Experience

After a 6 month hiatus to recover from pandemic burnout, I found a job at Webflow, a much smaller company than Amazon. This was a highly different experience from Amazon. Gone were the intricate deployment pipelines that weaved together tens of monolithic services together. In their place, a much simpler process, but also one that was much sleeker, using the latest technologies. It was here that I was given full technical leadership of a newly formed Enterprise Workflows team, where our job was to enhance Webflow with tools and workflows that were sorely needed by larger corporations who were onboarding with Webflow. The team I led was made up of some of the most delightful, kind and intelligent people I've met, and for all the credit I'm about to give myself, without them none of my accomplishments would have been possible.

My main job on the team was to lead the team in finding and implementing the most effective features for Enterprise workflows, i.e. the features that would help the most and fastest to implement. Typically, this meant I had the following responsibilities, in this rough order:

1. Work with Product and Design to figure out what exactly the most effective feature would do and look like,
2. Investigate the feature's feasibility given Webflow's current architecture, often by building a rough prototype to test out the idea,
3. Coordinate with other Engineering teams to ensure any changes we make won't conflict with their roadmap or future plans,
4. Work with the engineers on my team to divvy up the tasks into manageable, parallelized workloads,
5. Help out with the implementation.

Once the team really got going, we usually had 2-3 projects that were in various stages of the above workloads. It was a lot to juggle at times, but I also tried to give the other engineers on my team a safe space to take on more ownership and gain some experience leading projects, where I acted as an advisor in those cases. We were really effective as a team as a result, and I'm very proud of every engineer on my team, many of whom I consider to have been working at the same level that I was, even if that wasn't officially recognized in their titles.