A PRODUCT MANAGER
First and foremost, I'm a product manager. For over two decades I've worked with customers, engineering, design, and partner teams to deliver software that people love and that moves the business. I've had the privilege of helping define vision and strategy and ship mobile, cloud, and on-premise products in FinTech, eCommerce, AI/ML, and church software that are used by millions of consumers and Fortune 500 companies. I've done it at 20 person startups and inside the 10K+ employee enterprise.
Today I'm a full time product manager at Planning Center. Before that I was Staff Product Manager at Reverb (Etsy), a two sided marketplace for musical instruments with over 10 million monthly visitors and $1B in yearly revenue, where I led the iOS and Android apps and shipped feature sets that drove tens of millions in incremental revenue. Before Reverb, I was the lead PM for the Intuit TurboTax iOS and Android apps, where the projects I helped define and execute led to hundreds of millions in incremental revenue. The full history is on LinkedIn.
DATA DRIVEN
I'm a big believer that you can't improve what you don't measure. My product work starts with customer research and the data, finding the real opportunities, sizing them, and being ruthless about prioritization so the team is always working on the thing that matters most. Then we ship, measure, and learn: A/B testing, clear success metrics for every release, and dashboards and data visualizations that make the results obvious to everyone, not just the people who wrote the SQL. I've spent a lot of my career turning messy numbers into a story a team can act on, and it's still one of my favorite parts of the job.
A BUILDER, NOW AI FIRST
I've been building things for as long as I've been managing products. I wrote front end code from scratch for years before AI made everything so easy: hand rolled HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, jQuery back when that was the thing, Objective-C and then Swift for iOS. I've dabbled in most of what's out there, from C# to PHP to Ruby, built and deployed database schemas, and written more regular expressions than I'd like to admit. Everything on the My Work page I designed and built myself.
These days I build AI first. Claude is my pair programmer and my first draft for almost everything, Notion is where the specs and roadmaps live, GitHub holds the code, and Vercel and the App Store are where it ships. The stack that used to take me a weekend to scaffold now takes an afternoon, which means I get to spend the time on what the product should actually do and how it should feel. Being a PM who can build has always been an advantage. With the current tooling it's a superpower, and I get to build more than ever.
DESIGN CENTRIC
I tend to lean towards function following form, so I approach all my projects with a design and user experience first mindset. I spend a lot of time in Figma, Photoshop, and Illustrator getting designs just right. The iPhone is a good reminder of why that matters: it was never the most powerful or feature packed device on the market, but people fell in love with how it was designed, and the loyalty numbers have told that story for years.
Of course design alone, without a useful feature set, won't produce a successful product, but I do believe the inverse (fully featured, poorly designed) won't be successful either. Design runs in my veins. My Dad is a designer, his dad was a designer, I've held several positions as a designer, and I believe it makes me who I am today.
EDUCATED
I've got a BS in Business Administration from Cal State San Marcos, with an emphasis in High Technology Management (aka MIS). Most of the rest I've learned by building: online courses, documentation, and a lot of shipping things and seeing what happens. I continue to learn new things every day, whether it's design, programming, process, or a new AI tool that changes how I work.
PASSIONATE
I pour my heart into everything I do. Whether it's work or home, if your heart is in it, the results will show. That can translate into late nights and weekends sometimes, but if that's what it takes to get it done right, then so be it.
CREATIVE
Nothing excites me more than coming up with new ideas and helping change the world. Creativity runs in my blood, and I think if you aren't trying new things and dreaming up new paradigms, your work gets boring, which translates into lack of interest and eventually poor products and results. Staring into the horizon to imagine how to push the limits keeps me alive. When I'm not building software, I'm usually playing guitar, writing songs, or making sawdust in the garage.
THE SLEEP LAUGH STORY
I love my kids with all my heart. When they have a great day, meaning they have enough food in their bellies, aren't sick, and are happy, they laugh in their sleep. It is the cutest thing in the world, and it inspires me to work as hard as I can to be the best Dad, Husband, and provider I can be. That's the idea behind the Sleep Laugh name and logo.
