For over fifteen years I have helped build great teams and products.
I co-founded a startup where I built the product from the ground up. I've worked at a digital agency where I helped build ideas for startup founders, mid-sized companies, Fortune 500 companies, and everything in between.
I excel in fast-paced and dynamic work environments and am intrigued by companies that are driven by mission and purpose.
Let's build something incredible together.
San Diego, CA | 2021 - present | flowspeak.io
I co-founded FLOW Speak in 2021. FLOW Speak helps non-native English speakers improve their speaking skills and build the confidence they need to be successful in school and their career. As part of my role as CTO, I built the entire platform and worked alongside my co-founder and CEO to define business strategy and drive sales.
Highlights of my work include:
Houston, TX | 2008 - 2020 | poetic.io
Poetic is a digital agency based in Houston, TX. When I started, it was just the founder and myself. At that time, I was a developer building web apps for customers.
As the company grew, I took on more responsibilities and my role progressed. We hired a few more developers and I moved into leading that team. After some time, I started doing project management, then moved into a Solution Architect role. In 2016, I also took on the People Ops role to hire, mentor, and coach the dev, design, and project management teams. In 2016 I joined the executive team to help define and drive the company strategy.
Modern Design Drives A Luxury Brand | 2018
AMLI Residential is a leading multi-family company with properties across the nation. Their luxury brand gives residents the highest quality of living through excellent customer service, beautifully designed communities, and sustainable initiatives.
AMLI partnered with Poetic in 2018 to build the next version of their website. The new site needed to visually tell their story and technically be able to handle online leasing for a high volume of visitors.
One of the primary challenges of the project was figuring out how best to implement modern technology and modern design into the existing AMLI tech stack and team. To understand how to approach these challenges, my team and I conducted a week-long, on-site strategy session to learn about the AMLI culture, brand, and tech stack. Based on the findings, I wrote the AMLI website Strategy Report and Technical Development Roadmap.
The Strategy Report outlined the findings from the interviews and defined the strategic approach for the new website. The Technical Development Roadmap diagramed the new technical architecture and how each high-level piece of functionality would work.
The strategic approach provided the guiding light that drove the design and development phases. During the design phase, I worked with designers to think through the story we wanted to tell and help craft the final visual direction. In the development phase, I provided technical direction to ensure the website’s frontend and backend worked seamlessly and could handle all the steps visitors went through to find an apartment online.
A major success metric for the project was the ability for the AMLI development team to take over the site and easily improve it over time. When the site went live, it featured a modern web application infrastructure and tech stack which set the AMLI team up for success and allows the website to be a living site that continuously improves.
You can view the live website at amli.com.
Team
Agency:
Solutions Architect
Project Managers:
Designers:
Developers:
Poetic
John Goodman
Mallory Siler, Andrew Chein
Gary Norris
Francisco Sales, Damien Maya, Shelby Smith
Modern Technology Empowering A Community | 2018
Over a three and half year span, the Houston Food Bank ( HFB ) partnered with Poetic on nine major initiatives. I took a strategic role in these projects to understand the vision not just of each individual project, but how the projects connected together over the long term. I assembled architectural diagrams and technical roadmaps for each initiative to present to the HFB and the Poetic team.
One such initiative was the Partner Agency Map. This project began in 2018 when the Food Bank needed a better map to show their constituents where to pick up food and find services. The HFB had a very limited budget and a tight timeline for the initial product. Given these constraints, the Poetic team and I came up with a plan to first build the map as a very basic Wordpress plugin that read content from Google Sheets. The Google Sheets would allow various HFB staff members to add and edit content as needed, without needing to have Wordpress accounts.
In the next iteration of the map, we refactored the map to be a React based micro-application embedded into a Wordpress plugin. We also added in-depth filters to the map to make finding specific locations easier.
The third iteration of the map extracted the map out of Wordpress and Google Sheets into a standalone web application. This application has a robust admin section that allows HFB staff members to create their own customized map and receive an embed code to use anywhere ( Wordpress, 3rd party websites, mobile apps, etc ). This iteration also laid the groundwork to expand the “partner agency” functionality even more since all the data is now in a well structured, dedicated database.
The Food Bank found the map so useful that they have allowed other food banks and related organizations across the country to use the source code of the map for their own projects.
During the course of this project, my role was to keep these bigger picture, organization level objectives in mind and break down how to get there over a multi-year period. Each iteration of this project intentionally built another foundational element for the map project and other future projects that will rely on the same data.
You can view the live version of the standalone map application at map.houstonfoodbank.org.
Team
Agency:
Solutions Architect
Strategist:
Project Manager:
Designers:
Developers:
Poetic
John Goodman
Adrian Sameniego
Andrew Chein
Michelle Sue Agee, Shatha Hussein Kasem
Jimmy Thigpen, Sarah McLaughlin, Luke Martin
Building Stronger Relationships | 2017
Encourage X is an online platform that helps transform people’s good intentions into actions that encourage, inspire, and support the people they care about. The platform provides guides for how to encourage people through a wide variety of life situations. Encouragers can also create accounts to build an encouragement schedule with a suite of recommended “encouragements” to send people.
The founder of Encourage X began working with the Poetic team in 2017. Over a three and a half year span, I worked alongside the founder to understand his long term vision and break it down into achievable milestones.
As the concept progressed, we tried various ideas to engage encouragers ( individuals ), businesses, and B2C organizations. For each new feature or challenge we explored, I would assemble materials outlining the strategic approach, the tactical steps needed, the costs, and the timeline. To be a good steward of the clients funds, I would often pitch multiple approaches with different levels of complexity and expense.
As of December 2020, with assistance from myself and the other members of the Poetic team, the founder had finished multiple pilot programs with large companies, was in talks with two other major companies to see how their platforms could compliment each other, and was scaling up a new marketplace concept.
The Encourage X project is one that seeks to do good in the world and it was amazing to be a part of helping make the vision come to life. You can see the live web application at encouragex.com.
Team
Agency:
Solutions Architect
Project Managers:
Designers:
Developers:
Poetic
John Goodman
Adrian Sameniego, Justin Sanders
Michelle Sue Agee, Shatha Hussein Kasem
Trent Yang, Francisco Sales