Inspiration for this website
When I think back to 2011 after I graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I didn’t have a job lined up. My major was in Communications, and even though I focused on Media Studies, it was still very broad. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my career. I was interested in photography at the time and applied to a job to take school portraits. As a student, I was a part time bus driver with a CDL license and briefly thought it would be cool to work for Boston Duck Tours. I majored in Communications because I wanted to be a sports anchor for ESPN or for one of the local Boston sports channels and applied to television roles. Several of my communications professors, Professor Benjamin Baily, Professor Anne Cieko, Professor Claudio Moreira, Professor Lisa Henderson, and Professor Sut Jhally among others all left a mark on me as an undergraduate student and I really considered going back to my Alma Mater and pursue a Master’s Degree in Communications and eventually become a Communications professor. However, as someone who tinkered with computers from a young age, I was always good at solving computer problems and everything changed one summer day when I applied to a technology position on Craigslist.
In August of 2011, just about three months after graduating, I interviewed for a position to be an internet technical support specialist for a Nationwide Internet service provider. Based on the Craigslist ad that I saw, I seriously thought I was interviewing for a computer tech support job at a local mom/pop shop. So I was very surprised when I pulled up to a corporate building that employed over fifteen-hundred people. The person who interviewed me was the Assistant Manager of the department and he gave me my first career opportunity. To this day, I am very grateful for the opportunity I was given to begin my career. Thanks Adam.
During the first year of my career, I sharpened my skills and technical knowledge to the point where I was one of the go to experts on the team despite my short tenure. Then the part of me that wanted to go back to school to become a professor kicked in. There was a very disorganized and inconsistent way that the department did training. I saw this as an opportunity for myself to create a formal training class that could train any amount of people that would start at a given time. After a few months of work creating the content, it was launched and became a huge success. Everyone coming into the department would now receive the same formal training on all that was required to do the job before they even sat with anyone for shadowing. They were better equipped to succeed and to this day, some of that content I created is still in use despite many iterations over the past ten years. The reason I am proud of this accomplishment is not just because I saw an opportunity to improve something and knocked it out of the park, but because it made a positive impact on my teammates careers. This hard work payed off when the managers of my team asked me to join them in management and I was promoted to the position of supervisor.
My time as a supervisor was amazing. I was able to manage the most amazing people and help them progress in their careers and even lead some of them into management and engineering positions. To me, my relationship with my direct reports was the most important aspect of being a supervisor. At work, there was no greater joy than being able to watch them grow and flourish personally, technically and professionally. I was with my first company for five years, three of those years in management, before I decided that it was time for me to look for a different challenge. I found that challenge as an individual contributor at a local healthcare software company. One thing I knew that I was going to miss was the manager to employee interaction and relationship building that I enjoyed so much. But I told myself that when the time was “right,” I was going to start sharing my experiences personally and professionally on the web and try to impact people beyond just my social circle.
As soon as I joined my second company, there was so much to learn. I started working with different technology that I did not work with professionally before. On top of learning all the technical things, I jumped at every opportunity to work on any projects that came to my team. These odds tasks ranged anywhere from updating and eventually helping overhaul a Disaster Recovery Plan for the team to becoming a pseudo Product Manager to take our private status page and make it a public product for tens of thousands of customers to consume. That was my first taste of Product Management and I was hooked. There was something about the role that blended technical expertise, cross team and customer collaboration and defining and organizing the work necessary for successful deployment of the product that seemed to blend all my experiences and skills together. This is when I knew that I wanted to become a Product Manager. This was all put on hold when my manager approached me with an offer become a manager on my current team. After some deliberation, I made the decision to accept the offer.
Over five and a half years have passed since I joined my second company, three years since I helped launch the public facing status page for our customers, two and a half years since I became a people manager again. This management experience has been very different from my previous one. I’ve even been able to continue to do some product management responsibilities for one of our sister teams. However, my time is primarily spent on people management and I long for the day that an opportunity for product management comes my way.
My personal life has changed so much in that time span as well. I met the person who would become my wife. We bought our first house together and got married shortly after. The world is still going through a global pandemic. We welcomed a beautiful baby boy into our family in 2021. Our baby boy faced some medical issues and needed to have open heart surgery at two and a half months of age. With everything that has happened in 2016, I’ve finally realized that there is never going to be a “right” time to start my dream of sharing my experiences with a broader audience online.
As author James Clear says in his book Atomic Habits, “Some people spend their entire lives waiting for the time to be right to make an improvement.” I won’t let that be me. I want to continue my journey to become the best version of myself, to be a better person, better employee, better husband and better father. This website is the start of that dream to help make a positive impact on people beyond my social circle. So here I am, starting this exciting journey to share my personal and professional experiences online for everyone to read. If even one person can find value in anything that I share, then I will have already achieved what I set out to do.
