Hey 👋. I’m Matt.

I love building products developers love. I thrive as organizations scale by creating systems that keep priorities clear, defining value with metrics that matter, and coaching teams to grow with challenges. My leadership empowers through accountability, builds trust through transparency, and inspires everyone to be a catalyst for change.

Teams I’ve managed:

• Product management teams unifying all of engineering through the Target Application Platform (TAP)
• The product management team for Production Engineering at Target, including DevEx, SRE, and incident response
• The product, program, and content teams behind Red Hat’s digital communities, including Opensource.com
• Community and marketing teams at Sensu, from seed to series A
• Leading the vision for product and DevRel in part of Intel managing open source projects, including Snap
• Leading the vision for EMC’s first international community advocacy and gamification programs

Communities I’m a part of:

I work hard to connect and contribute to a broad range of communities of practice. Grouping in order of recency, that includes:

• Systems of Thought inspired by Team Topologies, Wardley Maps, and John Cutler
• Product Management through podcasts like Melissa Perri’s and Product School
• Kubernetes, Open Source (the OSI, GitHub, and CNCF), and Developer Relations
• Python programming language and Go programming language
• DevOps through the monitoring, observability, and distributed system sub-tribes
• Virtualization (especially VMware), Infosec, and Storage (especially EMC and NetApp)

Communities I’ve helped build:

• Enable Architect as the founding editorial lead.
• Opensource.com as a Technical Editor and designer of the Correspondent program.
• CHAOSScast podcast to highlight the value of open source and common metrics.
• DevRel Collective as a maintainer, designer of the rebrand, and creator of the website (v1).
• The Geek Whisperers podcast as a co-creator and co-host for 5 years.
• Commitmas: learning GitHub socially to collaborative learn Git and GitHub with the vBrownBag community.
• The Sensu Community leading community initiatives from maintainer practices to user summits.
• Snap: the open telemetry framework (EOL 2018) building brand, documentation, maintainer and contributor strategy.
• The EMC Elect (EOL 2017) as program lead, designing the business plan, brand, and community engagement.
• The Basho Community (EOL 2017) as the community leader and a maintainer.

Projects I’ve contributed to:

I often open small PRs as I work through new problem or as a way of saying thank you to a project. That’s led to contributions to Obsidian, Kubernetes, the CHAOSS community, iPython, Chezmoi, this Notion wrapper for Linux, Slack API Tutorial, Go GitHub library, Slack Go library, Leeroy from Docker, Awesome Maintainers, The Lita project, Homebrew, CHAOSS project, the CNCF Landscape, and many more. I also consulted behind-the-scenes for Exercism and continue to recommend joining their community because I ❤️ them.

Articles

Some of my more popular articles are off domain, like The right and wrong way to set Python 3 as default on a Mac. Here are some more:

MY PRODUCT MANAGEMENT LEARNING PATH

I’ve been thinking a lot about my learning path as a product leader. I’ve been in the technology industry for over 15 years now, but rarely had the title of the job I now love. What I have learned is that the title of the job won’t matter as much as the skills I choose to learn, and when I look back at my career, I have always thought like a product person.

TIPS FOR YOUR FIRST 30 DAYS OF REMOTE WORK

I have spent over 10 years working primarily remote, and they have taught me practices I will implement from day one of a new job.

SO YOU LOST YOUR JOB: NOW WHAT?

Some of the most talented, thoughtful, and effective people I have ever worked with were recently laid off. It’s such an emotional process, and I found myself sharing a few points that are worth writing down.

BUILDING PRODUCT COMMUNITY — HOW TO THINK ABOUT BRAND ASSOCIATION

Thinking through how close you wish a community to be to your brand–an affinity or upstream community–is an exercise that will pay off in the long run. You will ultimately want both, but will benefit from focusing on which need comes first.

MY APPROACH TO PAY EQUITY AS A MANAGER

Over the years, I have had more impact on people’s job titles, responsibilities, and–importantly–their salaries. I take that responsibility as a profound opportunity to advocate for equality. Here is what I have grown to learn about the subject.

3 TECH RESUME TIPS TO GET SEEN BY THE HIRING MANAGER

I recently reviewed a handful of resumes for friends and mentees, and I saw the same pattern in each. I have seen the pattern hundreds of times now, and that’s great! That means it’s time to write it down.

SHARING THE TOOLS THAT I USE TO STAY PRODUCTIVE

It’s a new year (allegedly*), and I’m finding new ways to share who I am and what kind of work I love to do. I call it Tools I Use. Check it out, or read more about why I wrote it up.

A MUST-FOLLOW RULE OF RESUME BUILDING

I have helped a lot of people refine a pitch: a one-liner that helps them effectively message who they are and what they do well. It started as part of The Geek Whisperers, where we met with people to help them take the next step in their career. We were terribly underqualified, but that’s never a concern. People need to talk to others–anyone–to refine their pitch. It’s more a need for practice more than guidance.

ADD COMPETENCIES TO YOUR RESUME

Job hunting as terrible. I keep writing about it in the hopes of your experience being a little less terrible based on some lessons I’ve learned.

SHARING THE JOB HUNTING PIPELINE BLUEPRINT

There is nothing like some unexpected job hunting to send a reasonably confident person into a spiral of panic. I recounted my own experience with recently in this post.