The Mgmt Life – Perspectives from a career in technology

August 19, 2026August 19, 2026

Early Career Advice Nobody Tells You

Recently, I was invited to have a fireside chat type of conversation at an America on Tech panel. The audience was early career young folks either still in school or just at the precipice of starting their careers in technology. Most of them were from underrepresented minority populations — in short, kids who reminded me a lot of me.

When I was in their shoes, I tried to educate myself on what it would be like out in the real world. As a child of immigrants, the first message I heard was that I had to work harder — being just as good as folks from more privileged backgrounds would not be enough to succeed. As an honor student in school, I heard the message that you will have to work hard and it will all pay off when you get into a good college.

I got into the good college but then when I started to work, I realized a couple of things: my parents were right about the lack of meritocracy (more on that another time!) but all my hard work didn’t really fully prepare me for what the next twenty years of my career would bring. So, when I had the opportunity to speak to folks who were about to make that leap into this world, I shared my number one piece of advice.

August 11, 2026

Crafting Clarity of Purpose

Before I became a manager of people, I worked with a gentleman whose work style I didn’t really love. He would push the cross-functional team in ways I felt were unnecessary (read: highly public!), drifting from the “praise publicly, critique privately” mindset that I had accepted as a hallmark of a great leader. By the time I left his organization a few years later, my perspective had shifted significantly and I came to appreciate the clarity with which he led.

The team I was on then was very good at getting things done that our business partners asked for. We were shipping and congratulating ourselves for great “say do” ratios and delivered work. But we weren’t great at connecting that back to the business value — and that’s where there was a tremendous disconnect.

July 21, 2026July 21, 2026

Everything in It’s Right Place For Problem Solving

I’m going to try really hard not to make this space completely about AI but it is the AI conversation on the internet that inspired me to talk about problem-solving.

Recently I saw a post about a company that used to try to sell us on robotaxis and how they’ve figured out the AI thing. They went on to explain that they deployed talented engineers at real business problems where workflows needed to be transformed — and then those talented engineers fixed the problem.

And AI was in the room with them so the story is “AI saved the day!”

I have to chuckle a bit because it’s fairly obvious to me that when you have smart people who are given the mandate to solve a problem for others (who are also reasonably intelligent and have a solid problem statement), they will crack the nut regardless of what technology they have to use — because I lived this myself.

June 4, 2026July 8, 2026

The Rise (and Fall) of my Actionscript Anxieties

I’ve been doing a lot of reminiscing lately — trying to find parallels between what’s happening in the world today and what I’ve lived through. As they say, those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it.

And recently, with all the hype around AI, I’m reminded of feelings I felt early on in my career as a Web Developer. But, let’s start at the beginning. I knew I wanted to work on websites way before I took a class on them. I taught myself how to do basic HTML / CSS and even started making websites for local bands in high school as a very minor side hustle.

When I took CS 201 (building your own compiler – often a make or break for CS majors vs folks who would instead take it as a minor), our professor joked about how this class was likely irrelevant for many of us. I knew that was true for me so, once I had the opportunity to take electives, I packed in as many courses as I possibly could to learn the ins-and-outs of web development. In doing so I picked up Javascript, Perl, Shell Scripting and really started to understand how the underpinnings of that customer experience was served from a technical perspective.

Before YouTube shorts and Instagram reels had a stranglehold on attention on the internet, there were websites we’d go to that would feature animated comedy shorts (think Homestar Runner). Most of these were built using a scripting language called “ActionScript” and you had to use a tool called Flash by a company called MacroMedia. And I remember feeling woefully inadequate that I hadn’t mastered “Flash” as we’d refer to it as developers. I had initially worried that the entire internet would turn into these experiences and I just couldn’t cut it.

May 27, 2026June 1, 2026

The Hubris of It All

Early in my professional life, I took on a Web Developer role at a big media company. Back then, a welcome package from the company with its very familiar branding arrived at my doorstep. To some degree, I felt like I had “made it.” I felt like I knew so much about the working world (in truth: I was Jon Snow, I knew nothing – it was my 2nd real job out of college).

I remember deciding I was ready to give back and go back to my alma mater, the high school I attended, to do career day. They encouraged more recent graduates to attend since it was sometimes easier for the students to envision themselves in roles seeing someone that might be closer to their age.

Before the session, I remember talking to the administrators at the school and telling them about how “slides” are a thing of the past, especially for technologists. And the Jen of today thinks back on that and chuckles (as I work on 3 different presentations, all likely due in the next week).

