I’ll be the first to admit it: Engineering wasn’t my first love. That distinction was reserved for singing. All of my degrees are in singing. I met my wife singing. I spent years immersing myself in the music scene, moving to New York and DC, doing auditions, and generally trying to make it.
Quite frankly, engineering was my backup — a way to stay afloat and support my singing career. But here’s the thing: I was really good at it.
I started as a temp but was quickly hired as a “Senior Internet Developer.” I dabbled in open-source projects on the side, applied for my first job at a startup, and eventually became a team lead. I enjoyed being the person others felt comfortable leaning on and learning from, and I enjoyed developing tools that made other software engineers’ lives easier.
Slowly but surely, engineering became my second love. I worked at companies like Canonical, Heroku, and Manifold, refining my management skills, deepening my core engineering knowledge, and developing a greater sense of how businesses (big and small) work. And eventually, that’s what brought me to Kard.
I had successfully led a team at Snyk building out key platform tools and was promoted to lead an entire branch of the business when it became clear that the new branch wasn't doing so hot. And soon, I was laid off. Although I was disappointed at first (being laid off really stinks), I saw it as an opportunity to branch out into a totally new space and build the kind of team I wanted to lead from the ground up.
Why Kard? Product, stage, and people
My approach is not run-of-the-mill (more on that later). So I wanted to know going in that the product I was working on was innovative, the company was at an exciting stage, and I'd have empathetic leaders backing me.
Transparently, Kard was the first company that seemed to meet all three of my requirements:
- It’s an API product made mostly for developers — my sweet spot.
- It’s at a really pivotal stage. Going from Series A to Series B is a crucial jump, and I wanted to shape the environment, culture, and product that would take Kard to the next level.
- It’s got great leadership. The CEO and COO are stand-up folks with good business and people skills. You don’t find that every day.
As soon as I went through the beginning stages of the interview process, I knew I was in the right place.
How I build teams that ship awesome things
I like to say that my job is to make a really effective team that builds the kinds of features customers have always wanted. And my joy is to develop a team that people love to work on and are happy to be a part of. Let me enlighten you.
To do my job: I preach three things.
The first two are fairly common: continuous improvement and iterative delivery. If we can ship something small that’s going in the right direction, I’d rather do that first and then enhance it. That way, the customer gets at least something they’ve been asking for, knowing they’ll get the full shebang later.
These are not new concepts, but the third, and perhaps most important, principle I teach is more unconventional: business-aligned autonomy.
In my opinion, developers must care about the business, understand the business, and be connected to the business to make good choices that move the company forward — especially in Kard’s current state of growth.
I cultivate this attitude by employing an adapted version of the “Shape Up” method. Any new ideas our engineers pitch must solve a legitimate problem our customers face and must deliver true business value. That means I expect them to do some background research, collaborating with product, design, data, support, finance, and go-to-market, to deeply understand that issue and how they can bring a reasonable solution to production.
To achieve my joy: I hire the right people.
To me, joy comes from great execution, from being a part of something bigger than yourself and doing it well. So:
- If I expect my team to apply their full imagination and intelligence to their work — and not just wait for the next ticket to show up — I have to hire for intrinsic motivation.
- If I expect my team to work together and collaborate in the fast-changing environment of a startup, I need to find engineers who are highly coachable and who respect others.
- If I expect my team to do good work, I must build a mix of engineers ranging from those who are highly competent at what they do to those who can quickly grow towards that expertise.
Powering Kard’s growth by balancing efficiency and exploration
We’re sitting on a very powerful opportunity at Kard — to drastically improve issuer and merchant back-end operations and to make loyalty rewarding for the end consumer. But to rise to the challenge, we’ll need to (1) find ways to scale and (2) leverage our data.
Scaling the business while maintaining a lean team
We’ve already experienced a lot of growth in the business, and we’re about to experience a lot more. This presents some fun challenges — particularly because we’re trying to keep the engineering team really lean.
To triple our output without inflating the team means we’ll have to:
- Invest in the right automation
- Remain extremely security and compliance-conscious
- Constantly push ourselves to work more intelligently
We’ve been incorporating more retrospectives to identify inefficient processes and suggest ways to fix them. I anticipate this practice to go even deeper in the future.
Going farther faster with data
I’m super excited about the data we have at Kard — the trends that come out of analyzing millions of consumer transactions a day are incredibly fascinating. And there’s more we can do and connect with our datasets.
We’ve made huge strides in the past three to four months, and we are hiring more analysts and ML experts to delve into new insights and capabilities. This work will not only help us improve our customers’ back-office workflows but also make their offers more targeted and rewarding for end consumers. We’ll also use data to anticipate innovation in the industry and delve into a broader world of rewards as we expand our product beyond card-linked offers.
Expanding the R&D team’s horizons
We’re at an inflection point at Kard and ready to take some big swings. Looking for an opportunity to stretch your wings?
We’re excited to hear from you.
Please check out our open product and engineering roles to see what positions might fit the unique skills and experience you bring to the table. And check out our guide to interviewing while you’re at it — we want you to come into the process knowing what to expect.
