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 trying to land a better job, Ryan has over a decade of experience helping companies and individuals find "better."
This site is a beautiful mess of my digital garden. I'm not pretending everything here is polished, well thought-out, or even spell-checked. Wander as you like. There are "stepping stones" to guide you below.
Upcoming Opportunities
Explore common metrics that fail to give you confidence in your decisions or outright mislead you. This free 45-minute webinar explores common metric issues and you'll learn a core practice called, "Signal Mapping" that will hone your metric and data skills. May 21st, 2026
A half-day workshop with Esther Derby for engineering leadership teams. Build a measurement system that drives real decisions, not dashboards.
Leadership
Unlock the power of a self-managed team. Discover the definition, benefits, and strategies for fostering autonomy and effective self-management in your team.
Time and time again people advocate for testing later. Can you really afford the consequences of having the strategy of quality last?
Horizon plans are a lightweight tool to communicate long-term strategic goals. Build, use, and update them to communicate more strategically and adapt faster.
Product Management
There are lots of reasons to kill a product. Some examples from my work, and when killing a product was the right call.
Story Points are in every agile shop, but often fall short of any expected use. Estimating stories by value instead.
Building a successful software product requires answering thousands of important questions. There is one question that, if you can master it, will make every other answer better.
Careers
The format that answers two questions hiring managers ask in seconds: can you do the job, and do they want to work with you?
Four rules I follow when negotiating salary, starting with the hardest one: don't say a number first.
Sometimes a perfect interview isn't enough. Four non-obvious reasons offers go to someone else.
Case Studies
450% faster delivery, zero bugs, Fortune 100 client. What it looked like to build a team that consistently outperformed the rest of the org.
Transforming 500 teams at a Fortune 10 company. What worked, what didn't, and what I'd do differently.
Bringing a near-shore product to market, including building the engineering organization that delivered it.
Work With Me
A short call to figure out if my work fits your situation. No pitch.
Weekly notes on engineering leadership, product, and careers. Free.
Also Available
One part guide, one part reference for the things rattling around in my brain.
Conference talks, podcast appearances, and other places I've shown up.
Odds 'n Ends
Yep, I'm a beekeeper. You'll find the occasional bits and bobs about that here.
More specifically TTRPGs. A separate garden for that work.
My start-up. The easiest way to buy and sell local. Working in public.
The Garden
Wander the garden. It has everything I've written. Some will be excellent, some won't, but you're invited to explore.