Greater Toronto Area, Canada
My love of shippping product and coaching folks has always worked well in startups. The current trend in tech companies for people to be closer to the work aligns so well with how I approach work. Makes we optimistic for days when anyone in a company can design, ship, and test improvements. My other biggest responsibility is being Primary Parent to my two young boys. Many folks have asked me "What do you mean by Primary Parent?" The quick answer: "By default, if something needs to happen for the kids it falls to me. For example, I am the person who packs the kids lunches, picks them up from school, arranges doctors appointments, takes them clothing shopping, and stay home with them on sickdays. " Reach out if my startup or technical coaching can be helpful or you want to ask about my experience as a Primary Parent.
Working with a maximum of three companies, I help teams ship their first products -- two SaaS, two Generative AI powered. Advising looks different at each company, but a few things I do stay the same. 1. Help build/architect the first version of the software or design the data for their AI systems. 2. Encourage more calls with customers to build trust and deeply understand their problems. 3. Ruthless push to cut features to reduce time-to-market. 4. Advise on AI strategy. The best moments are customers' feedback about the software improving their jobs! So many industries still need great software; let's keep building. The industries I focused on: Fisheries, Publishing, and Team Wellness.
Joining a venture-backed mission-driven company has been an amazing experience. Having an opportunity to transform the lives of Makers around the world is something that really resonated with me. Day-to-day, I wear two hats at Powered By People: VP of Engineering (team of 13 developers) Head of Product (team of 4 product managers) At our stage, with 40+ people, it is so important to improve team effectiveness. Just adding asynchronous communication techniques and lightweight process improvements delivers amazing return on investments.
Being the first technical hire at integrate.ai was exciting! Having been a part of five startups, the energy and potential in the early days are always amazing. We have built a team with aligned values -- the team is both high-performance and kind/supportive. Here is a list of my roles at integrate.ai: Principal Product Manager — introduced a new machine learning product to help companies boost their model performance with privacy-persevering 2nd-party data. During this role, I led the recruitment of our five alpha customers and the rollout with each customer. The tech of the product includes federated learning, differential privacy, structure transparency, and thinking about the opportunities these technologies provide. The Alpha, wich had five companies from different industries, went from ideation to launch in 4 months! Engineering Manager -- stepped into this role after a re-org to help support a new manager supporting five engineers. This included mentoring the new manager, helping to redesign our rituals and 1-1s. During this time, I also continued my Principal Engineer role with our biggest customer. Principal Engineer which included lots of time with customers, getting machine learning models into production. This includes doing the sales engineering role, working with privacy teams, building data pipelines, designing feedback loops, feature engineering on models, and of course reporting! Side Note: reporting is always tough with these systems!
Consulted with a number of startups on many aspects of their business. The areas with the most impact: - data analytics and machine learning (reducing churn) - new customer acquisition through AdWords - new product development - hiring One of the most fun was Woodscamp (acquired) focused on better forestry management. They started by combing all the Nova Scotia forest data with property lines for better