Jack of all trades…
…master of none—pretty much sums up my foray into web development two years ago. I learned HMTL, CSS, Ruby, Rails, SASS, Git, Photoshop, Illustrator and much more. Predictably, I didn’t become a full-time developer, nor did I build the next $1B business. However, it was an invaluable—if humbling—experience that has helped me in many other ways.
Most recently, as a Product Manager at Mint, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a talented team. Roles at Mint are well defined. We have web-ops, architects, front-end engineers, back-end engineers, QA engineers, experience designers, and visual designers. My experience as a full-stack contributor helped me develop an understanding and appreciation for each of these roles. However, before I was wearing all these hats simultaneously, and doing a poor job I might add. Today, I can count on a group of professionals to execute much better than I ever could.
So while my web development experience helped me build empathy and understanding into the effort of building a software product soup-to-nuts, it also helped me understand the importance of assembling a talented team. It truly does take a village.
Clearly, great teams make great products. With that in mind, I’d like to thank the talented engineers, designers and architects I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the last two years. You make great things possible. I’d especially like to thank Yutaka Hosai (back-end), Kevin Urrutia (front-end) and Ilana Eliran (design) for their help with writegreen.org. As part of an Intuit wide innovation competition, they helped me give writegreen a much needed enhancement. Without their unique skills and talents, the writegreen app would not be what it is today. Check out their great work: writegreen.org