Looking Back

For many years, I sometimes thought I might stay at Nike until I retired entirely. Quite a lot has happened over seven years I’ve been here and it has been the most rewarding career decision I ever made to join this company. However, it is with mixed emotions that I have decided to move on to a new opportunity. On June 21st, I’ll be joining the amazing engineering team at HubSpot.

I don’t often celebrate my accomplishments, and in part that’s because every accomplishment is truly a team sport. That’s one thing I learned over and over again at Nike. But I want to call out a few highlights that will stick with me. In the last seven years I…

  1. Helped lead the migration of Nike’s industry defining online activity tracking platform from the monolithic, data-center based system they started with into a scalable, resilient, cloud-based set of services that are still providing the backend capabilities behind Nike’s chart topping running and training apps.
  2. Laid the groundwork for and helped chart the course for what would become the Nike Communications Platform. This started as a very small, scrappy team and has grown into one of Nike’s most important initiatives supporting both the marketing and digital commerce functions of one of the largest, most respected brands in the world.
  3. Oversaw and grew Nike’s open source program, taking a traditionally very closely guarded organization over the hurdle and enabling engineers (and others!) to participate in and contribute back to the wider tech community.
  4. Created the Nike Tech Talk series, which facilitated connections to the Portland tech community by bringing in luminaries from the industry such as Paco Nathan, Brendan Burns, Charity Majors, Tammy Buttow, and so many others.
  5. Helped establish both the internal and external engineering blogs. Sadly the external blog has essentially gone quiet. There’s a lot more to this story to be told another time.
  6. Learned how to be a good leader, mentor, and coach. At least according to the data and input I was able to gather from the people and teams I worked with.
  7. Met an amazing number of the best, brightest, and most of all kindest people I’ve ever had the privilege to work with. This is perhaps my greatest accomplishment of all.

I have been incredibly lucky to have had these opportunities and I am grateful for all my Nike friends and colleagues who supported me over the years.

Note: this was originally published in a more abbreviated form on LinkedIn.