PinnedA Scalable Agile Planning and Delivery FrameworkIn an earlier post, I talked about structuring an organization as you scale. Another extremely common challenge that product organizations face when they scale is planning. Whether explicitly written down or not, every product organization has a process to decide what to build next. These planning processes can span from…Agile Development7 min readAgile Development7 min read
Pinned6 months at Coalition: The move from FAANG to high-growth startupI just hit my 6 month mark at Coalition where I run product development along with all things technical. When I joined, I wrote this post about why I decided to join Coalition after leaving Amazon Web Services (AWS). …5 min read5 min read
Nov 30, 2021Agile Planning Part 3 — Monitoring and OptimizingThis is the final post in my series on Agile Planning. In post 1, I described a simple and scalable agile planning process. In post 2, I showed the process in action with an example planning period. …Agile Development6 min readAgile Development6 min read
Nov 16, 2021Agile Planning Part 2 — An Agile Planning Framework in ActionIn my last post I introduced a simple, scalable agile planning process. I’ve used variants of this with success across my time at AWS and now Coalition with organizations up to several hundred developers. In this post, I will show an example planning period using our current implementation at Coalition. …Agile Development9 min readAgile Development9 min read
Oct 22, 2021One year at Coalition and counting: An insider’s view of insurtechIt’s hard to believe I’ve already been at Coalition for one year — what a ride it has been. At Coalition, we are hard at work solving cyber risk. Our approach is unique; we package cyber insurance with cybersecurity tools and services to protect our customers from digital risk. The…Insurtech5 min readInsurtech5 min read
Jan 31, 2021Building Effective Engineering CultureEssential elements for a happy and high performing engineering team — In this post, I want to talk about my views on engineering aspects of culture and what I believe are some key elements for building a high performing environment that engineers want to work in. The bulk of this post was adapted from material originally published on the Coalition, Inc…Software Engineering5 min readSoftware Engineering5 min read
Nov 12, 2020How to Scale your Agile Software OrganizationMy past few posts have been about things I learned while running services at AWS. These next few will be a bit different. I wanted to provide a kind of blueprint for building scalable agile software organizations. …Software Development8 min readSoftware Development8 min read
Oct 19, 2020What I learned about hiring at AWSThis is the second installment in my “what I learned” at AWS series. In my first post, I covered culture and the mechanisms that reinforce and scale it. This time I want to cover hiring. It was one of my bigger adjustments when joining AWS. It was also totally unexpected…AWS6 min readAWS6 min read
Oct 8, 2020What I learned about culture at AWSI worked at Amazon for the last six years running Monitoring and Observability services for Amazon Web Services (AWS). Without a doubt, I learned more over this time than at any other point in my career. …Amazon4 min readAmazon4 min read
Oct 5, 2020Why I left Amazon and joined CoalitionI recently made the difficult decision to leave Amazon Web Services to run engineering for a later stage startup, Coalition. So many people have expressed curiosity about my decision that I felt it was worth exploring in a bit more depth. …AWS6 min readAWS6 min read
