Engineering Blog

One year ago today was my last day at Amazon. In many aspects it was a dream job, and I remain a stockholder and unabashed fanboy of Amazon (as the Rally engineers who have heard one too many Amazon stories will attest). Two questions I get asked a lot are “Why Rally?” followed often by “What does Rally do?”. The latter is easy – we’re the market leader in Agile ALM tools for development teams. Agile permeates every aspect of our company, and we’re in the home stretch on bringing our strategic planning product to market to extend agile tools and methods beyond just development. I’m really excited about that.

So why Rally? I joined Rally in January as VP for Engineering, Operations, and Customer Support. The list of what attracted me to Rally is short and sweet:

I’m a big believer in taking the waste out of repeatable processes. That’s fundamentally what our products and services are designed to help our customers do. We’re often on the bleeding edge of this as we “eat our own dogfood”; we’re getting pretty good at continuous flow (we use Kanban), and the tools and reports we’re building for our customers are helping us identify and remove bottlenecks in our own processes and get even better.

The opportunity to be a servant leader. While I’ve always been predisposed to creating and empowering multi-disciplinary, diverse, participative leadership teams, at the end of the day responsibility for making tough decisions alway rested with me. And I won’t lie – I liked that. But one of the first pieces of advice my boss Tim gave me when I started at Rally was “Don’t make decisions for your team – they’ll learn to expect it from you”. That’s harder to do than it sounds. I’ve stuck my foot in it a couple of times but I am learning a ton, every day, from the people I work with and serve.

I work with great engineers who all team well together. We’ve done a lot of hiring this year and we’re attracted to people that want to work across the entire stack (We’re still hiring – talk to me if you want to know more). Our work area is as agile as we are. Jeff blogged about it when we moved in. Each quarter following our mid range planning walls move, desks move, and new teams and adjacencies quickly form. I get to sit smack in the middle of it all and while I can’t contribute code I can contribute perspective from having experienced first hand AWS growing from a simple storage service to a massive suite of enterprise class services. There’s a lot of pitfalls we can avoid.

It’s in Boulder. If you live here you understand. I’ll put fall, winter, and spring in Colorado up against anywhere. I’ll give a slight nod to Seattle’s summer (all three weeks of it).

In the course of getting a lot done each day I have fun. Every day I LMAO at least once. I’m the only member of Rally’s executive team who has permission to miss standup once a week so I can play in “the game” (which rotates between soccer, ultimate frisbee, and a mashup called “ultimate football”). That’s helping me be a more effective team member. It’s also getting me into great shape.

Perhaps most important for me is balance. Work/Life Balance is a core value at Rally and not just words on a poster (Ryan blogged about this a while ago when Outside Magazine named Rally one of the top 10 companies to work for in America). Balance has been somewhat of a career-long journey for me which has for the most part been outside my grasp; my blog at Sun was entitled “Life In Balance?” (strangely, while I left Sun many years ago the blog survived the Oracle acquisition). At Amazon I was surrounded by wicked-smart, passionate, driven workaholics that played into that aspect of my psyche. At Rally i’m surrounded by wicked-smart people who are equally passionate about what they do outside of work as what they do here. So far i’ve learned to slow down enough to walk the dog every morning, ride my bike to work and eat dinner with my wife every night. Hey, it’s a start. Im still WIP…