Building Exceptional Software Teams and the Leaders Behind Them
I'm glad you're here! Whether you're looking for help making your teams the best they can be, bringing a new product to market, or are interested in getting a better job, Ryan has over a decade of experience helping companies and individuals find, "Better."
Getting Around
I write about a lot of topics and I have helped lots of folks over the years. This site is something like a beautiful mess of all of it. I'm not pretending everything here is well thought-out or even spell-checked.
Main Focuses
- Leadership - I excel at building and leading exceptional software teams. You can learn my tricks, ideas, theories, and such here.
- Product Management - From start-ups to Fortune 10 companies, from discovery to scale, I've brought amazing products to market.
- Careers - Getting a job is soul-crushing. It turns out I'm really good at it and I have lots to share if you're in tech.
This is new. I want to capture some of the stuff that is rattling around in my brain. So one part guide and one part reference.
I've done a fair amount of speaking at conferences and such. Take a look.
Flotsam & Jetsam 🎣
Beekeeping 🐝
Yep, I'm a beekeeper. You'll find the occasional bits and bobs about that here as well.
Games
Well, more specifically TTRPGs. Check it out!
reko.day
reko.day is my start-up. It is the easiest way to buy and sell local. You will likely find me working-in-public here.
Recent Updates
- 2026-03-25: -
- Measures, Metrics, and Signals: My thoughts and approach to developing measures, metrics, and signals for exceptional engineering teams and leaders. If this topic has always felt baffling, this will cover goal setting with metrics, leading and lagging indicators, developing useful leadership signals, and how to avoid chaos with balancing metrics.
- Get Started With Dev And Product Metrics: There is a ton of heartburn about metrics, so in this article I explain how to start with metrics for any development group in a healthy way.
- How I Set Goals: -
- One Metric To Start: -
- Building Exceptional Software Teams: What I do to build some of the best software teams in the world.
- How to accurately forecast a software team's performance: An introduction to using probabilistic forecasting to understand when a team will be done. Also included are notes on adding bugs, dependencies, multiple teams, and scope changes.
- Great teams quit good leaders: -
- Result-Oriented Transformation: A Fortune 10 company had been "Transforming" for years but the only thing that changed was vocabulary. Shifting to result-oriented work instead of training and assessments changed everything.
- 6-Day Work Week: A QA department that is chronically over-worked and behind schedule believes automation will save them. However, after thorough analysis, removing interruptions gave everyone in the department an extra day of capacity back.