RapDev Leadership & Management

Tell us a little bit about yourself. What’s your professional background, and why were you brought on to lead this team?

After working at Curry College for a few years post-grad, I joined the Wayfair team in their early days. I got pulled in to start what has since become the operations center there. 

After spending 11 years building and managing that, I decided to join RapDev and have been here for a little over a year. Tameem, RapDev’s principal engineer, and I had worked together for several years in the operations center, and we decided to join forces again to bring my experience in the Datadog and site reliability engineering space into RapDev.

How would you describe your approach to leadership, and how do you plan on building team culture?

I try my best to be very open and honest with people. I love aligning people to understand the vision and direction of what’s needed and allowing them to forge their path to get there rather than dictating how something should be done.

There are a lot of things that build culture, like making sure the team has events and times we can get together to solve technical problems and have fun. Another important tool is providing rapid feedback: if there is any type of misalignment with your team, make sure to address that quickly. Above all, make it clear to the team that we are here to help each other out and ask questions. There’s a strong focus on cultural fit in our hiring process, and we use that to assess not just whether this person will fit our culture, but also if they will amplify it.
 

What project or initiative are you most excited to tackle, and why? What impact does it have on the company or its customers?

As we speak, we’re working on a new offering that will allow for better management and guidance to our customers around their Datadog footprint. I can’t say too much, because we’re still actively working on it, but we’re very excited, and we expect it to be released at the Datadog DASH conference. This offering will allow our customers to lean into our expertise which will, in turn, enable them to have better governance and consistency in their Datadog environment. Taking recent asks from both customers and Datadog, we’ve been able to go to market extremely quickly and meet their needs. I think that embodies how we operate here at RapDev — we see room for improvement and act as quickly and efficiently as possible.