I went from writing the code to running the team.

Weather Decision Technologies sold real-time weather alerting to businesses. Thousands of business customers were on it — B2B, so the party at the other end of an alert was a company rather than a person checking a forecast.

The team behind it was full-stack: React on the front, a Node API behind that, and AWS underneath. One team owned the path from the browser to the infrastructure it ran on, which is what full-stack meant here — three layers and one team, rather than a front-end group and a back-end group with a boundary to negotiate between them.

I was there five years, in two roles: writing JavaScript from 2013, and running web development as VP from 2016.

From 2016 I ran web development as VP: twelve people, full-stack. Hiring, quarterly reviews and the roadmap were mine.

Hiring and quarterly reviews are the two of those three that are about people rather than software. Quarterly is a cadence rather than an event: four scheduled conversations a year, on the calendar rather than at the end of a project. Hiring was mine over the same two years.

The third, the roadmap, is the software half of the job: it decided what the team built, and in what order. I set it working directly with the CTO and the leads of the other departments — so the roadmap was negotiated across the company rather than handed down to engineering.

The VP role ran to 2018. I arrived in 2013 writing JavaScript on the product and left five years later deciding what the team built and who was on it.

Of the two roles, the second is the one I would be judged on. 2016 is where the work stopped being the code I wrote and became the team that wrote it.