In a lengthy career in technology, it seems like you live long enough to laugh at the hubris of your past self and develop the humility to know that you will often be wrong, but at least not catastrophically so.

May 23, 2026June 4, 2026

Cash Rules Every AI Around Me

I debated whether I should join the fray of technologists talking about AI but, as an elder millennial, I think there’s an angle to this story that isn’t really being discussed — and it has a lot to do with money. Or rather, the tenuous balance between innovation and profit.

Right now, everyone’s talking about how AI is our future and will deeply transform the way we live and work — this has already begun and I don’t think it’s far fetched to believe that we still don’t quite yet know the ways in which this will fully change us until we are living in the change. However, it’s also true that all the large operators in this space are desperately seeking profitability more than they are the lofty ideal of artificial general intelligence. And the need for a return on investment, especially with valuations reaching the trillions for some, will ultimately create winners and losers.

I think back to the early days of the internet — at least as I knew it. When I was an adolescent, a personal computer in our home and a subscription to America Online would routinely tie up the telephone line (before cellphones were ubiquitous). In that time is when I started learning how to code by seeing HTML side by side with the website I was creating. And it was incredibly accessible to get started; whether it was HyperMart, Geocities, or AngelFire, you could very easily spin up a website for free, no ads.

With age and hindsight being 20/20 and all, I now realize what was happening.

July 22, 2025

How to Decide When to Get in the Weeds

I’ve been having trouble even starting to write about this topic because it’s such an interesting topic and something I’ve learned quite a bit about over the years — and continue to grow and learn about as I take on new teams!

As I’ve advanced in my career, I’ve gone from feeling like I need to learn every new technology or programming language (and getting overwhelmed and feeling inferior by the impossible feat) to realizing it’s impossible to know everything well. In the spirit of ruthless prioritization, I have to prioritize what it is I choose to know deeply (where I get in the weeds) and what I choose to only know at a surface level (usually relying on or deferring to the expertise of someone else who is in the weeds).

This approach to staying on the surface works really well when you can to defer to a colleague who you respect as an expert on their work (e.g. I understand we use XYZ technology but for any additional detail, talk to my colleague Jane in Engineering). And often times, a colleague will see this for what it is: trust that you will mind your own business because they’ve got their area under control!

It gets much more difficult when you need to do this with people who might report directly into you. Stay at surface and don’t know enough about their work? You seem out of touch (and isn’t it their job to “manage up” anyway?). Get in the weeds about everything they are working on? Now you are the dreaded micro-manager.

So how do you decide when to go deeper? There are tactics I’ve employed over the years that can help.

September 25, 2024

Flavors of Agile

Many years into my career in software development, I was introduced to the concept of “agility” and specifically leveraging the “scrum” methodology. We were trained up over the course of a couple of days which included silly activities to prove a point like making paper boats. I learned about 2 week sprints, sprint ceremonies (like sprint planning, daily stand-up and retrospectives), and best practices around estimation.

At the time, I was on a very lean team responsible for operating a platform that was licensed to a competitor for what I understood was a large sum of money. Our product was important to the bottom-line so consistently delivering value was the name of the game. I enjoyed the structure that sprinting offered and the constant tangible value delivery to our customer appealed to the dopamine receptors in my brain that get excited when I check something off my “to do” list.

During that time, I also learned about the “agile manifesto” and that there was a real career path for people like me who enjoyed solving human-centered problems. And since then, I’ve worked with a number of different large enterprises that employ various flavors of agile.

May 13, 2024May 11, 2024

Unwritten Rules of Management: Managing Up

A while back, I worked for a leader whose management style I didn’t understand or appreciate until years later. I perceived his tactics as borderline micromanagement and I didn’t like the way he publicly challenged the team.

At the time, my direct manager gave me some tips for how to best manage the situation, especially given my future success at the company would depend on his blessing. In reflecting back on that time, I realize my manager had given me the gift of learning how to “manage up.”

April 4, 2024April 4, 2024

Unwritten Rules of Management: Air Cover

Recently I was discussing something fairly innocuous with a member of my team. Given there was a very small financial outlay for what I was planning, I mentioned I’d take it up with our manager just to confirm it’s not a big deal.

At that moment my direct report joked, “You can just do it and if anyone bristles, you can blame me.” I told him the first “rule” of being a decent manager is to not throw your team under the bus!

And this got me thinking that there are so many of these unwritten rules that I should share given it took me over 15 years of work experience to learn them!