Product Engineering Leader
previously CTO @ Statusphere, CEO at Code Hangar
Helping early-stage startups build high-velocity product engineering orgs that drive innovation and achieve product-market-fit.
Expertise-Driven Innovation
With over a decade of experience in early-stage startups, I bring unparalleled expertise in guiding remote teams, driving technological innovation, and achieving key business milestones such as traction, product-market fit, funding, and revenue. My technical proficiency spans full-stack web application engineering, with a special focus on creating secure, scalable solutions and fostering front-end and back-end excellence.
Customized Strategic Solutions
Through deep contextual insight, I align closely with your mission and vision, tailoring agile product development strategies that minimize risk, expedite market entry, and maximize customer satisfaction. My approach balances current needs with your future trajectory, ensuring solutions are not only relevant today but scalable for tomorrow.
Agile Leadership and Execution
As a seasoned product engineering leader with CEO and CTO experience, I champion an agile, documentation-driven process that emphasizes transparency, collaboration, and continuous delivery. By leading regular sprint planning, providing weekly updates, and employing data-driven methodologies, I ensure projects stay on track, align with goals, and adapt to evolving market demands.
Impactful Outcomes
My ultimate promise is to deliver tangible results that drive your startup's success—demonstrating traction, securing funding, achieving product-market fit, and generating revenue. By fostering an empowered team culture, leveraging strategic solution design, and implementing agile execution, I guide your venture through rapid change and high-velocity development, ensuring a path to operational efficiency, innovation, and product excellence.
As a product engineering leader with CTO and CEO experience, I've worked almost exclusively with early-stage startups since 2015 when I quit my 9-5 app dev job to start a software business with my friends.
Our company was called Code Hangar and our specialty was our 8-Week MVP. We were 5 mostly software engineers, all wearing multiple hats to help the business succeed. As CEO I closed all of our contracts, collaborated with founders to define their MVP, designed the application interfaces, worked with the lead architect on database schema, APIs, and infrastructure, was hands-on building out full-stack features, all while managing the team and driving our release timelines. I LOVED IT.
Our go-to stack included Google Material UI, React, Node.js, AWS, Postgres, Github, CirclCI. We integrated with 3rd-party vendors including Stripe, Twilio, Hubspot, Wordpress, Google, Facebook to name a few. Customer highlights include Career Fair Plus, Fleat, and Statusphere.
What loved most about Code Hangar was that it allowed me to work with 2-3 startups at a time, which provided a lot of perspective on what works and what doesn't depending on context. It taught me to always hold some healthy suspicion when adopting any "best practice". I loved the high-frequency learning environment Code Hangar offered and I loved that my team was always striving to do our best work through constantly changing contexts. And still, I was curious to see what my team could accomplish if given the opportunity to focus.
Code Hangar exceeded $1.5M in revenue over 5 years, peaking at $40k monthly recurring revenue, until I accepted an offer from Statusphere to join as their full time CTO in 2020. My role at Statusphere was an extension of a 1-year part-time contract with Code Hangar. I brought my whole team with me so we were able to tear through the product roadmap to build out Statusphere's 2-sided brand-creator marketplace.
To be continued... :)
Right now, I'm working with a seed-stage fintech startup on some data automations to support their customer success team, as well as leading information and application security efforts as they integrate with a new partner bank to offer their customers a branded debit card.
I'm currently available for another fractional product engineering role. If you'd like to work with me, please book a call to discuss your product engineering challenges.
