Actively investing in your professional network improves your career. The sooner you start and the more you invest, the greater the return. Learning and helping others succeed is the currency.

Investing is "devoting one's time, effort, or energy to a particular undertaking with the expectation of a worthwhile result."

Your professional network is an investment that will pay tremendous dividends down the road. Like all investments, it's impossible to know what the outcome of your efforts will be. All you can do is decide to invest, trust the process, and go long.

A good network helps grease the wheels, supports you, advocates for you and exposes you to unknown opportunities, creating serendipitous career paths.

The currency of real networking is not greed but generosity. — Keith Ferrazzi.

I cherish the relationships and connections I have built with peers, managers, mentors, and mentees, and I look forward to interacting and learning with them regularly. I fondly remember the people I connected with, their stories, the support and guidance we shared, and the growth we went through together.

I still recall my commander’s advice in the desert many years ago while quickly forgetting the sweltering heat, tiredness and fear. Or the engineer coming in at 6 am to pair with me when I struggled. I don't recall the promotions, awards or accomplishments with nearly the same affection. People and their time matter more.

Don't underestimate your ability to bring value to someone else. — Michelle Tillis Lederman.

Renowned fashion designer Rebecca Minkoff advises giving something before you ever need anything. Minkoff recommends retrospecting on who you meet, what opportunities could be possible together, how best to engage and create authentic connections, and how you can help others succeed. At the extreme, even keeping track of contacts like a salesperson nurtures their leads.

I break my pro-network into four groups and invest differently for each.

Those I worked with directly; peers, managers, etc. I invest with intent and effort. Making time to speak regularly, even with individuals from 20 years ago. If they need help, I will make time and do what I can.

Those I worked with indirectly; same company, different department, etc. The people who know my name, but I might not know them well, if at all. I help with advice, recommendations, or introductions. For example, someone I only met in passing at a previous company reached out to me asking for my technical advice to help with a pitch. I took the time to reply with consideration, detail and care with no expectation other than the hope of helping. We now speak more often, and I have learned valuable lessons from them.

Those that don't share my core values or detract. An essential strategy for happiness. I do my best to avoid homogeneity, yet I don't hesitate to stay clear of people who detract rather than add; I wish them all the best and move on. For anything good to happen, for any investment to be worth it, you need boundaries. I can't connect with everyone and certainly can't be authentic if I try.

Those I meet along the way. The most exciting group for me. I don't have the same history or trust as the first group. Yet my learning curve feels more significant thanks to the often acutely different environments and perspectives. It still surprises me that meeting randomly and investing in others without expecting anything in return can produce so much value. A few years ago, I would never have expected to be able to reach out and ask for advice from an engineering leader at Microsoft or professionals in different industries like robotics.

All the time and effort put into networking can be all for nought if there is no follow-through. The same goes for sales. And leadership. And well, everything. — Beth Ramsay

Cultivate and invest in these relationships actively, just like you would friendships. Aim to create authentic connections and learn.

Who have you met recently, and how can you invest in them without expecting anything in return?

Read on Medium.

Someone asked me today, "How many weeks do you spend planning for a feature?"... I replied, "We don't generally spend more than a few hours, maybe a day planning before we start validating our assumptions with users. We focus our efforts on testing our assumptions quickly and often."

Here are the last few months of Salesroom engineering planning in Miro. Engineers start from an observed problem/situation or bet we want to make, research, do the minimum change possible to learn from users in production and then iterate based on their feedback. Almost all changes are in the code; some are sketches. Sometimes we use feature flags; often, we don't. Going from problem to initial solution often within a week or less is the goal.

Original LinkedIn Post with ~47k impressions.

Podcast Overview

With everything getting digitized and slowly moving on to the virtual world, there are some industries and arts that are having a bit of a hard time adapting to the new normal. Sales are one of them. Making sales is hard to pull off in-person, and even harder to pull off online, but people like Chuck Hardy, Head of Engineering at Salesroom, have made it their goal to make it easier for people to reach their potential clients, and remove the obstacles that selling in virtual environments pose.

