I’ll be sharing various things I’ve created, articles I’ve written, media appearances, and content from over the years.
Product Management
Many of these are proprietary products that I worked on for my employer, so I’ll have to keep it general enough to respect the intellectual property owners. These write-ups should give you a good sense of the kind of applications I’ve worked on.
HR Software – Helping Employees Develop their Skills and Navigate their Career Growth at Work
Technologies: .NET Core, React, GraphQL, Aurora MySQL
Innovations: Using a machine-learning model to predict employee skills, proficiency levels, and job matches based on data collected from over 250 million user profiles
Challenges: Customer education, managing interdependencies with over 10 downstream features that consumed our APIs, maintaining momentum over a 2+ year development timeline.
Fintech – White-Label / Embeddable Spend Management Application
Technologies: React, Typescript, Go, CockroachDB
Innovations: Fully white-labeled components, new real-time budgeting system
Challenges: Creating a new sub-category, rebuilding connector to card issuer processor, creating new tools for customer management
Manufacturing/ERP – Containing Defective Hardware Across a Large, Complex Operation
Technologies: Angular, C#, REST API, Entity Framework, MSSQL
Innovations: Shipping a fully-featured, well-documented Public API with a thin client (built for substantial third-party use).
Challenges: Migrating data from a debt-ridden schema, keeping the coupling between connected applications to a minimum.
Manufacturing/ERP – Document Management System for Manufacturing Specification Authors
Technologies: Angular, C#, REST API, Entity Framework, MSSQL
Innovations: Creating an application that can take in documents from multiple heterogeneous authoring tools. We also built a handy document diagnostic tool to help catch negative downstream impacts, formatting issues, and bad metadata before release.
Challenges: Working around the substantial technical debt of the existing system, choosing the right transaction scope for the service layer.
Manufacturing/ERP – Root Cause Analysis Toolkit for Quality Engineers
Technologies: Angular, C#, REST API, Entity Framework, MSSQL
Innovations: Integration between a custom ERP and Confluence for Analysis Notes, notifications for recurring similar defects using a relatedness algorithm.
Challenges: Striking the balance between rigid, structured workflows and providing the freedom for users to get the knowledge out of their head and into the application.
SaaS/Professional Services – Project Management Application for Consulting Firms
Technologies: Kendo, Custom JS, ASP.NET, C#, REST API, MSSQL
Innovations: Too many to count. Developed a custom task message syntax (think # and @ on Twitter) to enable rapid metadata entry that was intuitive for users. Created a zero-adoption product that worked in email without any signup (think of ical invites for assigning tasks). The user experience was the most tactile, playful productivity tool in its class.
Challenges: Not every screen and “mode” of the application was as fluid as the core experience.
SaaS/Professional Services – Work Collaboration Mobile Application
Technologies: Objective-C (iOS) using our public REST API
Innovations: Seamless flow from email into the mobile app, plus a ton of delightful animations.
Challenges: It was very difficult to pare down the features from the desktop application, while providing a simple, engaging experience.
Healthcare – Clinical Trials Tracking Software
Technologies: Bootstrap, Laravel (PHP), REST API, MySQL
Innovations: Clever Excel import tool to handle cases not supported in the UI.
Challenges: For reasons unrelated to technology, large parts of the business process could not be automated or digitized right away.
Digital Media – Custom Content Management Admin Tool for Large Digital Media Network
Technologies: JQuery, PHP, MySQL
Innovations: Combined a publishing calendar, configurable voting algorithm, explicit content filter, and WYSIWYG image captioning tool. Lots of saved time!!
Challenges: We had to build, test, and validate this without disrupting the day-to-day sites, which were receiving over 10 million pageviews each month.
Press
Chicago Tribune, Chicago, B2B shine in Techstars’ new class
Chicago Tribune, Technori event looks at what’s beyond the cloud
Built in Chicago, 50 Chicago Startups to Watch in 2016
Chicago Inno, Introducing the 150 Nominees for Chicago Inno’s 50 on Fire
Chicago Inno, How Techstars Member Tribe Is Making it Easier to Get Things Done Over Email
Videos
WGN’s Tomorrow’s Business Today