My Tech Work History

Product experience

I am a product-focused engineer. Or an engineering-focused product manager.

2013-2022: Boarddocs Policy - For most of the last decade, I was building a Policy Management solution for the K-12 market. I started more on the 'engineer' side of the fence, but grew to be almost 100% on the 'product' side, acting as product owner for the last couple years of this role.
I coded the initial idea into an MVP in 3 weeks, then spent a year travelling the country, meeting with potential customers, and extending the feature set until we had a product that met most needs of most customers.
We then rolled in a steady state for a few years - adding features, enhancing UX, growing until we were acquired and integrated into a larger company.
I left, but after a while was asked to return and continued to evolve the product, guiding a new dev team to replatform the product to a new stack and integrate with the larger business.

2022 - Present: Topcoder - A couple years ago, I moved to Topcoder built a new SaaS product intended to bring their competitive software model into enterprise organizations. I coded the initial MVP, worked to expand the product and worked as we built a team who ran with it, with a few hundred organizations signing up over the course of the next year.
It didn't land well enough to continue as-is, so we are now reworking all the tech across the company to re-launch a 20 year old organization with a newer, sharper focus that better matches the current reality.  

Next? - I'm OK where I am, but also open to something new - reach out to me at hikingdave @ gmail.com if you think I may be able to help you out.