If you want to be a leader, the one thing you must understand and accept is that it's not about you - it's about others. Your teams, your clients, your partners. It's all about them.

Key takeaways:

• The highest level of competency is knowing what you don't know
• The importance of staying humble
• Bridging the skills gap is all about bringing the concept of learning to life

Today, I'm proud to share that we raised an $8m seed round, built a world-class engineering and design team and shipped the first version of our product to customers. I am grateful to be part of such a talented, driven, and creative team, and I am excited to bring our vision for the future into reality. The size of the challenge ahead is exhilarating, and the journey has only just begun.

Building a video conferencing platform from the ground up is no small feat. It's a technology that hundreds of millions of people use daily. It's more complex than you might expect, and for salespeople, the difference between a "good call" and a "bad call" can cost them their monthly paycheck.

When we started this journey, we were committed to focusing on what sellers actually needed while challenging what others were doing. We used this as a forcing function to help us solve the fundamental problems that stood in the way of building relationships over video.

Here are a few small examples: we noticed that recording a meeting is currently a binary choice on other platforms; it's either on or off, putting participants in an awkward position. This felt archaic to us, so we decided to give every participant the freedom to choose how their audio and video were captured and used. We also noticed that other providers were not doing a sufficient job handling device permission issues, causing unnecessary stress. So we rethought that too, and now everyone can see who is having problems and can help directly. This is just the tip of the iceberg, and I can't wait to share more with you.

I am a big believer in remote work because it allows me to spend more time with my family and dog, Indy. We are fortunate to live in a rural part of England, near the beach where we can spend time in nature. This is made possible thanks to technologies like video conferencing that allow us to do business from anywhere.

In my career, I have spent a lot of time purchasing software. I have also had the pleasure of working with excellent AEs and experienced sales leaders such as Charandeep Chhabra, Laura Youngblom and Max Mizzi. This experience has uniquely prepared me as an engineer to help solve many of the problems buyers and sellers have working virtually.

Join us, and let's build something together that redefines virtual sales, for real!

When you’re building a website for a company as ambitious as Planetaria, you need to make an impression. I wanted people to visit our website and see animations that looked more realistic than reality itself.

To make this possible, we needed to squeeze every drop of performance out of the browser possible. And so Animaginary was born.

Original LinkedIn Post

I am proud to announce that I have joined the founding team at Salesroom, the sales platform that puts personality first. We’re building cutting-edge tools that bring virtual sales to life, fostering the organic conversations that build trust and close deals.

After five years as the VP of Technology at General Assembly, I didn’t take this leap lightly. I was privileged to lead talented teams in making a tangible impact on the education sector by empowering people to change their lives through intensive yet accessible learning. I found the role immensely fulfilling, but as for many of us, 2020 was defined by heightened and prolonged introspection that planted the seed for me to pursue new and nuanced challenges.

That curiosity culminated in March of this year, when I attended a Leadership Program at the Elar Institute, which guides participants through rigorous reflection in pursuit of clarity and self-understanding (I highly recommend the program). This workshop reaffirmed that I am happiest when applying creativity to solve problems in fast-paced environments where I can learn from intelligent and diversely skilled people around me.

The workshop also reinvigorated my inner entrepreneurial spirit. I come from a family of business owners and have always known that the compulsion to build something from scratch and shape its evolution would one day grab me. Taking ownership of a meaningful project motivates me far more than financial incentives—a value system compounded by the rapidly dwindling appeal of conventional professional pursuits as the pandemic endured. 

Salesroom is that rare and captivating opportunity that spurred me to go all in—the relentlessly intriguing venture with undeniable promise that compels me to commit myself fully to its success. Avidly searching for varied voices outside my circle, I reached out to many startups and interviewed with nearly a dozen before signing on with the proven founders at Salesroom, Roy Solomon and Daria Danilina. 

