement to my undergraduate research, and worked at the university's IT Office where I gained a bedrock foundation of user empathy by serving multi-lingual cutting-edge genius researchers who had trouble with ethernet and email.
My early career at a Microsoft-owned consultancy exposed me to development practices across dozens of industries and companies of all sizes. This experience proved invaluable when I later moved into leadership roles, as I could draw from a diverse playbook of approaches rather than being limited to a single mindset or methodology.
The transition to leadership wasn't one I initially sought—in fact, I initially resisted it at Kabbage. However, I discovered that building and guiding teams allowed me to create impact at a scale far beyond what I could achieve as an individual contributor. I found deep satisfaction in seeing team members grow professionally while delivering solutions that served ever-larger user communities.
What continues to drive me today is the combination of technical challenge and human impact. I'm energized by complex problems that require both technical innovation and organizational alignment to solve. But what gives this work meaning is knowing that the platforms and systems we build touch thousands or millions of lives—whether they're postal workers delivering essential medications, small business owners accessing capital for the first time, or consumers relying on supply chains that deliver what they need. This blend of technical passion, problem-solving mindset, and focus on human outcomes shapes my approach to leadership and continues to guide my career choices. I remain committed to building technology that matters, leading teams that thrive, and continuing to learn and grow at every step.