Once I met Roy and Daria, they moved quickly—deliberate and refreshingly direct. Much like their emerging product, they put me at the center of the process. They showed deference and authenticity, putting all their cards on the table by arranging for me to connect with their investors and people that know them personally to ensure that I made an informed decision. They shrugged off my offer to sign an NDA, assuring me they have nothing to hide and underscoring their total transparency.  

The Salesroom executive team exhibited all the attributes I was looking for in an early-stage startup—a pair of smart and seasoned founders with a well-tuned moral compass, a bias towards action, an aspirational yet grounded product vision with a strong point of view, and a clear commitment to teaching me the inner workings.

As an experienced buyer of software, I know first-hand how painful and broken the existing offering is for virtual meetings. I would choose Salesroom over Zoom, Teams, or Meet any day. Salesroom’s features are at once pragmatic and innovative—they help salespeople solve real and well-defined problems, and they endeavor to take virtual interactions to the next level, equipping salespeople with tools to showcase their personalities and thrive in any environment. Salesroom is a product I can readily get behind in my own daily life, making it an obvious choice for the next evolution of my career. And as an engineer, I can’t help but buzz over the AI-powered potential.

At Salesroom, we’re bringing energy, warmth, and clarity to virtual meetings. From digital rooms that reflect the natural cadence of in-person conversations to real-time coaching that keeps you on point, we support account executives through every step of the sales cycle. 

I’m new to the crew, but it’s already clear to me that joining the founding team at Salesroom will sustain me personally and professionally for years to come. I count myself lucky to have found an opportunity that leverages the best of my abilities and challenges me to exert myself daily to solve interesting and meaningful problems with brilliant people by my side.

Finding talented people is the hardest part of my role. If this post resonates with you, please reach out. I'm looking for driven designers and engineers that share our vision for a more authentic and human virtual sales experience to join our nimble and inspired team in redefining buyer-seller interactions.

Original Post on LinkedIn

Smart Pickings is a web application created for UK homebuyers to collect properties from any online agent into a single place –enriched with additional data– where they can collaborate with family members to help make more confident decisions.

Imagine looking at properties on your favourite online agents, Rightmove, Zoopla and OnTheMarket. As you find ones you like, regardless of the agent, a single click of a button uploads it to Smart Pickings. Data you usually only get much later during the sales process enriches the property, and we score it against your current and ideal dream home. You compare, discuss and can correlate based on your and others real-world experiences to make more confident decisions.

Smart Pickings started as a spreadsheet for my purchasing journey, which I later began to share with friends, who found it also helped them. I moved away from the spreadsheet to a simple app that could be shared more widely and enriched with more data. With feedback from a small group of people and as I moved on to my second home, the app grew, and I became more serious about releasing it as a product.

Aggregating multiple data sources into a reliable and easy-to-understand format within seconds took a lot of work. Dealing with legacy government public APIs, massive CSV archives and even image analysis was complex and difficult to simplify into what you see in the UI.

With over 1500 commits, 1.2 million lines of code added and thousands of hours of researching, learning and programming, Smart Pickings felt like a product capable of being released to more people.

In late 2016, after receiving various challenges from online agents, I decided to park the project and focus on my career. Smart Pickings took me on an exceptional journey, and I plan to pick it up again someday.

Properties Page

Property Page

Website

I believe a senior developer has the responsibility to encourage those around them to aspire and excel. To mentor, coach and reflect understanding of the core qualities and knowledge required for developers to provide true value. To command respect through leadership and by example. To contemplate and absorb problems and relay solutions in a simple and understandable manner. Engage with management to produce results in line with technical strategy, while shielding developers from business demands and explaining the transition into business needs in an agile way. Being a senior developer brings with it a much greater requirement than just solid experience and skill. Being trustworthy, pragmatic, engaging and understanding gives the ability for greater stability and structure which allows the team as a whole to function as a productive and happy entity.